This year, for the first time, I attended the security convention and hacker party time that is DEFCON.

I had heard a lot of things about DEFCON, but it far exceeded my expectations. The convention is so full of things to do that most of the time I was not even aware of them all. Atendees are, mostly, intelligent, approachable, and respectful.

On Thursday, within 10 minutes of setting up an account for the secure wireless (by using the inscure wireless), my Blackberry Z10 went nuts. I took a device that didn’t have any data on it on purpose so that I could be reckless like this. I was impressed by the speed and violence of the attack. I could not turn my phone off properly (it just kept vibrating and making noises) and had to remove the battery. Booting in airplane mode was fine, but the moment I connected to the WiFi again the attack continued. Creating an actually secure account using a friend’s 3G allowed me to actually use my phone for the rest of the convention. Overall, it was an awesome experience.

I saw talks about quadcopters, Dust, ToR, SIM card exploits, physical lock exploits (as well as normal lockpick techniques). I attended workshops on evidence tampering and handcuff shimming. I spent some time trying to decode some of the crypto puzzles that were an integral part of the conference. I met some people.

The reputation DEFCON has for being full of misogyny and therefore having few female attendees is completely overblown. I was actually suprised at the (seemingly) huge number of female attendees, compared to many other tech conferences I have participated in. Hacker Jepordy has a stripping component, and that was the only anti-feminism I saw at the convention. I saw a lot more, but that was Vegas casinos, and not inside the convention space.

The weather was amazing. Hot and dry. The air conditioning way overcompensates, though (my hotel room was set to 19 when I arrived), so take a warm shirt.

Overall I enjoyed myself, and I plan to go back again next year.

It’s no secret that I’m not impressed with the current state of University education. I’ve spent a long time griping about the various issues, and pointing out ways I would do it differently. None of that makes any difference, however, until I actually do something about it.

While my issues are with post-secondary education generally, my primary expertise (especially of late) is in Computer Science and Software development. So, I developed a curriculum, found a community, and started teaching a class.

Teaching one class does not constitute a solution, but it does provide a learning experience for me. The class is over half done now, and in the rest of this post I will be examing things I have tried and what I have learned.

Hands-on Learning

Since my approach is focused entirely on education, I did not assign any exercizes early on. I provided students with the tools needed to play with the concepts on their own, and set them free to hack. This turned out to be too open-ended. When encountering a new concept for the first time, many students simply had no concept of what direction they should take their explorations in.

I am now providing some concrete exercizes to the students, but really I need to find a way to integrate more hands-on learning into the class itself. This is made more difficult because of the pacing I chose for this version.

Pacing

Probably the biggest experiment in this first version of the course is the pacing I am using. The class is an overview of Computer Science from both the perspective of functional abstractions and low-level machine implementation. It is designed to give students a flavour of what parts of Computer Science they might find interesting for further study. I am doing the whole thing in 8 weeks.

The amount of material I am covering would normally be covered in two or more semesters at a University. Why am I doing this? For two reasons: so that students have less time to get bogged down on individual details (since, as an overview course, this is not about depth), and also to find out how fast one can reasonably progress without hopelessly confusing students.

While I cannot be sure without more experiments, I am also beginning to suspect that the pacing increases student engagement (at least for the sorts of students I have solicited). New material every single class means that students do not have an opportunity to tune out because “we already talked about this”.

While the pacing is definitely hurting the students’ ability to deeply absorb the subject matter, I conduct informal experiments periodically to determine understanding. Students in general seem to be grasping concepts, and find themselves coming back up to speed on items they failed to retain quickly enough to demonstrate a level of penetration.

Students

For this course, primarily because of the pacing, I solicited students with prior knowledge of computer internals and programming. I started out with a good mix of students from various backgrounds, but certain students (about half of the 10 I started with) dropped the course fairly early on.

Students who stuck with the course were precisely those students who had both enough knowledge of computer internals to handle the pace, and enough of a deficiency in prior experience with Computer Science-related material to be interested in an overview. I hope to run both slower and more in-depth courses in the future in order to serve other sorts of students.

While prior knowledge of the basics seems to be helping the students’ ability to comprehend new material, it also occassionally poses a distraction, since I cannot present any idea as strictly new. I need to improve my ability to communicate an idea that is “new” in the context of a course, without speaking as though no one present has ever heard of it before.

From the Top and Bottom

The concept of my particular curriculum for this course is to start at the “most” abstract and “most” machine-specific concepts, and work inward. This is in stark contrast to most first-year Computer Science courses, which start out in practical programming, move on to machine specifics, and then later on do algorithms and (maybe) more abstract (actual) Computer Science.

Students have indeed struggled with the seemingly-abstract concepts, especially early on when they may not yet even have a basis on which to understand “why they care” about the abstractions that are possible. This is partly because of my failure to spur adequate hands-on learning, and partly because of the ordering. On the other hand, the juxtaposition of abstractions and related implementation details has already more than once resulted in realizations about the nature of the abstractions (“that product type is just like a struct!”)

Next Steps

I still have to finish teaching this class, and will report more at that time. Some of my students (and also other members of the Kwartzlab community) have expressed interest in an Operating Systems implementation course, based on my Writing a Simple OS Kernel series of posts. I hope to run this course mid-summer, and structure it purely as a project course. This should give me more experience with the ways that hands-on learning can be effectively brought directly into a class.

I am also excited about the idea of running other more in-depth courses, based on community interest. From a “Computer Science for Programmers” side I would like to run a course I’m calling “Advance Abstractions” (dealing with advanced concepts in control flow and data modelling) and also a non-course structured as various talks by various contributors on specific data structures and algorithms.

I would also like to run the “slow version” of this same course, targetted at complete beginners. The problem with this version is that it requires participants to have more time to dedicate to the course. We’ll see where that goes.

This morning, I went through my backpack and threw out all the business cards I have collected. If I have met you in the last 5 years and you’ve never actally corrosponded with me, it may be that I no longer have your contact information.

Why?

Because they were just taking up space in my backpack. Some of them have been in there so long that they could no longer be read. One of them was just a paper with an email address scribbled on it.

Why did I have so many? Because at every conference and networking event I go to, people try to shove me their business cards. Sometimes I take them to be polite, and sometimes I take them because I’m genuinely interested in the person or what they do. In the end, though, if they never contact me and I don’t have an immidiate reason to contact them, the card just sits in a pile. I suppose I could transcribe them into my digital address book, but that takes work.

This is why I’ve never really had business cards and I don’t give them out. I have a simple string of characters, “singpolyma”, that I give out to anyone who asks. This string of characters will find my on almost any service, or on a web search. Then, if you actually want to connect with me about something, you can do so using the mechanism that makes the most sense.

Similarly, if I actually want to connect with you, I will probably write down why I want to connect and who you are on my phone. I may even initiate contact digitally (by adding you on IM or following on a microblogging service) while I’m still physically standing with you.

I’ve found that the really interesting people often keep popping up. I may stop taking business cards, or I may just clean out my backpack again in four more years, but I definitely won’t be giving out little waste scraps of cardboard any time soon.

I thought I should blog this while the discussion I recently had with Christopher Vollick about the matter.

First, a small disclaimer. I may use words like “spouse” and “marriage” in this post. These words are used for simplicity only and are not intended to indicate a particular legal or religious connotation. You could substitute “life-long helpmate” or “mate” or any word that fits your worldview.

There are a great deal of different models used in the pursuit of spousal selection. I cannot possibly deal with them all, and may not even know about them all, so I will deal here primarily with three idealized models taken from Western Culture.

Modern Common

This is what I choose to call the spousal selection model commonly portrayed in recent Hollywood movies. It is also, unsurprisingly, the most common model in common use in the Western world.

This model consists of selecting a potentially interested party, proposing that said party engage in some sort of social activity, after which the couple quickly becomes formally declared and usually exclusive (“boyfriend/girlfriend”). This process often happens so quickly that, if both parties are more or less interested from the outset, there may be no intervening social activity at all. In all cases the couple transitions very quickly from casual friends (or even total strangers) to a formal romantic relationship.

The couple then engage, at least for some time, in a significant amount of private or semi-private social activity as the primary avenue for relationship building and evaluation.

This model tends to result in people who go through a series of formal, semi-committed, but ultimately disastrous relationships. It also tends towards viewing the relationship as an avenue for two people to evaluate each other, instead of as an avenue for two groups of people (friends and family on both sides) to be slowly evaluated and integrated. This results in weddings where one side may meet close friends or relatives of the other very shortly before the event.

Modern Courting

This model may be unfamiliar to some as it is mostly common among the far right. It claims to be an incarnation of a much older model (discussed next), but is in fact something new and much closer to Modern Common.

This modal is far more formal and legalistic than Modern Common. Instead of having an optional period of socializing between “friend” and “girl/boy friend” this model chooses to force everything to be formally declared up front. Guardians are often consulted, goals set, and rules agreed to. Like much that comes out of the far right this model tends to pride itself on what it does not do. Modern Courting couples often spend little to no time alone, and limit their interactions to a plan.

Modern Courting does emphasize family evaluation more than Modern Common, but only in terms of the context in which it operates. The individuals themselves quite often still do not see this as a primary component of their relationship.

Austin/Dickens Era

This model is the obvious ancestor to Modern Common, but has some very distinct differences. The couple still engage in social activity together in order to evaluate compatibility. The relationship still eventually becomes formalised, and usually exclusive. The couple even, contrary to popular belief, may spend a significant amount of private or semi-private time in relationship building.

The primary differences, are transition and context.

In this model, the transition from casual friend to a formal romantic relationship takes at least as long as the normal transition from stranger to friend. Nothing formal has to happen until the couple is nearing the engagement stage. Before that, the couple is interacting as increasingly good friends in whatever context would be natural for good friends to interact, given their other cultural baggage. This means that, naturally, friends and family who are likely to become a major part of the couple’s future are interacted with and evaluated as part of the social group the relationship is using for context.

This model also gives significantly more wiggle room to pursuit, since a party has not overcommited before an evaluation has taken place, and can exit from the non-relationship gracefully without anyone else being aware of what said party was thinking. Of course, eventually each party’s intentions become easy to discern, but things are not dealt with formally from the outset.

On Arrangement Models

Decently-run “arranged marriage”-based models can work very well. Possibly better than anything else. They cannot, however, be mixed in a society with another prevalent model. If they are, those under the arrangement find the arrangement to be arbitrary as compared with the “freedom” of those around them.

I am watching Dr. Who (and some other shows) right now. Every time I finish an episode I have to wait 7 days before I can watch another.

7 days.

Now, this 7 days is perfectly arbitrary. It doesn’t take 7 days to make an episode (it almost always takes more), nor does it take 7 days to do anything else. The number is just a convenient amount of time for them to make you wait, such that other shows on the channel can get fair airtime.

Channel?
Airtime?

We should seriously be much past that stage by now. The BBC has filmed at least half of the Dr. Who content for this season (they must have, in order to finish airing on time). They may have finished all of it.

BBC, I will give you $100 to send me that content now.

If $100 doesn’t seem like that much money, consider this: it is more money than they will see from me for the show otherwise. Even if I watched ads (which I don’t) or actually watched it on broadcast (which I don’t), $100 is still probably more than they would get for me watching the season. And that’s just for whatever they have as prerelease content. When more is made I’d get it again, possibly the way I do now. It would cost the BBC a little, but I’m sure there’s more than just me.

Consider: if only 200 Dr. Who viewers were interested in this, that’s still $20000.

That’s a lot of money to make off a group of people who would likely otherwise give you nothing.