Others!

Shortly after the Oscars, when the winner of Best Picture went to Crash, there was an uproar by those who wanted Brokeback Mountain to win. As a gay-themed picture, it doesn't broach particularly brazen ground, and perhaps that's why it resonated. For every political figure like Harvey Milk, whose murder in the 70s, sparked candlelight vigils and was a key touchstone in the gay rights movement in the United States, there are plenty of others whose relationships develop in places that are far less liberal than San Francisco. Films like Brokeback Mountain are about small towns where a conservatism still holds sway.

But these are pockets of conservative areas in a country that has been dealing with these issues since the 1960s.

What happens if an entire country has kept the subject under wraps. This is what has happened in South Korea. The subject of homosexuality was rarely raised in society, and while there were places were gay Koreans could go, the average straight Korean had no idea.

I just read an article in the New York Times on the film The King and The Clown. It seems to have similar themes to Farewell, My Concubine. This is set in historical Korea, where clowns would travel to entertain, but also to beg for money. These troupes were all-male, and it became common for clowns to establish relations between one another.

In western cultures, we're used to the idea of women having their own opinions and exerting some control. Indeed, it's fairly common for guys to ask permission of their wives to do something. In the past, a man might be more assertive, saying he made all the decisions. Since women couldn't sustain their own livelihood away from the family, they had to put up with this disparity in power. Indeed, men's libidos often hold them imprisoned to the whims of women whose interest they seek.

In eastern cultures, especially those in Southeast Asia (Japan, Korea, Taiwan, China, etc) where men often work long hours and women tend to kids, there's a sense that men understand each other far better than women, and that they hold a station in society higher than women. Hong Kong films like those directed by John Woo, filled with men in dark sunglasses, and exuding cool, are accused of homoeroticism, which I believe is due to unequal relationship of men and women in society. Still, a barrier often exists that prevent men from being open about their feelings to one another.

King and The Clown has become a wildly successful hit in Korea where an estimated 1 in 4 people have seen this film. The story is about two clowns, one masculine-acting, one feminine-acting who eventually catch eye of the king, who falls for the feminine-acting clown, and the jealousy that this causes.

The topic of homosexuality has rarely been raised, the article goes, until an actor came out a few years ago. He was fired from the show he was on. But due to the unexpected success of this film, which has generated a fair bit of conversation, much as Brokeback Mountain generated conversation.

The conversation should be of different kinds though. Brokeback Mountain has been used by some to mean straight guys experimenting with homosexuality, which is something that straight guys tend to joke about, in any case. It brings into the question the fluidity of sexuality. If it can happen to the traditionally macho cowboy (although technically, they're shepherds, since they herd sheep), then could it happen to couch potatoes?

I suspect that the kinds of conversations being discussed in Korea are the kinds that existed thirty or forty years ago in the United States, except since the rest of the world has already dealt with this, Koreans can, in principle, see these issues even if they watch Asian films. Ang Lee, the director of Brokeback Mountain, started his film career with The Wedding Banquet about a Taiwanese American living in the US who has a boyfriend. His parents want to arrange a marriage for him since he's single. This film is over ten years old. Heck, go to Farewell, My Concubine which even has a similar historical setting. Or check out the recent Tropical Malady by Apichatpong Weerasethakul which takes a modest gay relationship and surrounds it with mythic overtones.

As South Koreans grapple with this issue, it will be interesting to see how South Korean women respond to this. Brokeback Mountain has something to say beyond repressed relationships. It is a film about the growing power of women and men who are seeking ways to deal with a changing society. (Both wives are important breadwinners in their families, and in the case of Jack Twist, his wife runs her dad's company, while he's the show pony).

Despite the differences in the film's audience, both have raised issues that their respective societies are still dealing with, and while I doubt these issues will ever completely disappear, it may, one hope, become less important over time, as people find it as natural as one's hair color, even if there's more to it than that.

Magic Carpet Ride

There are subjects, like preservation of forests, saving the whales, heck, saving endangered species, that seem to get very little play from the mainstream media. Almost always, coverage of those topics are negative. They're mostly negative because they protest the status quo. They say that the way we're doing things is wrong. And they say this about things that many people don't think are necessarily wrong.

For example, while there's a strong case to be made that humans are stewards of the earth and owe protection to the species that can't fend for themselves, there's also a feeling that if it's us or them, then we should win. When forest land is set aside so that clearcutting can't be done, people fret their jobs are taken away by tree huggers who love nature more than they love one another. Never is it mentioned that maybe, just maybe, these guys can be retrained to do something else that isn't clearcutting.

And really, are the workers the ones protesting, or is it the companies that really make the profit that are engineering this support for the little guy.

One topic that rarely makes it to the national media is college sports. Of course, I don't mean that college sports doesn't make press. We're in the middle of March Madness, and there's quite a bit of press on the underdog, George Mason, which I'll get to soon enough. What I'm talking about are folks who believe that there should be no scholarships given to athletes, and that universities should use that money to pay for people who need the money to have academic success. A university, after all, is a place of learning.

There are some arguments against people who are against college athletics, and so I'll go through them. Coaches will argue that successful programs generate revenue for the university. This can be difficult to assess, because successful programs, especially football programs require a great deal of money. A typical football team has some 70 students on scholarship, and there may be more walk-ons. These days, players take chartered flights to their games. Think about the cost of your latest flight and multiply that by about 100. The band, needless to say, must often travel by bus, or not travel at all. And the wealthiest teams can probably send those kids too (to play that annoying FSU fight song).

African American coaches claim they are taking kids that are on the margins, kids who would never have any chance at college, and showing them a better life, a way out. These are coaches like John Thompson, John Chaney, and Nolan Richardson, coaches that have blazened a path for African American coaches everywhere, but not without some controversy.

This argument has always struck me as somewhat strange. The reasons these kids are being shown life in college is because they show talent in basketball. Thompson's words would ring far truer if he could find kids that lacked any basketball skill, and try as hard as he could to make them succeed academically. In fact, joining a basketball team rarely has to do with academics. There are simpler issues at hand. Many kids joining teams are from single parent households and coaches serve as father figures. They also get to see a world outside of inner city life. The academic thing? Well, that's really too much to hope for. These kids weren't even high school material, let alone college material.

The kind of "education" that these coaches talk about could operate just fine outside a college environment. If college basketball could viable succeed without being part of a college, all of this "education" would be just fine and dandy. It would serve exactly the purpose that Thompson and others want, without the sham of saying that these kids are getting a college experience. What is true, I'd say, is that their kids might be more inclined to go to college, only because the dad realized it was important, even if he wasn't good at it.

This is certainly true of John Thompson's son, John Thompson, the 3rd, whose kid went to Princeton to play basketball, then became an assistant coach, then a head coach, before coming back to Georgetown and becoming their head coach.

But that's like taking an Asian teen who's never played basketball, and having him hang around the basketball team, and meanwhile he does, whatever, academics or play chess. He's getting "exposure" to basketball, only in the hopes that he might instill the thrill of basketball for his kids.

Where sports teams do help, and this is rather strange, is that successful teams often increase the reputation of the university. March Madness brings a lot of coverage to universities and colleges that no one has ever heard of. I remember, many years ago, that College of Charleston had success in the tournament. They knocked out Maryland one year. Two years of success lead to an increase in applicants.

And let's not forget the granddaddy of them all, Notre Dame. Ask anyone in the midwest about whether Notre Dame is a good school or not, and they'll tell you it's a powerhouse. For engineering in the midwest, that school is Purdue. Outside the midwest, well, no one much cares. But let me rattle off universities that have successful teams: Michigan, Texas, Illinois, UCLA, Berkeley. Some of these are also the best state universities in areas such as engineering and computer science. UCLA is heavily Asian American, something you don't get a sense of watching their basketball team.

Sports teams also provide a sense of unity. Alumnis of a university can always look back at their college experience, but nothing ties alumnis more than a successful sports team. Perhaps you or I don't have this experience, but many a college fan, years and years after their graduation, go to watch college football. I see couples that are retired, who have likely been attending games, attending tailgate parties, for the last 40 years of their lives. Even folks who've never gone to college find it's their way to root for the state.

Until the Houston Oilers moved to Tennessee and became the Titans did Tennessee have a professional sports team. Before that, and even now, the team was Tennessee football, at their main campus in Knoxville (surprisingly yes, it's not in Nashville). Tennessee competes with Michigan for the largest capacity stadium (Michigan has probably won this) with each able to seat over 100,000 fans. Surely, many of those fans did not go to UT, but are still avid fans. They can dream of their kids heading to UT. Most universities can't buy this kind of support.

Well, actually, they can. And do.

This kind of enthusiasm for a university seems like it's worth gold, and universities pay gold to have this enthusiasm. A head coach can make anywhere from one to two million dollars a year. For a public university, the head coach is often the highest paid employee. Since when did a university or a state think that this was a perfectly legitimate way to spend taxpayers money?

Since the taxpayers cared far more about the health of their team than they cared about the quality of their university. One film that explores this issue is Friday Night Lights, about a high school football team that is seen as a bit of an underdog, and feels the pressure of its successful history. Players who won championships at their high school, but have otherwise never had much of a life afterwards place a great stress on the coach to be successful, to provide the kind of inspiration to an otherwise economically depressed region. When an emphasis on education with this kind of fervor would do so much more to raise poor counties, it is depresseing to see that this enthusiasm placed on sports.

But the media is awfully good at what they do. We're now in the middle of the sweetest ride that Coach Jim Larranaga of George Mason has ever had. This is the furthest any mid-major has ever made it in the tournament. Before then, you'd have to go back to 1979, when the University of Pennsylvania, the Ivy League champ, made it to the final four, before bowing out tamely against Magic Johnson, then playing for Michigan State.

Larranaga has charmed an entire coterie of sportswriters nationwide. He seems like the favorite uncle or granddad that most of us don't really have. He's a genuinely nice guy, and he's been soaking this all up. When they beat University of Connecticut, the number one team in the tournament, he was asked, in his earpiece to ask a question to one of his players, and asked him what he thought about going to Indianapolis. Larranaga has been interviewing all week long. He knows this is the best exposure he'll ever get.

He opened up practice to the media, a practice that's nearly unheard of, because he said if they couldn't play in front of media, how were they going to play in front of a nationwide audience (basketball, unlike football, doesn't rely on trick plays and so seeing practice is often not that surprising---it's often more a game of executing the plays you do already, not inventing some flea flicker or hook and ladder at the last moment).

At the end of their Tuesday practice, Larranaga again held a baseball game for the team, so they could be relaxed. He had done this at the end of practice the last two weeks and wanted to do it again this week, except this week, a bevy of media were filming it all. Larranaga has learned how to keep his players relaxed. He was telling his players that the CAA (which normally stands for the Colonial Athletic Association) was now the Connecticut Assasin Association. He kept yelling "CAA", "CAA", and this cracked his players up.

Larranaga is perhaps in the best position as coach. Unless he pulls a Gonzaga, which now perenially gets into the tournament and garners a mid-to-high seed, it's likely that Mason will fade into some obscurity, so he must, as the cliche goes, strike while the iron is hot. He doesn't have high expectations placed on him. He must recruit strategically, trying to find players that the major teams pass on; kids who are a little too short, a little too big, and try to mold them to winning. Unlike a Duke, which almost always rolls to the sweet 16, Mason's chances are once every few years. He doesn't have to deal with pressures like Mike Davis, where fans expect Indiana to contend for a national championship all the time.

This is not to say that Larranaga doesn't feel pressure to succeed. He's been quite successful at George Mason, but they're just at the level where they may or may not get in the tournament (they had not won their conference's championship--UNCW did that, and so they had to get an at-large bid, a bid that didn't go to Maryland, Michigan, Cincinatti, Louisville, and several other powerhouse teams that were relegated to the NIT this year).

You see how happy his players are. You discover that Lamar Butler, whose been the face of the team, has been involved in recruiting, telling new guys about what it's like to play for George Mason, how they built they team they have now.

There's almost nothing like this experience for academics. If you're making straight As in computer science, well, that's great, but it's only for yourself that it matters. There are programming competitions, but it's not aired on television. True, the thrills of competing can be nearly as giddy, but the rest of the campus doesn't care.

I'm always torn when a team like George Mason does well. The media knows that there are no other number 1 seeds around, and they really want George Mason to pull the magic upset. Even one more win, a defeat of Florida with their behemoth, Joachim Noah, son of Yannick Noah, the 1983 French Open winner (Noah was seen as a tall guy in tennis at 6'4". His son is 6'11".), would send everyone over the top. Florida, however, has been the only team that has won all their games comfortably.

The media has found a relationship too, between Larranaga and Billy Donovan. Both had attended Providence College. Both are originally from New York City. Donovan played under Rick Pitino. This was a while ago, before Pitino went to Kentucky, won a national championship with them, then went pro to coach the Celtics, then after that fiasco, returned back to the state of Kentucky to coach Louisville. Donovan's been hear before. He made it to the final four a few years back, where his pressing style had knocked out a highly favored Duke, but since then has struggled to reach his previous lofty standards.

Now, think about what the media wants to do. Does it want to promote good guy Larranaga and his band of overachieving underdogs, who's been happy to accomodate every media request, who gives hope to all the small teams struggling to compete against the big boys, or does it want to have an expose about the way colleges care more about their athletics than it does about its academics.

In fact, as this story is brewing, there's another story too. Duke recently suspended its entire lacrosse team. Seems like a few members hosted a party where some strippers (of color) where brought to entertain the crowd. When racial epithets were heard, the strippers were going to leave the party. Apparently, one person convinced one to return back, where it was alleged that she was held down by three folks and raped.

This news took a bit of time to percolate up. It wasn't until the police brought this information to the public and then the university finally responded that the team was suspended. The reason for the suspension (even though it was clear the whole team could not have participated) was because the guilty party or parties or even witnesses would not come forward.

Tony Kornheiser felt, for sure, no one would come forward, even as women's advocacy groups have called these players cowards for not stepping forward. ESPN recently had a made-for-ESPN film about one of the military academies facing a huge cheating scandal that affected the athletes. In it, they show loyalty to each other, although the guilty party eventually said so, not wanting the rest of the team to be affected by his behavior. This is the kind of loyalty that teams like to have, even if it means, in this case, that they are doing the "wrong" thing.

From time to time, sports controversies like this pop up, and people begin to wonder about all of this. Remember that crazy story about Baylor's player, Patrick Dennehy, (despite his Irish name, he's black). Initially, it was found that he was missing, and people wondered where we was. His car was spotted far from Baylor. Then, there were accusations that his teammate Carlton Dotson was the culprit. The two were teammates on Baylor.

It was worse than that. A murder would make it awful on recruiting and the reputation of Baylor. Dave Bliss, the coach, tried to make it sound like Dennehy was a drug dealer, and that this caused his death (presumably a deal gone wrong). His assistant coaches were not at all in favor of this cover-up. In the end, Bliss had to resign when his scheming was discovered, and it had become the topic of sports columnists and sports show announcers (which sprouted in the last few years, so that sports commentary is far bigger than it used to be).

That was considered a low point in college basketball. When it comes to March Madness, the media would rather not see a team like Baylor. They like George Mason. And when you read it and watch it and see it, you begin to fall under the cast of this spell.

They remind you, once in a while, even in the age of big sports and big money and the pressures to succeed, that sometimes the game's still fun.

And in those times, you sit and let the fairy tale take hold, and let yourself be transported on this magic carpet ride.

Playing the Youth Card

Getting the lastest Ender's book in the series reminded me of something Orson Scott Card said, that Searching for Bobby Fischer covered the things he wanted to say in Ender's Game had me revisiting this film.

It's not about Bobby Fischer's life, nor about someone who's going to be the next Bobby Fischer. Instead, this tells the tale of what happens when you have a kid that's good sport, in this case, chess, and the kinds of pressure that surrounds being the best. Although it's baldly manipulative, shimmery light, sped up blitz chess, repeated pounding of the chess clocks, to amp up what would otherwise be a yawner of sport to watch, it touches on topics that's rare in sport (and for the purposes of discussion, I classify chess as a sport).

Pandolfini plays the surrogate chess father who sees in little Josh Waitzkin the potential for the next champion and wants to toughen him up to rise to the challenge, while Josh (and his mom, and later his dad) still wants to be a kid.

Pandolfini's "I've been there before and know how to train you" is contrasted with Vinnie's street tactics which primarily involve early queen play and intimidating the other guy, much like classical basketball teamwork is contrasted with And-1 one-on-one flashy crossovers and whipping by your opponent for a dunk. The former representing the pressures of being good, the latter representing pure joy of the game.

Yes, they had to have a "bad guy" for Josh to face, in this case, a kid that looks like evil Fred Savage, who's acting mostly consists of glares and pouts. Max Pomeranc, a real life chess player, selected to play young Josh Waitzkin seems to lack the acting chops to pull off the role, but he becomes more effective as the film moves along, with the director using his lack of acting to his advantage, showing him as the innocent. Even the final game which seems like a complete cliche has a conclusion that somehow manages to combine everything he was taught and the person that he is.

You begin to see why Card likened this film about a chess prodigy to his story of a kid that's talented at strategy and war. It's about the pressures of being the best, of still being a kid, and to learn to love one's enemies.

[Hah, I think the key to writing reviews is to force it to be short, short, short. Something I have incredible difficulty doing.]

Teaching Computer Science

Computer science suffers from a problem that's almost unseen in nearly any other major. It is tied closely to technology, the kind of technology that changes in the space of a few years. In many subjects, language, most sciences, mathematics, many social sciences, the lectures that were given twenty years ago are often suitable for today.

That's not the case in computer science. Twenty five years ago, assembly language programming was common. Fortran was widely taught. By the early to mid 1980s, Pascal was gaining a foothold in computer science programs throughout the country. There weer a few oddballs like MIT which taught (and continues to teach) Scheme. By the 1990s, Pascal was being replaced by C++. The late 80s saw industry adoption of C++ and the goodness of object-oriented programming. As usual, universities lagged behind, wanting to know whether this was a trend they should bother with.

By 1995 and the advent of the web, Java was starting to get major play. Computer science departments who had avoided C++ because they couldn't stand its complexity quickly leapt onto Java. Those who stayed with C/C++ were given a push to use Java when the AP exam, the exam used in high schools throughout the country to give college credit to high school students that score well on the exam, moved to Java about a year ago.

Those who had taught Pascal liked it. Pascal was specifically designed to be used in the classroom. It was not seriously used in industry, which was using C, then C++, then Java and C#, and now, Ruby. Those who learned to program in Pascal or in FORTRAN learned to code in a procedural way.

The switch to object oriented programming was not an easy leap for teachers, some of whom continued to think in very procedural ways. Procedural programming, in a nutshell, is like a recipe, do A, then do B, then do C. There are decision steps, such as, if you work more than 8 hours, add overtime and of course, functions, which encapsulates chunks of work.

Programming in Java or C++ does not automatically mean you are doing object oriented programming. Some have coined the term object-based programming, which is programming with objects. Most people argue that true OO programming requires inheritance, or at the very least, use of interfaces.

To give you a sense of what I mean by procedural thinking, I relate a tale. I was once co-teaching a course. The person created a project that had something to do with strings. The specs required a three step process that involved removing spaces, converting to lowercase, and one other step. Each of these three steps were three seperate methods in a class. Students were expected to use these methods one after another.

I know the thought process behind this thinking. In the 80s, and even beyond, teachers taught beginning programmers to break a problem down into smaller pieces. Eventually, the pieces would be so small as to be easily coded. This was stepwise refinement. In general, it's a very good idea for solving a problem, not just a coding problem.

However, having objects with multiple steps publicly simply doesn't make sense. These steps are there to make the task of writing the program easier. Objects should have methods that makes sense to be called. If the implementation requires multiple steps and multiple functions, that's fine, but those methods should be private.

A useful exercise when you're starting to do OO programming is to think about what kinds of operations the class should support, and to think of it independent of the task to be done. Very often, students come up with methods that are specifically aimed for the task, but would be untouched in other contexts. For example, look at Java's String class. Is there an encrypt function? Is there a function that causes it to compile a small bit of Lisp code?

Learning OO programming typically requires you to rethink how you solve the problem. The first step is to think about which objects/classes you think you need, then to think about what operations these classes should support, then to use the objects to solve your problem. Procedural programming decouples data and control. OO programming tries to unify the two. OO programming attempts to provide programmers the ability to create their own abstractions. Procedural programming generally forces you to use the abstractions provided (arrays, pointers, etc).

But this isn't really supposed to be a lecture on how to teach OO programming for those who still think procedurally, but to point out that teaching programming often requires changing one's view of programming, and that's tough.

Let's compare computer science to another field: mathematics. There are advancements that occur in mathematics, too. Mathematicians continue to come up with new techniques for proving things. New developments in those fields are not taught in introductory classes because they require such sophisitication that several years of grad school are often needed before one is ready to use those techniques.

That's not the case with computer science. If the field is changing, the changes can ripple all the way down to introductory level courses. Those changes don't even have to do with things that are traditionally thought of as programming. For example, if you're coding in Java today, you may be using the popular IDE, Eclipse. This is a great, great tool for coding in Java, but it is very complex. A 500 page book might only scratch the surface of all the functionality Eclipse has to offer.

If you're experience with typing code is Wordpad, then you might wonder why you need functionality that you never knew existed.

And, as software engineering principles are used more widely, IDEs, like Eclipse, have support for CVS, unit testing, and build support. These are topics that were unheard of even ten years ago, despite the fact that version control has been around for a while. Teachers of programming would argue that version control isn't about programming. Indeed, few books on introductory programming even touch the topic. Are there lectures on how to manage branches? How to handle merges? What a conflict is? How diff works? These are not only complex, but rather tedious. And yet, what working programmer doesn't use some kind of version control every single day?

Teachers will ultimately say to you "we can only teach so much". It's a point that's very valid, but the funny thing is, many of those teachers don't have any idea where it should be taught, and frankly, wonder why it has to be taught at all.

And this raises a particularly interesting thought. Can we teach programming without resorting to technological advances? Fundamentally, we can think of a program in terms of basic constructs: conditional statements, loops, functions, objects. Other languages have other constructs (closures, continuations, etc) that are useful. Many of the challenges of writing modern software is managing a large number of people's code. This is why version control was so important. It's not a perfect solution by any means. To some, it is still some magic ritual they wish would simply go away.

Now, consider that teacher who taught in C, with one single file, no makefile at all, and it compiled to one nice executable. How did that morph into Ant files, Jar files, an IDE that requires hundreds of pages to explain, version control, unit tests, project structuring, not to mention things that are actually code related, such as architecture design.

Furthermore, fewer and fewer people write software from "scratch". Let's say you want to run a website. There are now half a dozen books or more that tell you how to set up Apache (a web server), PHP (server side coding), and MySQL (database). Most people aren't programming from scratch anymore, because it's far too daunting to do so. If you need real database capabilities, you want to get one, not code it yourself. (On the flip side, some people use databases for all sorts of data storage, when a text file can do the job with less overhead and fuss).

I remember hearing a professor recount a story of another professor complaining about teaching data structures. He wondered why he had to learn object-oriented programming just to teach data structures. He had been teaching it for twenty years, before OO programming, and the data structures hadn't changed. You drew circles to represent nodes and arrows to represent pointers. The actual syntax was something they didn't want to deal with.

Now, keep that thought in mind. I'm about to take a tiny detour, before returning to this idea.

A few weeks ago, I was attending one of the ETECH talks, on the last day, a Thursday. For most of the conference, we were on the second floor. For whatever reason, O'Reilly didn't have enough clout to stay there the entire time. On Thursday, we were moved up to the third floor, which was a bit more cramped, but did have a nice view of the water.

One of the talks was titled Learning 2.0, which is one of those awful titles that's almost good because you remember it. It's a riff on Web 2.0, which, in a nutshell, is the evolution of the browser and webpage from something that links one page to another (hypertexting) to rich client (i.e., desktop-like) applications, so your webpages seem more like interacting with Word and Excel, not clicking on links to new pages.

The name Web 2.0 has been derided some. Giving it a version number just seems silly. (Are we to follow that with Web 3.1 and Web XP). It makes it sound like a product or a technology, when it's certainly not a product, and isn't quite a technology either (though certain technologies, mainly Ajax, are giving web pages richer interaction).

Given that you know that, the phrase Learning 2.0 would seem to have something to do with Web 2.0, but only in the vague sense that as the web is evolving, perhaps learning is too.

The presenters are wondering why O'Reilly (who they represent) haven't made much inroads into universities. To remedy the problem, they've started talking to teachers, and apparently, those that they spoke to want the ability to create their own textbooks.

Now, let's step back and think back to our college days.

Sure, there was that one professor who had written his (or her) own book, and of course, made that book required. How many students recall teachers who teach out of their own books fondly? Most don't. Most aren't Michael Sipser, who wrote a book on theory of computation, and seems to be a dynamic lecturer, if comments in the Amazon web page of his book are to be believed.

These teachers were the exception. In computer science, think of how many teachers developed their own material at all? I had a professor once, who taught a grad course by borrowing the complete lecture notes from someone else. I knew another prof. who did just the same for an undergrad course. To be fair, those notes were pretty good, but it can be challenging reading someone else's Powerpoint. I knew another guy who asked me (since we were covering the material) what to teach later that day.

How many professors do you recall who, despite being brilliant, spent almost no time preparing for class? I recall a prof. who would work through a proof, and would get stuck, and think and think and think. I'm a Ph.D. in theoretical computer science. I don't need to prep for class. And yet sitting and watching someone mess up a proof is highly distracting. Even if a person recovers, the student typically doesn't.

I've seen a prof. who takes a projector, and blows up a technical paper on the wall to display, pointing to a few key sentences, and delivers a lecture that way, typically because he just read the paper earlier, found it fascinating, and lacked the time to write it up properly.

And, there are those who haven't programmed in any real way in twenty years. I always admired a theory professor I knew for reading up on C++, Java, OpenGL, and so forth, so that he was up-to-date. He didn't have to do any of that. He mostly taught theoretical courses (although, he did cover graphics, but he didn't have to do that either). His colleagues in theory thought it was a waste of time to fill up their heads with syntax they weren't going to use or remember.

There was something purer about just thinking about math. The notation stays consistent. The proofs written yesterday are good today, good tomorrow, and good in twenty years.

To be fair, some of those things are changing. People who are graduating today with Ph.D's often are far more well-versed with programming than those of the last "generation" who were really only computer science professors in name. In practice, they're applied mathematicians.

They view syntax as fad. They view version control and unit tests as fads. Things that distract from real problem solving.

Attendees at ETECH are at the other end of the spectrum. They are all about fads. They are all about buzzwords, and they feel no guilt, no compuction, no remorse about this. This is where the cool things are happening. This is the realm of the alpha geeks. They want the concept cars of tomorrow, today. They don't mind filling their heads with the latest trends. Mashups, tagging, social networking, the attention economy. That's where things are at today. Design patterns? That's a decade old. J2EE? Man, we're Ruby On Rails.

So, that's where we are. On the one hand, professors who decide it's easier to present someone else's lecture notes, or who go without prepping, trying to teach what's on the cutting, no bleeding edge. And O'Reilly's solution for this is to have teachers come up with their own books?

Oh Really? (I couldn't resist)

If O'Reilly really (I couldn't resist again) wants to help out with computer science teaching, they should use their position in the technical world to filter out the most important pieces of information and pass that onto teachers. Now, to do that, they'll have to interact with teachers more.

While I was at ETECH, I thought it might be cool to teach programming to APIs by doing mashups. This would have several benefits. First, it's a lot cooler than writing some banking application that computes compound interest. Second, it gets people to do something that's "real". Third, it's exactly the kind of social geek behavior that web services is promoting.

But present this idea to a teacher, and they're likely to tell you "But why should I do that? They don't need to do that to understand programming?". On the one hand, that's absolutely true. You can teach people to program with the same kinds of toy programs people used twenty years ago. The fundamental aspects of programming are roughly the same as they've always been.

On the other hand, it takes students away from the kind of "revolution" that is happening on the Internet, the kind that people living in their ivory towers often miss because they're caught up with research, the folks who missed the OO bandwagon, and the folks who certainly don't care about Ajax or its subcomponents Javascript and XML. How do you tell them that the things that are so important to alpha-geeks should be important to them?

One thought I had was a one-stop web shop. I have a friend who's Ph.D. thesis is about doing analysis on programming habits of introductory students. The key is to commit the student's code every time they save or run their code. This information can be used to track the evolution of a program. It uses an Eclipse plug-in to do the work, and requires CVS to be setup somewhere, and therefore, requires an Internet connection.

But once all of that is in place, students can submit their projects (in Java), and the system will run unit tests and provide feedback.

Here's the idea. A school or university subscribes to this service for some fee. Included with the service are columns that explain the latest ongoings in the world of programming. The key here is to figure out a minimal set, and order them properly. It shouldn't devolve into Dr. Dobbs with a dizzying array of technical topics which the person teaching won't care about. However, it should justify why certain things should be taught.

Furthermore, the site should have some projects people can try out using the new technologies. All the hard work is done by such a site. They figure out what new technologies seem important enough to learn. They provide articles explaining how it works. They provide projects that students can try out. They provide the mechanism by which students can submit their projects, and have it automatically graded.

Now, perhaps, even this notion of teaching programming in this way will disappear, but for now, it's a nice evolution to the way we teach programming now.

Cat's Meow

I'm starting to listen to a compilation called Mews Too: An Asthmatic Kitty Compilation, which could be said to be "artists that sound like Sufjan Stevens", which is not that surprising since Asthmatic Kitty is the the record label started by Sufjan Stevens and his stepdad. I suppose you could call this alt-folk. Sufjan's own music can be said to be a kind of religious folk, occasionally drawing from his Christian faith, but the music isn't the kind of unbearable stuff that plays on Sunday mornings in the Bible Belt.

The album's filled with simple guitars and passionate (or sometimes not) singing, but it's well worth listening to if you like Sufjan. So far, my favorite song on the album is Jim Guthrie's Evil Thoughts, whose voice has been likened to Sufjan. Guthrie is Canadian, though (but then, Sufjan's practically Canadian, as he grew up in northern Michigan). His album, Now, More Than Ever, has been called a kind of folk Radiohead.

I didn't much follow Radiohead when they first became big. The most notable song I knew from them was Creep, which I thought was a interesting topic for a song that resonates, I suspect, with many an introspective geek. Even as this tune played on the now defunct WHFS 99.1 (which mysteriously went off the air unannounced to, if memory serves, a Spanish medium station) over and over and over (99.1 must have had only 3 songs they played in constant rotation--I used to listen to 99.1 as it blared at the school gym, and even in my short workout, I felt the songs were being played again), I couldn't have told you that, yes, that's Radiohead.

At the time, I wouldn't have been able to tell about Radiohead's influence on music through the 90s. A British band formed in 1986, consisting of Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood, Ed O'Brien, Colin Greenwood, and Phil Selway (I've only ever heard of Thom Yorke, the singer), their best regarded album, so I'm told is, OK Computer with Kid A a close second.

Comparisons made to influential groups or singers are often unfair, especially since it attempts to confer greatness by analogy. If the group is truly worthy of comparison, then it should stand up on its own, unique in its own right, which often means it doesn't sound a great deal like the band it's being compared against.

Of course, I have to again, give credit to NPR's All Songs Considered for cluing me in to this album.

Secrets and Lies

I just watched Atom Egoyan's Where the Truth Lies. Atom Egoyan is noted for his brainy films, where scenes are shown as a puzzle, the viewers invited to figure out why a particular haunting view is shown again and again.

Egoyan has a few themes he tends to explore. He's into, for lack of a better phrase, sexual deviancy. I use that hesistantly because Egoyan generally doesn't view these topics with disdain. He keeps the treatment subtle so people aren't outwardly offended, but I believe he wants us to say that our thoughts on these matters are too conservative.

In Ararat, there is a half-brother and half-sister that sleep with one another. In Next of Kin a supposed brother and sister have feelings for one another (turns out they are unrelated). In The Sweet Hereafter, a father and her daughter seem to have an incestuous relationship that is briefly mentioned, but never brought up again.

Egoyan also uses video in all his films. The video, to me, serves as a metaphor for human memory. Although people often treat video as an accurate depiction of reality, movies are essentially videos, and directors manipulate what we see. Even amateur filmmakers present a kind of reality just by deciding what or what won't be recorded.

Egoyan has been accused of creating chilly characters. At times, it's difficult to care about his characters because they seem so different, so hard to grasp. In Speaking Parts, a woman is fascinated by an actor, who, until recently, has had no speaking parts. He plays minor roles. She keeps renting videos from her video store of this man. The man happens to work at the same hotel as she does, cleaning rooms, though it seems they have either never met, or never known each other that well.

Another woman is interested in making a film about her dead brother. She finds that the same man working in the hotel resembles her brother. She insists on casting this man, and eventually has a relationship with the man (albeit, the earliest form of a kind of cybersex, more relevant now, than it was then).

Still, it's hard to associate with any of these three characters.

Since then, Egoyan has tried to create characters that people could relate to, and in the process, he seems to have lost some of the trickiness of his plotting.

Where the Truth Lies seems a bit like Velvet Goldmine, a film by Todd Haynes, starring Christian Bale as a reporter who wants to find out what happened to a singer, played by Jonathan Rhys-Meyer, who faked his own death. Rhys-Meyer plays Brian Slade, an enigmatic glam rock singer. Bale's character had attended the concert where this death was faked, and he's been curious ever since to figure out why Slade disappeared shortly after admitting it was a fake. It owes its plot very much to Citizen Kane where reporters want to know why Kane uttered the word "Rosebud" just before he died.

There's a woman reporter in the early 70s, who wants to know why Lanny Morris and Vince Collins (modeled after Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin) split up shortly after the death of Maureen O'Flaherty, a woman found dead in their hotel room.

Where the Truth Lies is perhaps Egoyan's sexiest film to date. Even Exotica wasn't really nearly as erotic, and deals more with a father's pain about his daughter, which he somehow deals with by going to a strip club. Yet, for my taste, it seems more conventional than a typical Egoyan film.

When the truth is finally revealed at the end, it's the kind of answer you'd expect from a more run-of-the-mill whodunit. As time goes by, Egoyan seems to have grown more skilled visually as a filmmaker. He's always been fond of moving the camera, almost like Hong Kong directors. Watch the way the camera moves in various scenes.

He films this like an older style movie with bright shimmery qualities.

Throughout the film, I was engrossed, wanting to know what would happen. Alas, I had scene the pivotal scene ahead of time (the one that rated it NC-17), which is, at least to me, surprisingly not that surprising. That didn't help because I knew what the revelation would be. But even had I not known, would that surprise be typical Egoyan?

Certainly, this film has him exploring other kinds of sexual contact. I get the sense that Egoyan, if he could, would make a far more subversive film if he could. He's doing it in such subtle ways because the film industry is not prepared for him to go as far as he wants to go.

For example, I think he really wants to explore incest much more fully than he has, where it has a significant meaning in the film. It's so fascinating a topic to him that you feel Egoyan must have been involved in such a relation himself.

The title is also intriguing. Originally, I read the title to mean "where the truth is buried", but you can also read it as "when the truth is a lie", which is paradoxical, and is perhaps the kind of double meaning he's looking for? It reminds me a little of the title of the album by Secret Machines, Now Here is Nowhere, which is a play on words. If you put, "Now Here" together, you get "Nowhere". But it could also be an insight. Effectively, to be right here, right now, is to be, in some weird sense, nowhere. OK, it doesn't make sense to me either, but I'm sure the idea seemed ubercool to the guys at Secret Machines.

The film's watchable and engrossing, but I don't think it's near his best efforts. For that, I give the film a B. Good, but not great.

March Madness Brings May Sun

There are, I'm sure, many people who curse George Mason for busting their brackets. Let's look at their path, so far. In the first round, they knocked out Michigan State. Michigan State was the surprise final four team from last year, and had won the national championship themselves in 2000. They were a senior-laden team. Many predicted they would go far in the tournament, even though they were perhaps not as strong as the team from last year. Mason beats them without Tony Skinn, suspended for punching a Hofstra player in the groin by Coach Larranaga, seen as a gutsy move, given that it could have cost Mason an opportunity in the tournament.

Second round. University of North Carolina. Last year's national champion. Sure, several of the players that made last year's win possible are now earning six figures playing for the NBA. This was seen as a rebuilding year for UNC. But as with most powerhouses, they can lose large parts of the team to the pros and still win. With freshman sensation, Tyler Hansbrough, UNC looked not to miss a beat. Surely, they would knock out Mason. Some had picked them to sneak far into the tournament, especially since they had a regular season defeat of Duke.

Mason knocked them out, down by 7 points at the half, playing a zone defense they installed only mere weeks earlier, that confounded a young UNC team. George Mason was in the sweet 16.

Their opponent there was a game Wichita State. The first weekend of the tournament was all about the Missouri Valley Conference. Billy Packer had lambasted tournament committee director Craig Littlepage, athletic director for Virginia, for picking four, four teams, from the MVC, a little regarded mid-major conference. To compare, this year, the ACC only had four teams sent to the big dance, and the ACC has had three teams that had won national championships in recent years (Duke, UNC, Maryland). Wichita State had knocked out surprise number 2 seed, Tennessee, whose first year coach, Bruce Pearl had been one of those mid-major coaches the year before.

Pearl had coached University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee (the UW most people know is in Madison) to the sweet sixteen, defeating Notre Dame. He had brought the UT team back into the tournament after years of absense. Still, no one thought they were ready to be the number 2 seed, and they barely escaped the first round, requiring a three point shot in the last few seconds to beat Winthrop. The experience Wichita State beat them by 7 in the second round.

George Mason, coincidentally enough, had beaten Wichita State at Wichita State. You have to realize that beating teams on their home court is worth a lot. Home teams are probably 5-6 points better at home than away. George Mason had another advantage. They were playing at the Verizon Center, nee MCI Center, which is in Washington DC. Thousands of Mason fans would make this a virtual home game. Wichita State didn't have a chance.

But no one, no one, except possibly the Mason players and die-hard Mason fans, gave Mason much of a chance to beat UConn, the number 1 number 1 seed in the tournament. It's true UConn had not played great to get to this point, but usually a top seed will have one dominating game on the way to a championship. Besides, UConn's draw was really tough. They faced Kentucky in the second round, which has won the national championship recently, and a tough Washington team that required a last second 3-point shot by Rashad Anderson that put the game into overtime. Washington was deflated, and proceed to exit the game meekly.

Mason would enter the second half down 43-34. Nice try, Mason. This is where you exit. You're at the elite 8. You've represented the CAA and all mid-majors quite well. This is where the big boys take over.

Except Mason wasn't going anywhere. Knocking 3 pointers after 3 pointers, Mason would make up the deficit and eventually head to the final seconds with a lead of 2 points. With 5 seconds left, with a missed George Mason free throw keeping Mason's lead at a mere 2 points, Denham Brown Connecticut would charge down the court, past Mason defenders, curl around, put up a reverse, and watch it bounce, bounce, bounce, and fall into the hoop, to tie the game and push it into overtime.

And that should have done it. Washington was deflated after the 3 pointer went in to push their game against UConn to overtime. Destiny, baby. That's what UConn had to think. Some higher power wanted them to win. They would test them, by seeing what steel they had, at the closing seconds of the game, and they would meet the challenge, and be rewarded with victory.

But Mason wasn't done. Hitting 5 of 6 shots, often in close range, in the midst of bigger players, but not stronger players, not players with more heart, Mason would trade blows. Mason would take a lead of 5 points, and then it would be cut to 2 points after a UConn 3. And UConn would need heroics again in the last seconds to push it to overtime number 2.

And the ball would bounce on the rim once again.

And it would not fall in.

And the game would end.

And Mason would stand as victors, gladiators in the pit of the Verizon Center, surrounded by Huskies, with fans cheering up to the rafters. And Larranaga would smile. Just a few years short of 60, in his ninth year as head coach. A moment in time that he had seen as an assistant but never as head coach. And Tony Skinn would smile. And you couldn't stop Lamar Butler from smiling. He had been grinning all tournament long.

And they would head to Indianapolis.

Of the three Georges in the region, Georgetown, George Washington, and George Mason, they were the least likely to make it.

One George to rule them all. One George to find them.
One George to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.

This fellowship is heading to Indy, baby. They're still dancing.

More Josh, By Gosh

One of the reasons I wanted to start a blog was to write film reviews. There are a handful of Internet film reviewers I admire: Scott Renshaw, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Roger Ebert, Bryant Frazer, Theo Panayides, and a few others. Most especially, I like Mike D'Angelo's columns.

A film review is several things: a brief summary of the film, insight into the significance (or lack thereof) of the film, and the highlights or lowlights of the film. A good review is amazing because of its quality of writing as well as its keenness of observation, making points that the average watcher would miss entirely. A great review excites the sense, makes one want to spend head to the next showing, surrounded in darkness, ready to be consumed by the magic of a vision put to celluloid.

It's tough to write well, there's no two ways about it. Some have the talent, I suppose, to craft words of such economy and clarity that an edit is superflous. The rest of us have to revise, rethink, rephrase our thoughts until it is acceptable for mass consumption. We want to look our best.

And yet, the medium of the blog, at least, the common blog, not those whose audience is expected to be wide, and thus, expecting a minimum quality, is not edited. The first thoughts that are typed out are those that are shown, no matter how haphazard or insignificant.

Whenever I choose to rewrite a review, I still do it in the framing of a blog. Write it out again, rather than take the words I've already written, and prune it, shape it, or jettison it. It's a strategy that wastes time, I admit, and yet, since I have a limited audience, it's the way I prefer. I want to write fast, and then put it up, so that I can be done with it.

This leads me back to my review of Searching for Bobby Fischer, a film that came out in 1993, over ten years ago. At the time, I recalled that it had been something of a critical darling. It shone a light on a seldom seen sport in film---chess.

Its title was mysterious too. Was this a film about Bobby Fischer? Was it about locating his current whereabouts? Was it about finding the next new talent that would be the greatest American champion since Fischer?

It's mostly about the latter. Searching for Bobby Fischer is the film adaptation of a non-fiction book written by Fred Waitzkin, a sportswriter, who finds his son is a chess prodigy. The film adaptation, like many, is a dramatization. It does not attempt to be a documentary.

In fact, like many films, it's a manipulative one, and although I knew this, it was skillfully done, so I didn't mind.

Films, by its very nature, is manipulative. It seeks to entertain, or inform, or enrage, or to elicit some kind of emotion. Even films based on true stories often change elements of the story to make it more dramatic, even if it means playing hard and fast with facts. I remember reading a review of Remember the Titans which was about the integration of two football teams because they were now one school. One was predominantly black. One was predominantly white. The coach was black, played by Denzel Washington. The film, so the review goes, made it seem like this was set in the racist south, when reality was that it was in DC, in a reasonably liberal section of town. Facts were changed to heighten conflicts. The reviewer lamented how many facts were changed, when being a little more faithful to reality would have been better.

Searching for Bobby Fischer is more than simply a recounting of the story of Josh Waitzkin, who is portrayed as the next Bobby Fischer. It is about sports parents who live through their kids accomplishments. This is rarely portrayed on film. Parents of talented kids, especially athletes, push their kids to success. Mary Pierce's dad would force her to practice, even in the rain, after losses.

It's difficult to portray such stories because parents are often the guilty culprit. Watch Spellbound, a film about the spelling bee. One of the parents of the Indian spellers organizes his practices, gives him strategies for spelling. The father is shown as living the American dream, living in a nice house that he and his brother built. The film shows the kid playing football and other sports, to show he's well-rounded. The kid seems to be fine, as a person, not too stressed out, but then, most of the time is spent with his far more articulate dad.

When he fails to win (as their is only one winner), his dad is rather comforting. True, this was being filmed, and so maybe his reaction would have been different out of the harsh glare of a camera's eye, but even so, it seemed that he realized that losing is always a possibility, even with the best of preparation.

Still, there are kids, involved in competing all the time, that define their lives by their athletic or mental skill, and are not immune to the faults of children---taunting those with less skill, being cocky or aloof, trying to be funny at the expense of others.

This film explores those aspects of chess like no other sports film before it. Fred Waitzkin wants Josh, his son, to be a baseball player, but when Josh finds that chess is his love, Fred wants him to be the best at that, as well. He searches for someone to be his chess teacher, and finds Bruce Pandolfini.

How Pandolfini ever agreed to this film, I'll never know. He ends up being the wayward dad, in an inversion of the usual story where the real dad is never around, and a surrogate dad is. Pandolfini is a real chess grandmaster, and he's portrayed as a man whose lost some faith in chess, and who sees, in Josh, the kind of raw talent that, if properly trained and molded, could lead to great success.

Bruce is fair though. He tells Fred that to be a chess champion requires great devotion, great study, to give up all else in the pursuit of being the best. He points out a chess player who is clearly socially dysfunctional, who plays 200 tournaments a year, and yet barely makes two grand. Does Fred really want that for his son?

The film shows the transition of Josh from his days at Washington Square, where he first learned to play street chess, where the play is quick and aggressive, much like street basketball is all about 1-on-1 play, and not about sound team principles. The flashy dunk wins over passing to the open man.

The film choose to make a point about the inherent goodness of Josh's heart. Washington Square is mostly populated by African Americans, who hustle each other for drug money, by playing chess. It's such an odd thing to think about, that most people feel it must be true. Who would imagine that winos and drug addicts would spend the kind of time to play chess, seen as a brainy sport.

Vinnie, as played by Laurence Fishburne, is seen as the embodiment of the street hustler, someone who sees that Josh has talent, and knows that Josh will eventually be better than all the guys out there. He nurtures Josh's talent in his own way, telling Josh to play aggressively, to play the equivalent of street ball in chess, and while Josh never brings himself to talk trash, like Vinnie, playing chess here is considered Josh's happiest moments.

As Pandolfini trains Josh, he wants him to avoid that crowd, because he feels it teaches him poor skills in chess. He notes that they play tactics, not position, which, if you're familiar with chess, are the two schools of thought in chess (one has to be versed in both, to be fair). This means he's told to abandon one chess father for another.

Since Pandolfini is the chess expert, he becomes something of the heavy, trying to get Josh to be all he can be, but his own dad also pressures him. Fred knows his son can beat nearly everyone, and yet questions Josh when Josh throws a game so he won't have to face the evil kid.

Ah, the evil kid. This is where the film takes some license again. The evil kid is the chess prodigy who's been trained to think only about chess, and nothing else. Josh is the well-rounded kid. He plays baseball. He goes fishing. There's more to his life than chess. Evil kid only plays chess. He has a strict mentor, and is shown to relish his ability to beat adults. And he manages to do this while uttering maybe three lines in the whole film. He mostly glares.

As I was watching the film, I wondered if it made sense to cast Max Pomeranc. Pomeranc was mostly picked not only because he looked innocent, but because he played chess. At first, I thought it was a bad decision. Pomeranc isn't a great child actor by any means. Still, they work his natural performance by having most of the actors underplay their parts.

It's an interesting choice for another reason. Child actors are often asked to do things that adult actors do. Some of the best child actors are unbelievably amazing, such as the incredible Haley Joel Osment. Max Pomeranc struggles with some of the acting he does. For example, when his dad is wondering why his son has tanked the game, he talks to Josh out in the rain. Max is trying to shiver naturally, and yet, it comes out unnatural, and that nearly speaks to the kind of awkwardness of a child trying to be an adult.

However, his innocence plays an important role in the film, because one key point is to show that he's a kid, a kid with tremendous talent for chess, but a kid nevertheless.

It's too bad that the film chose chess, even as it brings to light a game that is hardly ever shown in film. There are kids that are fanatics about basketball. They dream about being the next Jordan or Lebron James. They spend hours practicing their crossover dribbles. They are poor students.

Do their parents ever think "these kids spend far too much time on basketball, they need to have quality time doing something else, or they will be dysfunctional"? Somehow, anything that involves the brain is seen as abnormal, that kids need something athletic to have fun. Those that are athletic, on the other hand, often lack the kind of mental prowess to have them, say, play chess for fun, or do things that are more academically minded, something that might actually serve them in the long run.

Searcing fo Bobby Fischer tries to balance the good and bad in everyone. Pandolfini tries to be a good teacher. While he's portrayed as the strict dad that isn't there, eventually, he is there for Josh's big moment, realizing that Josh is a kid, after all. Fred realizes that maybe he's pushed expectations too much on Josh, expectations that Josh is starting to ingrain in himself, to keep his dad happy (these are the scenes that work least well for Max). He gives Josh an opportunity to get away from chess for a while, to not worry if he doesn't beat evil kid.

Vinnie is also there for Josh, showing that Josh still cares about the people who first kindled his interest in chess.

When you realize just how challenging a story this is, how difficult it is to have antagonists that aren't purely evil (except evil kid), you can forgive some of the excesses (the sympathetic lighting, the rain pouring down, the scene early on when a guy wants to give a baseball back for a chess piece that Josh has found, symbolizing Josh's decision for chess, the blantant underlining that Josh is tossing all his matches against his dad, because he doesn't want to beat his dad, the symbolic removal of the telephone books from the chair when he plays his dad for real, then races up to talk to his friend in between moves, the fire brigade of kids who relay what's happening in a key game with Josh, as the parents are locked away in a waiting room, so they won't pressure the kids).

All of this dramatization works because it defies conventions all around. The more I think about what the film is trying to do, the more amazed I am about how it manages to accomplish it all, and that's why I'll accept evil kid, even as the film needs a dramatic conclusion to show that Josh has learned lessons.

So you may wonder what's happened to Josh Waitzkin. When the film came out, he was still playing chess, in his late teens. It was 1993. The web existed, but it was rudimentary. The first browsers were perhaps being developed. Personal websites were extremely rare.

These days, Josh has his own website. Although he is still interested in chess, Josh turned his interests in 1998, to martial arts, in particular, Tai Chi, which is a form of meditative martial arts. Apparently, there is a competitive form of tai chi, and Josh, perhaps being obsessive compulsive, has done quite well, winning competitions in China.

There's probably going to be room for another film or documentary that details how this kid, pegged as the next Bobby Fisher (though the film is clear to show that he has decided, unlike evil kid, not to pursue chess as doggedly as he would need to to be the best in the world), has transformed himself.

You can go to his gallery, where pictures suggest he's hot and sultry while meditating over chess pieces and martial arts. If he was 18 at the time the film was completed in 1993, he must be about 31 or so, now.

This is the power of the web. Before it, I would have to work really hard to find out what happened to Josh. And Josh would have had little reason to put his life for view. The web makes that all quite easy now.

I'll give the film an A-. There are still a few too many dramatic liberties it takes that probably enhance the fun of the film, but maybe could have been toned down. You'll notice that indie directors often try to buck the trend of keeping audience expectations happy, and thus, alienate a few folks who want traditionally happy endings.

Lost and Lost

I've decided that hotels are truly incompetent at one thing. They can't find anything. I know. I know. A hotel is huge. The things you lose are small. They don't intend on having people whose job is to scour the hotel grounds possibly looking for something when that something can look like trash.

Recently, a visitor came and he was borrowing the card key I have so he could go to the men's room, and then re-enter back without having to knock on the door. Alas, he kept the card by accident, and he did what he thought was the sensible thing. Since he was staying at a hotel, he left the card key in an envelope.

Of course, the hotel, having no mechanism to properly deal with this somehow nearly lost the key in front of their faces. This visitor put the key into a small envelope with his name and my name. By the time I arrived at the front, nearly 6 hours later, a new shift had arrived, and of course, were completely unaware of what was going on.

I figured this was monumental incompetence and that if they simply allowed me to look for it, I would find it. Never trust a staff to look for anything you want. Of course, they thought I was looking for a hotel key, which I told them it was not. Fortunately, they had been opening and closing this desk, and apparently not looking inside it at all, despite the fact there was an envelope with my name and this guy's name on it. They took a simple quick cursory scan, which yielded nothing.

Imagine if they had lost $100 in that drawer. They would, I'm sure, be awfully patient looking around.

I saw the envelope, say my name, and pointed it out. Did they apologize for their mass incompetence? Of course not. They didn't say "How is it possible that I could have missed this? I am truly sorry!". No, not at all. All they think about it is what a great inconvenience it is to do their job. If it takes more than 10 seconds to check it out, it's far too long.

To be fair, this was a crappy hotel. However, I was met with similar help (i.e., none) when I was at the Manchester Hyatt. Of course, their problem is far more daunting. Their hotel grounds are probably ten times as large. However, in this case, I was looking for something that was left with hotel management, something you think they could have dealt with, and yet, nothing was in place to do this.

Lesson? Never lose anything at a hotel. Even if someone puts a big sign with a big arrow pointing at it, the staff will manage not to spot it.

Fischer King

I remember, a few years ago, watching Searching for Bobby Fischer. It was the critical darling, the little picture that could. It tells a rather small story, not of Bobby Fischer, who famously beat Boris Spassky in the 70s to become the first American world champion of chess. In those days and even now, Russians were the ones to beat. They take chess far more seriously than Americans, which isn't to say Americans aren't any good, just that they aren't at the level of world champion.

Bobby Fischer was a strange one. He was extremely paranoid. He thought Russians were trying to use mind-control on him. He was irritable. He'd spout all sorts of stuff. Needless to say, that part of him didn't make him all that popular.

You'd think, with a title like Searching for Bobby Fischer, that the story would be about the next great American chess prodigy, the Tiger Woods of chess. But alas, no. It is based on a true story of a sportswriter who wanted his kid to play baseball, before discovering his affinity and talent for chess.

The film is, in hindsight, amazingly star-studded. Laurence Fishburne and Ben Kingsley play the main characters, outside of Max Pomeranc, a kid who was cast partly because he really did play chess, which is one of those casting dilemmas. Rocky 5 cast Tommy Morrison, the grandson of John Wayne, as the young boxer that Rocky takes an interest in, far more than his own son, and leads him to success, before he is swayed by the sweet talk of a Don King-like character. While the concept was intriguing, in principle, it was horrid in execution.

Morrison, a real-life boxer, never provided the right dramatics for a Darth Vader like character, whose descends into greed and corruption. Worse still, Talia Shire is shrill as the ever-suffering Adrian, and the son is similarly awful.

There's no question that Max Pomeranc is not Haley Joel Osment. He's not a truly gifted child actor, by any stretch of the imagination. Initially, this seems to be a bad decision. He seems a bit too innocent, a bit too unable to provide the right emotions.

The director seems to know this too, and has the actors suitably underplay their roles as well. There are scenes where Max talks to his sister in a way that seems believable in real life, if perhaps not in the dramatics of the story.

I had seen Searching for Bobby Fischer about ten years ago, when it first came out, and thought it was good. I recall an odd comment by Orson Scott Card. At the time--and even now, there was speculation about the film version of Ender's Game. When this film came out, Card said that the film said what he wanted to from the book.

I had wondered how the two were related. Ender's Game tells a science fiction story. Earth has been at war with an alien race called the "buggers", presumably insect like creatures.

They have had infrequent encounters, and have decided that to prepare for their next encounter with the buggers, they must find the next leaders of strategy and war. At the time the story was conceived, sometime in the late 70s and early 80s, video games were starting to become popular, and kids were among its best practitioners, spendings many hours and quarters playing Asteroids, Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Donkey Kong. Kids seemed to understand how to play these far better than adults.

Card merely extrapolated the ideas of kids as genius to war. The story follows the story of three siblings, Andrew (called Ender, because his sister, Valentine misprounounced his name), Valentine, and Peter. Peter is the eldest, and unlike Ender, he is cruel and manipulative. Ender is the innocent, who is nonetheless, also cocky and self-confident. But where Peter is ultimately power-seeking, Ender loves his enemies, and that gives him strength.

This feels like a much different story than that of Josh Waitzkin. Waitzkin is the child of a sportwriter, Fred Waitzkin, who hopes his child will become a baseball star. One day, while chasing a baseball, he stumbles on chess players playing at Washington Square, and is immediately fascinated by the game, and the players that play it, and eventually begins to play.

The title of the film, Searching for Bobby Fischer, is not so much about Waitzkin being the next Bobby Fischer, as it is about what it takes to play chess at that level, and the effects it has on Josh.

The film explores what it takes for kids to be excellent at what they do. Sports films rarely touch on the topic of kids pushed to success. Sports films are almost always about why sports are great, and feature the big game at the end, where the underdogs pull it out in the end. Even a film like Friday Night Lights which tracks a high school football team's travails in small town Texas, where poverty means that the only thing anyone looks to is the success of the football team, and the immense pressure that comes from the community that has little else.

The kids in such teams are seen as innocents, trying their best to win, to not let down the community, even as the community itself is portrayed as caring far too much about winning.

Rarely are kids on such teams seen as the product of parents who push and whether such decisions even make sense.

Chess works out better because one can imagine that parents might wonder whether their kids should choose to excel, much as they might wonder if a math prodigy is wrong for spending so much time at math. It's funny how films often question this kind of prodigy. Pi went so far as to say that the search for math genius leads to insanity. Athletic genius, of course, doesn't come with this burden.

Fred Waitzkin, who initially wants his son to be a baseball player, realizes his son has good at chess, and searches for a suitable teacher. He finds it in Bruce Pandolfini. It's amazing that Pandolfini agreed to this portrayal, which makes him out to be a guy that has been burned out by chess. He knows, as someone who was once at the top of the game, but not a world champion, what it takes, and is eventually invigorated by what he perceives to be the next Bobby Fischer.

His desire to make Josh good leads to a line that really brings home its relation to Ender's Game. He tells Josh that he must have contempt for his opponent, that Bobby Fischer had contempt for his opponents, that his opponents hated him. Josh says that he doesn't hate his opponents.

"Searching" hits all the right notes for motivation, from Pandolfini encouraging Josh to succeed by earning master points, which Josh covets, until Josh wants it so bad, that Pandolfini pulls the rug underneath him, telling him the certificate Josh wants is worthless. Joan Allen, alas, is doomed. She must play the good mother, who sees that Josh is a good person, who cares about others more than even she does. Josh likes to hang out with the less than savory chess players at Washington Square, seeing them as people who are, at least, good at chess, even as she is scared of them (but eventually comes to see how meaningful they are to his life).

Josh has ultimately, three father figures in the film, his real father, Bruce Pandolfini, and Vinnie, played by Laurence Fishburne, who embodies street chess. They all want him to succeed, but in different ways.

The degree of difficulty is rather high, because the film has to dramatize chess, a game that is notoriously brainy, and inscrutable to many. The director finds its way by using speed chess and Fishburne's trash-talking Vinnie to heighten the dramatics.

Chess is a timed game, at least, when played in competition. I believe the rule two hours to make the first forty moves, which is about 3 minutes a move. Even at that relatively fast pace, the game would be far too slow on film. Speed chess can be played even faster, at a minute a move or less, and the film accelerates that to a second or two a move, trying to take away the one element that matters most--thought.

I had a sense, watching the film again, how much I was being manipulated, but how I didn't seem to mind. The film is based on a true story, but it is definitely dramatized. Vinnie, I'm sure, is not a real character.

Bruce Pandolfini is portrayed by Ben Kingsley as someone, much like the Stellan Skaarsgaard character in Good Will Hunting or Salieri in Amadeus, a man who is talented, but more importantly recognizes talent, and hopes to cultivate the talent even further. He's much like a dad who loves baseball, but lacks talent, and hopes his kid can play in the major leagues. Was the real Pandolfini like that? I somehow doubt it.

Then, there's the other kid. He's the rival. Played by evil Fred Savage (it isn't Fred, but i t sure looks like him), this kid's purpose is mostly to glare. He's the embodiment of the child chess machine, the Ivan Drago of Rocky 4.

Josh is scared of this other kid, scared because he feels he can't beat him. He's also feeling the pressure of expectations from his dad and Pandolfini. He's being asked to play like an adult, to deal with pressure, and yet he's a kid. Pandolfini is even made out to be the bad chess father, the guy who can't make it to Josh's competition, but since the real Pandolfini did have a role in the film, his character does come through.

The kids three dads come with him to the big competition. Which strategy does he try to use against evil Fred Savage? Does he play the cavalier style of street chess where you play the opponent and not the board? Does he play the erudite style of Pandolfini and classic chess where you play the board and not the opponent?

He does a little of both. He brings out his queen early, a move seen as too rash by Pandolfini, and in fact, loses the queen early, normally a devastating move, then, as he regains parity with the queen, he sits and sees the winning move that Pandolfini is describing in a waiting room. Then, he does something unexpected for all concerned. He offers a draw. He offers a tie. The two can share a championship, since he sees there's a win. Of course, the other kid will have none of that. He's winning, after all.

Somehow, the climatic game, the one that you know is going to happen, combines all the aspects of who Josh has become. He plays the strategy of Vinnie, then sees the board like Pandolfini, but is still the good-hearted boy he's always been.

This is underlined again when he meets up with Morgan, whose dad (played by character actor, David Paymer) critiques him for not using his knight, and comforts him by saying Morgan is a better player than he was at Morgan's age, a funny comment considering both kids are like 10 years old.

For the purposes of the film, the chess is made simple enough that if you know the basic rules, you can follow the last game to some extent. You know when the queen is taken (bad). You know that in the end, when both are rushing their pawn to the end to queen, and the evil kid is able to get their first, but Josh's queen leads to a check, and then resignation (in reality, the kid would have seen that move coming much sooner).

Although I knew the film was manipulative, it tells such an interesting story of the nature of competition, from the dad who tries to understand his son and his skill at chess, to the pressures of being the best at a sport and the expectations to succeed, to simply being a kid, and just enjoying life.

If you haven't seen this film, watch it. If you haven't seen it in a while, it's worth watching again.

Shane!

Two years ago, Shane Carruth's film, Primer was making the rounds of indie theaters. It came for one week at the E Street Landmark. There are two Landmark theaters in the DC area, one on E Street in Washington, DC, the other in Bethesda.

I find it easier to get to the one in Bethesda, though I have to drive there. Well, it's because I have to drive there that it's convenient. Some people hate to drive, and find opportunities to take public transportation much more palatable. I hate the extra time it takes. Every time I take the DC Metro, I wonder why they didn't design express trains that would skip ever ten stops. You would then get off and take another train that would go, at most, 5 stops away.

It's too bad, really, that the E Street Landmark almost always has the better films. Wouldn't it make more sense for both theaters to carry the same films, staggered by a week or so? If you missed it at one theater, you could get it at the other? But, no, that would be too convenient.

The Landmark Theaters, as I understand it, are the brainchild of Mark Cuban. If you follow any NBA basketball, you know he's the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, and is himself, something of a maverick owner, wealthy from a company that he sold to Yahoo.

What is Primer? The ads don't give you much of a clue as to what the film is about, and so by telling you, I'm spoiling it.

Basically, Primer is about time travel. Here's the basic idea. You turn on the machine with a timer set for, say, five minutes, and leave. The machine warms up and stays humming for five hours. After the five hours, you enter into this machine. When you're done, you're at the other end.

To illustrate. Suppose you turn on the machine at noon. You leave and come back at 5 PM. You get in the machine. You get out at noon. Now, when you get out, there's really two of you. The one that started the machine at noon, and the one that got out at noon, after getting in the machine at 5.

Of course, what's weird is that between noon and 5 PM, there's someone in that machine, going back in time.

The film gets even more confusing, because you can bring in another time machine with you at 5 PM, take at out at noon, and fire it up elsewhere. That way, you can always get back to noon over and over, while more and more copies of you occur.

That sounds simple enough, but if you watch the film, you'd be hard-pressed to follow all of that without multiple viewings.

The story follows two inventors, Abe and Aaron, who work at a startup company by day, and work on this mystery project at night. They're trying to build some new tool, and stumble upon the creation of a time machine. They wonder what to do about it.

Eventually, there's a shooting where someone gets hurt, and they think they can travel in time to prevent it from happening. There's also a question as to whether the time travel is causing them permanent damage, and what this power does to their friendship.

Made on a shoestring budget of $7000, Shane Carruth enlisted the help of his family and friends. He hired only one real actor, the guy who played Abe, and cast himself as Aaron, since he couldn't find another actor to play the role. He figured that's one less person he'd have to worry about showing up.

Shane has an uncanny resemblance to Topher Grace, the lead guy (well, assuming you don't think Ashton Kutcher is the lead guy) in That 70's Show. Shane pretty much did everything. Acted, wrote music. He did have a director of photography, who doubled as an actor. He had his sister play his wife. I believe the brother of the D.P. played a role as well. His own brother dubbed the voice of another actor, when that actor was out of town and unavailable.

Carruth said he barely had any more footage than what he took. Despite the small amount of money used to make the film, Carruth decided to make the movie using film, instead of digital video. He wanted it to look as good as possible, but using film meant that he could afford, at most, one take excepted in limited circumstances.

To offset this huge problem, he had the cast rehearse and rehearse. The film is primarily two actors, with everyone else having minor roles.

Because Shane was so small-time, I could actually email him and get a response. Now, I know how this typically works. You might get one or two email exchanges going, but it's not going to last long if they think you're boring. Even if there aren't many people taking to you, ten or twenty people ends up being more than most people would care to talk to.

I asked Shane about movie making, and he said that he wished he had taken some courses. He had been an engineer, and hated it. Then, he read up a lot on filmmaking. He also received a lot of bad advice, mainly passed on from people who should know better, but which didn't bear out when he tried stuff for real.

After two emails, I haven't heard from Shane, which isn't to say I've written him since two years ago. I think I sent him an email about a week or so ago, trying to see what he's up to.

Consider the accolades he received. He received an award at Sundance. Mike D'Angelo pointed to his film as one of the best of the year. D'Angelo's quote about the film is actually in the film poster (I've sent email to D'Angelo as well, way before I knew about Carruth).

In interviews, Carruth said he wanted to write a romantic comedy, a change of pace of the heady science fiction story he came up with. Perhaps the person people think of most when they think of indie film to success, at least, in recent years, is Darren Aronofsky, who wrote Pi, and followed that up with Requiem for a Dream.

Of course, the king of the indie films of recent memory (I won't go as far back as Cassavetes) is Steven Sodebergh, with his precocious debut, Sex, Lies, and Videotape from which he's gone on to have excellent films such as Traffic and Erin Brockovich.

Carruth never quite got that famous. I think his film is starting to get noticed a little. Two of my coworkers have seen his film, though I'm sure I'm the only to have seen it in the theaters.

So, my question, and the point of this blog, is to ask, "What ever happened to Shane Carruth?". Here was a guy that had a fair bit of promise, who earned some money for his film, and seems to have disappeared. I see no mention of him in Google. Nearly every interview is around the time the film came out. It's been at least a year since he's had an interview.

Where are you, Shane Carruth?

Oscar, I Swear

I flew into San Diego about two weeks ago, on the eve of Oscars, and somehow missed the Oscars, mostly because I had arranged to have dinner with a former student, and that dinner time--between 7 and 9, happened to neatly overlap with the time the Oscars were on. That's West Coast time, for you.

Crash won best picture, though I thought, for sure, Brokeback Mountain would win it. If the votes had been cast two months earlier, in early January, rather than early March, it probably would have won.

Shortly thereafter, there were many complaints. I happened to read an article in the L.A. Times while exercising at the Y in the basement of the hotel I was staying. Kenneth Turan was criticizing the selection of Crash accusing voters of feeling ambivalent about a movie about gay cowboys, favoring, instead, a film about racism.

The backlash of those who wanted to see Brokeback win lead to another backlash of those who said "Grow up, already! Crash won!". Such complaints don't make sense, mostly since the people who wanted to see Brokeback win didn't have an opportunity to vote.

I had felt sure Brokeback would win mostly because of the impact it's had in our culture. True, there's more spoofs of Brokeback than nearly every non-science fiction blockbuster (recall, the Matrix three-d pan around, which was mercilessly copied by everyone). People were using the word Brokeback in their vernacular. Mike Wilbon has uttered "Have you gone Brokeback on me?", which isn't exactly a flattering comment, especially since it offers a way to say "gay" without saying it.

Roger Ebert defended the choice of Crash which he felt was the superior film, and couldn't understand how people could get so worked up about this choice, although his complaint, rightly so, was about the mud-slinging that fans of Brokeback threw against Crash, calling it the worst film of the year, blaming those who liked it more for being short-sighted, homophobic, you name it.

The best rebuttal I've seen so far is Scott Renshaw's. He wonders why we care at all? Once upon a time, the Oscars went to big budget films. Good films weren't even in the running. In the last twenty years, the Oscars now take their cue from other awards, in particular, the Golden Globes, which used to be a farce of an awards, since international film writers were often easy to convince to vote your way. They were as starstruck as the average Joe.

Nowadays, films of some quality do make it as nominees. True, there are always going to be some films that are too controversial, or too indie (i.e., not rewarding enough to the average filmgoer who wants a plot and a happy ending) to ever get nominated.

Even so, any choice of best picture is tainted by those who select it. Scott points out, quite rightly, that if you care that Brokeback Mountain is best picture, then it is. Don't make out the Oscars to be anything more than it is. It's one group's opinion, and that group can be frankly, ignored.

For many a sports fan, the Oscars are a waste of time. They see it as dress watching, and nothing would bore them more. Sports fans, in general, watch few films (outside a David Aldridge, who apparently watches quite a lot) and then, only the action/adventure or Wedding Crashers variety appeals to them. Films like Brokeback Mountain would scare them (and probably be too slow) to care, and they are perfectly happy ignoring the Oscars.

In the end, the effect of the generally accepted Brokeback Mountain may be better films in the gay genre getting made (there are plenty of awful ones out there, especially romantic comedies). And that may be worth more than any Best Picture.

Brave New World

Computer science is a weird field. Its very name is based on a technical object: the computer. Perhaps no other major can make that claim. Some people claim the name is a misnomer. Computer science, by its very name, has the word science. But it's not biology or chemistry or physics, that develop theories and verify by observations.

Although computer science has its foundations in mathematics, it is not purely math either. Computation theory and algorithms are math. However, programming, software engineering, databases, and so forth are all applications of this theory. Indeed, software engineering is as much about social organization as it is about math.

Computer science is a relatively young field. The field itself predates the computer itself. The birth of computer science probably begins at the beginning of the twentieth century, where mathematicians came up with the grand idea that everything could be proved, if we provided rigorous enough rules. Put in modern terms, this means we could write programs to prove all theorems. Godel disproved this, but nevertheless, it lead to people like Von Neumann and Turing to conceive the modern idea of a computer.

The oldest computer science departments can only trace back some forty years. The germ of a computer science department didn't start until the 1960s. By the 1970s, a few more were springing up. The advent of the personal computer gave rise to many computer science departments in the 1980s and onward.

Computer science education, however, hasn't evolved particularly fast. Computer science often teaches its courses much as any other major does. It rarely uses computers to make it work. Ten years ago, you'd find most computer science lectures being taught using chalkboard.

These days, the ubiquity of the laptop and projection units has made it possible for everyone who plans ahead to use Powerpoint (or similar) to present their information. However, anything beyond that, say, interactive software have never really been successful because it added a great deal of work for professors.

While we'd like to believe that most professors devote a great deal of time to teaching, many choose to spend very little time on it. Students that aren't very brilliant start to wear at the patience of normally impatient teachers who complain aloud that students have to work harder, just like they did, to be successful. If a professor could work and think hard, why can't they?

And yet, it's in teaching that most professors are weak. They devote so little time to understanding how people learn, where students have deficiencies. They make brief summaries of chapters, and hope to say the same things year after year after year. I knew one instructor who wouldn't update his SQL notes which were ten years old.

That's part of the problem of teaching in an area that's tied so closely with technology. You have to invest time to keeping up. Yet, many other areas change slowly. Mathematics, physics, biology, chemistry. Even if there are advances in these areas, they are often at such an advanced level that only graduate students have to worry about it.

On the other hand, computer science changes fast enough that even the basics of programming have evolved over the years. We started off with procedural programming, such as Fortran and Pascal, and that evolved to object oriented programming of C++ and Java. That was not an easy transition for many people, even many bright people, who still think procedurally.

Industry always moves quicker. If one company chooses not to adopt a technology, others will. The current fad of industry is web services, Ajax, Web 2.0. And yet, a typical computer science teacher may not be following any of these advances at all, which is sad, because it opens up all sorts of opportunities to write new programs beyond the kinds they write now.

O'Reilly held a session titled Learning 2.0 about changing ways we learn. However, the lessons offered weren't particularly enlightening. From surveys, this O'Reilly group heard that teachers want to create their own books and decide their own content. You can now work with O'Reilly to do just that.

But who do you suppose responded to O'Reilly? Teachers who cared. What about the teacher that walks into lecture and starts rattling off the content off the top of his (or her head)? Yes, there are teachers who think "I have a Ph.D., I don't have to prepare for class since I already know it". There's no one checking on whether they do any advanced preparation.

If you have someone like that, why on earth would they want to invest the time to develop their own material? That takes time! I knew one professor who did decide to write his own notes for his course. He co-taught this with another professor. When that other professor taught the course for the summer, he went back to the standard textbook. It had certainly been revised more often and had far more content than the makeshift book.

So how do we get teachers to learn more about the brave new world? The first step is to create a resource (preferably web) that people can easily find and easily read and takes little to no work to be involved. They can simply read up on other people's ideas, and that alone would work out great.

I believe with a judicious combination of web resources and good teachers, it will eventually be possible to train the next generation of computer scientist and computer technologists that will make them far more capable of handling the problems of tomorrow.

I once sat at a talk by Dave Thomas. Thomas has written two books on Ruby, and is a funny and exciting guy to hear at a lecture. He said we really need to increase the expertise of more people in the computer industry. How do we do that? That's the problem I'm giving some thought to. I don't think the answer lies in creating customized textbooks.