Summer goals: academics

The summer lasts until some time toward the end of August. Here is what I hope to do before the first day of Fall Semester:

1. Complete every problem in Sakurai's Modern Quantum Mechanics
2. Perform a full signal analysis for coherent 2-photon interferometry.
3. Form a reasonable model of cross-Kerr nonlinearity and linear absorption in atomic mercury in the transparent regime.

The last two are subject to the vagaries of research. In other words if my bosses or just the direction of the fields I am working in require that I work on something else I will do that. If they don't, this is my course of action.

Goal setting

That makes two cycles of goal setting and achieving. I guess that there will be a lot more cycles before this is all done.

For me goals are a funny thing. It is one thing to set them and another to commit to them. When I set an initial goal it is partly a goal and partly a guess. I try to stretch reality a bit, but not too much. I don't really know if I can achieve the goal. Another question is always whether it is the right goal.

So for the first bit of time I think that part of what drives my work on the goal is research. I'm trying to find out if the goal is actually achievable. And also if it aligns well with the larger picture of what I am trying to do. So far in each cycle there has come a point when the time has been about 60% or more up when I have had to really decide whether or not I would commit to the goal. In both cases it still seemed pretty iffy whether or not I could achieve that goal. In each case I responded to that questioning time by first hesitating and then praying and then moving forward with having decided to get the job done. That last decision seems to be only partially in my control. And I think it has to do with what I believe in my heart are the answers to the two questions that I was researching. Can I believe that the goal can be accomplished? Do I believe that it is worth accomplishing? I think my heart kind of waits for an affirmative on both questions before it truely signs onto the goal that was set weeks earlier.

After each job has been done there has been a bit of a let down. A celebration, but also a desire to rest and renew my sense of direction. Possibly a lack of direction and a bit of burnout as well. Certainly I have wanted to stop with the type of work that got the goal accomplished and step back for awhile.

It is tempting to think of this last step as wasted time. And definitely burnout is bad, especially if it lasts. So is a lack of direction. But I think that at least part of this time is really important. When you are committed to a goal you become pretty obsessive about it. At least if the goal is tough to achieve. And you become pretty myopic. You have to because the accomplishment of the goal comes through the exact or recursive execution of a hundred little details. But when the goal is reached it is time to look around and open your mind to the possibilities around you. When you are climbing the mountain you need to watch the trail so that you don't stumble. But when you get to the first outlook I think it makes sense to stop and look at the view. Maybe you can enjoy just being there on the mountain. And maybe you can see better what you need to do next. And maybe you can rest up a little physically but also spiritually.

I'm not done with this step yet. I was surprised by the early completion of task 2 and my mind is still a little bit clamorous. So for that reason I am not ready to set the next meaningful goal. Not yet. But I am beginning to look toward a new type of goal to supplement continued progress with SongPiper (the name of the program for now). I am beginning to think about how to bring it to people who will use it. And pay for it.

Doug

Task 2 completed! Want a copy?

Our goal was the following:

• We want a fully operational GUI-pitch detector combo that is nice enough that we won't be ashamed to distribute it.
• We want to put it in a format where a non-expert can install it on their windows PC with no external help.
• We want to accomplish these things by June 1st 2006.

That goal was completed yesterday. The GUI-(pitch detector) combo is workable. I decided (felt like inspiration) to go with flash cards for this first product. Anyway, a note is displayed. If you can sing the note and maintain it you will be shown a new note, picked at random. Then you sing the new note. Gina and I have tried it with the piano and with our voices and it works. There are a lot of improvements that I want to make over time. But the bottom line is that it works! It's simple and it works.

The second part of the goal, like the first part, is met. It turns out that NetBeans automatically generates a set of JAR files that are easily deployable. I just give Brad a folder and he opens it and clicks on the JAR executable and up comes my program. (The only caveat is that he has to have JRE installed to run it. And I haven't tested to see if the program works for older versions of JRE, I only know it works for the current version.) I had to tweak things a little to make the flash cards deploy with the rest of the program. I'm sure that there are some things I can do to make distribution more effective. But start simple, no?

My jogging buddy, Brad Bushman, is going to a family reunion this weekend. I told him yesterday morning that the first simple version was getting close to completion and he said that his inlaws are music crazy. So he asked me if I could get him a version by today that he could show it off to them over the weekend. He said he would try to get feedback. Tonight I deploy the first copy.

Want a copy? I want to sell the program for $20 a pop. It's not enough to pay anyone full time until a whole bunch start getting sold (meaning thousands per year). But I want it to be a small enough expense that any normal family can buy it and not be affected too much one way or the other. (Sight reading for voice is a rare skill right now. I think that we can make it a lot more common.) Anyway, when you get your free copy I hope you won't think "it's free to me so it has no value." Rather I hope you will think "this little thing is pretty cool! Maybe if Doug did ____ it would be even cooler. I'll have to tell him. You know, I know some people who would really get a kick out of this. I should show them. Maybe they'll buy a copy. At $20 they can't lose." (Right, so I fantasize a lot.)

Anyway, all this is leading up to my offer (which is really a request for help). If you want a copy, tell me. Anyone who requests one by email to me or in a comment to this blog before June 15th (Heather's birthday) will get one sent to them by email. For free, of course. If I don't have your address just post it. You might post it in some kind of simple code like with the first letters of a sequence of words giving the address. That way I think it is unlikely to be found by a spam robot. OK. I had better get back to my physics.

But before I leave can I say that I am amazed? Last week it seemed like I would never make the goal. In the past few days it just came together. Way faster than I was thinking! Now how often does that happen? Yahoo! (TM) :-)

Doug

Task 2 week 5

I was pretty down about things this week. I was getting lost in a maze and June 1st was rapidly approaching. I hadn't made concrete progress all week. Not only that but Denis hadn't been able to contribute like he wanted and decided to back out formally.

Friday night I thought about things. Should I back up and make a new goal that would be more appropriate to the current situation? It would make total sense.

But somewhere inside was the knowledge that I didn't want to give up. The only thing was Gina. Would she agree to let me make an extra effort? Would she be willing even to sacrifice so that I could? (Nothing I do gets done in a vacuum. Extra effort somewhere means sacrifices elsewhere. In this case it means that I will be working a bit in the evenings and mornings as I can fit it in. That means extra effort from Gina.) She assented. So I'm going for it. I think we can have something that is worth being proud of by this June 1st.

Actually, the whole thing is getting to be pretty fun. Meaning, not just the process of making the product but playing with the product itself. The product is becoming fun. And it's getting better.

Thanks Gina! This is going to be fun.

This week's concrete progress: I learned how to get arbitrary gifs onto the GUI and to update them during run time. And I made most of the appropriate gifs. (I know. It's not too impressive. But it is all a necessary part of this first product.)

Doug

Alone. For now.

Denis has been under a good bit of pressure lately between finals, a car crash, an impending month-long trip to family in Russia, a chance to present at a prestigious optics conference called CLEO, and so on. For that reason he hasn't been contributing like he wanted to. He has decided that it won't let up for a bit and has requested that I not let him hold me back. He's signing off. After Russia we can see where things are.

Anyway, the goal that we set together seems pretty difficult to make alone. We'll just have to see.

Regardless, I am here to build a company. Not to become a computer programmer or just have fun but to learn how to build a company. In my view there is no company until you have revenue. And I don't see why there should be revenue until there is a product worth selling and worth buying. So I don't know about the timing. But I am pretty clear about the goal: I want to produce something worth selling and worth buying.

I see creating a company as something similar to earning a PhD. In both cases you are trying to create something worthwhile and original. In both cases you have to learn a lot to do so. Both can take a good chunk of time and commitment. Both can open doors and create opportunities that would otherwise remain shut. I am excited to have the chance to be involved in both.

Task 2 week 4

Now I can make it look pretty cool. But it's still just pretty cool text. What I want in the end is a musical score. One with notes whose appearance will change over time.

I think that the first application that we spread around might be flash cards. The note stays on the screen until you sing it. Then a new note appears. That way you have something of a game. But how should I draw the notes and the score? It doesn't seem too hard to just draw some things. But it would be neater and more scalable if there were a well worn path for representing notes on the screen that we could take.
Can't find one yet and only 2 weeks left.

Constraints: thinking out loud

My brother Bart and I used to imagine up various super powers and what one would do with them. Every once in awhile we would create someone who was pretty much omnipotent. Things got boring about then because how can you have a plot involving someone who can do anything? The imposition of constraints in that case made things fun. How much could you do with just the power to shoot sharp pencils out of your fingers?


Yesterday I had the neat juxtaposition of opportunities. In the morning I read Lehi. I was trying to apply his words to my role as a young men's advisor: And if ye say there is no law, ye shall also say there is no sin. If ye shall say there is no sin, ye shall also say there is no righteousness. And if there be no righteousness there be no happiness. And if there be no righteousness nor happiness there be no punishment nor misery. And if these things are not there is no God. And if there is no God we are not, neither the earth; for there could have been no creation of things, neither to act nor to be acted upon; wherefore, all things must have vanished way.

Here we have Lehi explaining that law is central to God's creation. If you remove the law you lose the creation. I couldn't help but try and apply the scripture to my calling and to other endeavors. And if ye say there are no expectations, ye shall also say there is no breaching of those expectations. If ye shall say there is no breaching of those expectations, ye shall also say there is no success. And if there be no success there be no happiness. And if there be no success nor happiness there be no failure nor misery. And if these things are not there is no young men's advisor. And if there is no young men's advisor there is no young men's program, for nothing has been created; wherefore, the whole program may as well have vanished way.

Anyway, what I was thinking during the study is that when you are in charge of a social program you are asked to perform an act of creation. You are trying to create something that is more than a bunch of people gathering together to waste time. And what I was learning was that creating or maintaining a social program requires the defining and maintaining of a code or standard of conduct. If there is no code or standard there is no society.

Or perhaps it all applies better to a game. If you don't define the rules of the game, if you don't define the ways in which you win or lose the game, you have no game. And so you create a game by defining rules or constraints. And goals.

The second opportunity I had yesterday was to grade some biophysics homeworks. The assignment was mostly on entropy. So energy is constant in our universe as far as we can tell. But entropy is always increasing. You can decrease the entropy in a part of the universe so long as you have a larger increase in entropy in the universe as a whole. Entropy prevents you from using energy to do work. Imagine that you are given a fixed amount of usable energy in an isolated system. Usable energy is called free energy. As time goes by the entropy in your system increases and you begin to run out of free energy. After enough time has gone by the entropy in your system is maximized and you can do nothing more. Even though your total energy has remained constant, you have lost the order in your system that made it physically possible to access that energy. You have lost your free energy.

So what does this have to do with the rest of the discussion? Because the way that you increase the entropy of a system is by removing constraints on that system. If you remove the constraints quickly you forfeit your chance to do work with the free energy that used to be present. A certain amount of free energy is lost. Forever. To the whole universe. For example, if you have a box of air there is a pressure on each of the walls. You can use that pressure to push something. If instead you poke a hole in the wall of the box and let the gas escape you allow each particle to follow a less constrained trajectory. The particles will escape and you will lose your pressure having done no work. Your free energy is gone.

Task 2 week 3: the GUI updates immediately!

Got the pitch detector running as a thread. Found out how to update the GUI from that thread. So now I actually get real time feedback as I sing from the GUI. It's pretty cool! The main problem now from a user's standpoint may be that the thing is too fast. When I take a breath or when my voice quavers so does the image. Do I want to be updated quite that fast on what I am doing? I think it might be more pleasing to see some continuity. It might be nicer to have a metronome that you can sing to. The frequencies yielded by the pitch detector during the time between two beats can be combined to say whether you were on target or not. It would also be nice to see a frequency history that accumulates over time, to sort of watch yourself sing (or play the violin or whatever).

It took 3 weeks to figure out how to update the GUI from another thread, working on it about an hour a day. To do it again would only take a couple of minutes.

This all goes to show once again that what we are doing right now isn't writing a program so much as learning how to program. I learned about threads. I learned about Swing and about the NetBeans IDE for writing Swing GUIs. It may be that from a global economic standpoint we are wasting time. Plenty of people know how to do all of these things right? Why not have one of them build the program and have us focus on the things that we do well? But it's neat to learn this stuff. And fun. And I think that we will eventually get where we want to go as long as we stick with it.

Anyway, there is a lot to learn and this could be a long term project. But for now it is time to celebrate: we have a working pitch detector that updates the user in real time on what their voice is doing. Cool!

Tasks

1. Pitch Detector. How about one that a piano tuner would want?
2. Sight Reader. You can enter the melody by hand or have the program generate (not necessarily melodic) tunes.
   

Lobo Mind Loan

This semester the number of graduate students who decided to come here was considerably higher than the expected number. The Department is short on the funds to support them all like it promised to. All that leads me to think again about something that I was strongly considering initiating last February. Here it is:

Last August Mark, an excellent student, graduated from my group. He was offered a few different and interesting jobs. One of them was a short term job with high pay. I think it was something like 8 months and 80 k. It wasn't his first choice because it didn't provide a lot of security.

But I couldn't help but guess at the reasons for the odd job offer. Why the high pay and short duration? Here is my first guess: they wanted a job done but they didn't want an employee. Mark had a very specific expertise that could help this company improve their products. If he had accepted they could have extracted the valuable knowledge without acquiring a long term liability. My second guess is that they actually do want more quality employees, but that they don't know a good way to find out if you will be one without having you work for them for a little while.

Now I want to ask a question: was Mark very much more valuable the semester after he graduated than he was the semester before? I think that the answer is no. Only somewhat more valuable. But before he graduated he was probably earning about $1,200 per month rather than $10,000 per month.

Mark isn't alone in having a very specialized and possibly quite valuable expertise. Ideally a PhD student comes to know one specific topic better than anyone else in the world. Not every student achieves that ideal but I believe that a fair portion of them do.

Right now PhD students at UNM are supported on either TA-ships or RA-ships. Both become great opportunities to learn to do research and to learn to teach. It's a great system, especially for training up future teachers and researchers for the academic world. There is one weakness: you can get a little cloistered. You don't get to learn how the world works. Especially how the other large research sectors, government and industry work. And it is hard to know if at the end you will be prepared to work in either. Or even if you would like to work in either. The pay is also pretty low if you want to raise a family and live a normal life.

Anyway, here is what one might do:

• Gather a list of companies and the technical problems they would like solved and the kind of people they would like to recruit

• Gather a list of upper-level graduate students and their greatest strengths and strongest interests

• Try to pair up the two. The companies would put in 30 k for 6 months. No taxes or paperwork beyond the 30k. The company doing the work takes a commission of 10%. The rest of the money goes to paying a stipend, paying tuition, paying taxes, and so on.

Companies benefit from the chance to take advantage of specific expertise, and from the chance to try out perspective employees in an inexpensive way.

Students benefit by having the chance to learn a little about the real world and by having a temporary increase in funds. They can also form job leads for the future.

Professors benefit because they can fund more students in a more exciting fashion.

Professors and industry benefit by forming stronger ties with industry and having any cross pollination that can come from such ties.

UNM benefits because it will become known as the place to go to graduate school if you want to come out with an understanding of the technical work place.

Albuquerque benefits because it can have the chance to keep a larger portion of it's quality graduate students in the area.

The University benefits as it becomes known as the best place to come to graduate school if you would like to go into industry down the road and as it becomes able to fund more graduate students than it would be able to take on otherwise.

What do you think?