Serial Entrepreneur Damon Horowitz Says “Quit Your Tech Job and Get a Ph.D. in the Humanities”

in Education, Google, Philosophy, Technology | August 7th, 2012

Damon Horowitz, a phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor and “ser­i­al entre­pre­neur,” recent­ly joined Google as an In-House Philosopher/Director of Engi­neer­ing. Pri­or to his work at Google, Horowitz co-found­ed Aard­vark, Per­spec­ta, and a num­ber of oth­er tech com­pa­nies. In this talk at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty’s 2011 Bib­lioTech con­fer­ence on “Human Expe­ri­ence,”  Horowitz explains why he left a high­ly-paid tech career, in which he sought the keys to arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, to pur­sue a Ph.D. in Phi­los­o­phy at Stan­ford (the text of the talk is avail­able here).

Horowitz offers fel­low techies a for­mi­da­ble chal­lenge, but a worth­while one. In say­ing so, I must con­fess a bias: As a stu­dent and teacher of the human­i­ties, I have watched with some dis­may as the cul­ture becomes increas­ing­ly dom­i­nat­ed by tech­ni­cians who often ignore or dis­miss press­ing philo­soph­i­cal and eth­i­cal prob­lems in their quest to build a bet­ter world. It is grat­i­fy­ing to hear from some­one who rec­og­nized this issue by (tem­porar­i­ly) giv­ing up what he admits was a great deal of pow­er and soci­etal priv­i­lege and head­ed back to the class­room.

Horowitz describes his intel­lec­tu­al jour­ney from “tech­nol­o­gist” to philoso­pher with pas­sion and can­dor, and con­cludes that as a result of his aca­d­e­m­ic inquiry, he “no longer looks for machines to solve all of our prob­lems for us,” and no longer assumes that he knows what’s best for his users. This kind of humil­i­ty and intel­lec­tu­al flex­i­bil­i­ty is, ide­al­ly, the out­come of a high­er degree in the human­i­ties, and Horowitz uses his own tri­als to make a case for bet­ter crit­i­cal think­ing, for a “human­is­tic per­spec­tive,” in the tech sec­tor and else­where. For exam­ples, see Horow­itz’s TED talks on a “moral oper­at­ing sys­tem” and “phi­los­o­phy in prison.” Com­pli­cat­ing Google’s well-known, unof­fi­cial slo­gan “don’t be evil,” Horowitz, draw­ing on Han­nah Arendt, believes that most of the evil in the world comes not from bad inten­tions but from “not think­ing.”

In a relat­ed Stan­ford talk (above) from the same sem­i­nar, Maris­sa May­er, for­mer Vice Pres­i­dent of Con­sumer Prod­ucts at Google, dis­cuss­es how she incor­po­rat­ed the human­i­ties into prod­uct inno­va­tion at Google. The first female engi­neer at Google (and its youngest exec­u­tive at the time of this talk), she has made head­lines recent­ly, becom­ing the new CEO of Yahoo.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Illus­trat­ed Guide to a Ph.D.

The Ph.D. Grind: Philip J. Guo’s Free Mem­oir Offers An Insider’s Look at Doc­tor­al Study

Free Online Busi­ness Cours­es

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

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Total Noob to Learning Online? P2PU’s Peer-to-Peer Courses Hold Your Hand

in Education, Online Courses | July 23rd, 2012

Those of us inter­est­ed in explor­ing the myr­i­ad free cours­es avail­able online will appre­ci­ate the work being done at P2PU. It’s per­haps a fun­ny name when you first say it out loud, but P2PU’s approach and orig­i­nal learn­ing con­tent are for real.

You may have guessed what the name stands for: peer to peer uni­ver­si­ty. P2PU’s mod­el is inno­v­a­tive. Their idea is that tak­ing an online course should be more like learn­ing on the job than tak­ing a tra­di­tion­al class. Their approach encour­ages peo­ple to work togeth­er on projects—whether learn­ing com­put­ing pro­gram­ming or some­thing else—and to assess one another’s work with con­struc­tive feed­back.

Users can design their own cours­es with help from P2PU. Course design is bro­ken down into dis­crete steps and course con­tent is vet­ted by peer users and P2PU staff.

Cours­es are hands-on and super var­ied. One course lets users take a hack at design­ing their own big game—the kind that gets adults out in the streets defend­ing a foun­tain or hid­ing trea­sures under bus stop bench­es. Anoth­er cours­es lays out the steps for mak­ing a music video. Fif­teen oth­er peo­ple are already tak­ing the chal­lenge. Two have com­plet­ed it and four men­tors have offered their help.

One of the most pop­u­lar cours­es is about writ­ing for the web. The com­ments sec­tions for each step are live­ly and filled with links to real blogs. Par­tic­i­pants in this course share their writ­ing and opin­ions about what makes for good web writ­ing.

One of the site’s oth­er well-sub­scribed cours­es teach­es par­tic­i­pants how to pro­gram using the Twit­ter API. P2PU breaks the chal­lenge down into nine steps (the first of which is to intro­duce your­self to oth­ers already tak­ing the course). Par­tic­i­pants pro­ceed at their own pace and can reach out for help to oth­er stu­dents, men­tors and P2PU staff along the way.

Not all of the cours­es focus on new tech­nolo­gies. Always use­ful and nev­er out-of-date, this course is a per­fect fit for num­ber noobs.

You can find a list of P2Pu’s new cours­es here. And while you’ve got your think­ing cap on, don’t for­get our big list of 500 Free Online Cours­es.

Kate Rix is an Oak­land-based free­lance writer. See more of her work at .

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The Ph.D. Grind: Philip J. Guo’s Free Memoir Offers An Insider’s Look at Doctoral Study

in e-books, Education | July 5th, 2012

Recent­ly, a video circulated—one of those weird Xtra­nor­mal cre­ations that set text to stilt­ed ani­ma­tion and robot­ic voices—entitled “So you want to get a Ph.D. in human­i­ties.” It spawned a num­ber of imi­ta­tions, in oth­er dis­ci­plines, of a sim­i­lar scenario—a world-weary pro­fes­sor chip­ping away at a star­ry-eyed undergraduate’s naïve illu­sions about the world of acad­e­mia. For a week or so, this meme had some of us wiz­ened, griz­zled doc­tor­al stu­dents laugh­ing through our tears while we hunched over key­boards and suf­fered through carpel tun­nel syn­drome and irrel­e­vance. In his free and down­load­able mem­oir, The Ph.D. Grind, author Philip J. Guo points out that such dis­par­age­ment can serve a purpose—as com­mis­er­a­tion for dis­tressed insiders—but it hard­ly helps less jad­ed or expe­ri­enced stu­dents and can be mis­lead­ing and disin­gen­u­ous.

In his pref­ace, Guo promis­es to give clear-eyed advice, avoid too much geek-speak, and steer clear of “bit­ter whin­ing.” Guo is an accom­plished engi­neer at Google who received his Mas­ters from MIT and his Ph.D. in Com­put­er Sci­ence from Stan­ford. His memoir—written imme­di­ate­ly after he fin­ished his degree and there­fore free, he claims, of what he calls “selec­tive hindsight”—documents his expe­ri­ences as a doc­tor­al stu­dent over the course of six years. He offers the book as a prac­ti­cal man­u­al for a vari­ety of read­ers, includ­ing under­grad­u­ates, cur­rent Ph.D. stu­dents, pro­fes­sors and poten­tial employ­ers of Ph.D.s, and any­one gen­uine­ly curi­ous about the nature of aca­d­e­m­ic research.

The most imme­di­ate­ly help­ful part of the book is the Epi­logue, which func­tions as a set of con­clu­sions in which Guo lays out twen­ty of the most mem­o­rable lessons he learned dur­ing the years he nar­rates in the book.  It’s all good advice and well worth read­ing his fuller expla­na­tion of each one. Here’s the short ver­sion of Guo’s “twen­ty lessons”:

  1. Results trump inten­tions
  2. Out­puts trump inputs
  3. Find rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion
  4. Cre­ate lucky oppor­tu­ni­ties
  5. Play the game
  6. Lead from below
  7. Pro­fes­sors are human
  8. Be well-liked
  9. Pay some dues
  10. Reject bad defaults
  11. Know when to quit
  12. Recov­er from fail­ures
  13. Ally with insid­ers
  14. Give many talks
  15. Sell, sell, sell
  16. Gen­er­ous­ly pro­vide help
  17. Ask for help
  18. Express true grat­i­tude
  19. Ideas beget ideas
  20. Grind hard and smart

Notice that none of these relate direct­ly to the arcana of Ph.D.-level com­put­er sci­ence. While Guo cer­tain­ly achieved a high degree of mas­tery in his field, his mem­oir demon­strates that, despite the inten­sive spe­cial­iza­tion of doc­tor­al work and the pre­car­i­ous posi­tion of aca­d­e­m­ic pro­fes­sion­als in the cur­rent job mar­ket, com­plet­ing a Ph.D. has many intan­gi­ble ben­e­fits that well exceed the nar­row goal of tenure-track employ­ment. The full-text of Guo’s book is avail­able in PDF here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Illus­trat­ed Guide to a PhD

500 Free Cours­es from Great Uni­ver­si­ties

Josh Jones is cur­rent­ly a doc­tor­al stu­dent in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

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Found: Lost Great Depression Photos Capturing Hard Times on Farms, and in Town

in Education, History, Life, Photography | June 13th, 2012

Dur­ing the Great Depres­sion, the Farm Secu­ri­ty Admin­is­tra­tion took on the task of “intro­duc­ing Amer­i­ca to Amer­i­cans” through pho­tog­ra­phy. The FSA hired Dorothea Lange, Walk­er Evans, Gor­don Parks and oth­er artists to cap­ture images of ordi­nary Amer­i­cans, specif­i­cal­ly poor farm­ers.

Some of the images are now icon­ic, notably Lange’s image of a des­ti­tute migrant moth­er of sev­en. That image and most oth­ers are cat­a­loged in the col­lec­tions of the Library of Con­gress, but some lan­guished and were for­got­ten. Oth­ers end­ed up in gen­er­al cir­cu­la­tion, so that, in the­o­ry, any­one with a library card could check out an orig­i­nal print.

Recent­ly a pho­tog­ra­phy cura­tor with the New York Pub­lic Library tracked down the miss­ing images—some 1,000 of them—and cre­at­ed a spe­cial online archive where they can final­ly be seen.

Many depict rur­al life: A 91-year-old woman sits in front of her North Car­oli­na cab­in. A work­er takes a break from carv­ing a dirt road into the New Mex­i­co land­scape. A black man in black face pre­pares to per­form in a trav­el­ing med­i­cine show. The chil­dren of migrant fruit pick­ers in Michi­gan sit for­lorn­ly on a truck.

But not all the pho­tographs doc­u­ment the plight of rur­al Amer­i­ca. Some of the col­lec­tion’s most pow­er­ful images are of Amer­i­cans strug­gling in cities. Here two young girls play out­side in a Bal­ti­more slum. Three peo­ple sit out­doors on a Sun­day in New Orleans. And then we cap­ture a scene on the Low­er East Side of New York City.

Not sur­pris­ing­ly Dorothea Lange’s work is among the strongest in this col­lec­tion. One of the most pow­er­ful images comes sev­er­al pages into her work’s archive, so be sure to click through. The sto­ry behind “From Texas ten­ant farmer to Cal­i­for­nia fruit tramp” (the first image above) sums up the era: “1927 made $7000 in cot­ton. 1928 broke even. 1929 went in the hole. 1930 went in still deep­er. 1931 lost every­thing. 1932 hit the road.”

Kate Rix is an Oak­land-based writer. See more of her work at .

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What Is a Flame?: The First Prize-Winner at Alan Alda’s Science Video Competition

in Animation, Education, K-12, Video - Science | June 8th, 2012

If an eleven year old child asked you to explain what a flame was, what would you say? When Alan Alda was 11 and posed the ques­tion, his teacher replied, “Oxy­da­tion.”

Unsat­is­fied and still curi­ous, Alda went on to help cre­ate the Cen­ter for Com­mu­ni­cat­ing Sci­ence at Stony Brook Uni­ver­si­ty. This year the Cen­ter issued the Flame Chal­lenge, invit­ing all com­ers to take a stab at explain­ing what a flame is. The only require­ment: Make your expla­na­tion clear, and inter­est­ing, to an 11-year-old.

Sci­en­tists from all over the world sent in entries – some were just one sen­tence (one actu­al­ly stat­ed, “A flame is oxi­da­tion.” Come on!). Anoth­er was a 37-page writ­ten expla­na­tion. After judg­ing the entries (all of which were pre-screened by sci­en­tists for accu­ra­cy), class­rooms of 11-year-olds declared a win­ner: an ani­mat­ed video by Ben Ames, a doc­tor­al stu­dent in quan­tum optics.

In the sev­en-and-a-half minute video, the con­ge­nial voice of a sci­en­tist (Ames) explains a flame to a beard­ed man chained in hell.

“See that fire over there?” Ames asks. “Have you ever real­ly won­dered what the flames are from that fire? I mean look at all those col­ors!”

He goes on charm­ing­ly to describe the process, with­out avoid­ing big words that kids actu­al­ly seem to love: when atoms (car­bon and hydro­gen) react to heat and change form, that’s pyrol­y­sis. That chem­i­cal reac­tion radi­ates light: chemi­lu­mi­nes­cence. Then the changed car­bon and hydro­gen inter­act with oxy­gen and that’s—you guessed it—oxi­da­tion.

But 11-year-olds love music too, right? Ames wraps it up with a song:

The fuel los­es mass, it turns to gas

Before the next change through, some atoms shine blue

When the process is com­plete, it gives off heat

Extra car­bon will glow—red, orange, yel­low.

Kate Rix is an Oak­land-based edu­ca­tion writer.

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Robert Penn Warren Archive Brings Early Civil Rights to Life

in Education, History, Law, Politics | June 5th, 2012

While an under­grad­u­ate at Van­der­bilt Uni­ver­si­ty in Ten­nessee, writer Robert Penn War­ren began writ­ing about the south and its tur­bu­lent racial his­to­ry. He trav­eled through­out the Unit­ed States and inter­viewed men and women involved with the Civ­il Rights Move­ment, record­ing each con­ver­sa­tion on a reel-to-reel tape recorder—a project that result­ed in the 1965 book Who Speaks for the Negro? This month, Van­der­bilt University’s Robert Penn War­ren Cen­ter for the Human­i­ties makes a full dig­i­tal record avail­able of Warren’s research for the book—an impres­sive and well-con­struct­ed col­lec­tion of inter­views with his­tor­i­cal fig­ures includ­ing Ralph Elli­son, James Bald­win and Mal­colm X. The rich­ness of the site is its con­nec­tive design. Each inter­view is tagged by top­ic, includ­ing a subject’s link to broad­er issues or to oth­er inter­vie­wees, mak­ing evi­dent through user expe­ri­ence the com­plex nature of the Civ­il Rights Move­ment. A search for the NAACP, for exam­ple, yields mul­ti­ple inter­views fea­tur­ing dif­fer­ent points of view on the organization’s for­ma­tion along with PDFs of orig­i­nal let­ters and the search­able text of news­pa­per arti­cles about ear­ly NAACP demon­stra­tions. But the site’s audio offer­ings are its most pow­er­ful assets.

The mate­r­i­al offers a potent por­trait of a his­tor­i­cal moment and is rich with ref­er­ences to pol­i­tics, art and spe­cif­ic con­flicts over inte­gra­tion. The group inter­views with uni­ver­si­ty stu­dents and pro­test­ers are worth a lis­ten, both for the con­tent and for the ear­ly 1960s group dynam­ics. When War­ren inter­views men and women togeth­er, men tend to speak first and at most length. But the views expressed are fas­ci­nat­ing, as in one case when a female sit-in par­tic­i­pant gives her opin­ion about assim­i­la­tion.

“My first reac­tion of course would be, think­ing of Socrates: Know thy­self. We do face the prob­lem of amal­ga­ma­tion into the whole of Amer­i­can life, being Amer­i­cans first, say, or being what I would like to term Negro Amer­i­cans or Black Amer­i­cans. I think that we as black men have an oblig­a­tion to know our­selves as black men and be proud of what we are, and con­tribute to Amer­i­ca what we could actu­al­ly offer to this cul­ture.”

Kate Rix is an Oak­land based writer. See more of her work at .

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Mal­colm X at Oxford, 1964

Great Cul­tur­al Icons Talk Civ­il Rights (1963)

MLK’s Omi­nous Final Speech

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Adam Savage (Host of Mythbusters) Tells Sarah Lawrence Grads to Think Broadly … and Don’t Work for Fools

in Education, Life | May 20th, 2012

Adam Sav­age was born in New York City, not far from Sarah Lawrence Col­lege, the lib­er­al arts school where he deliv­ered the com­mence­ment speech this past week­end. Sav­age nev­er went to Sarah Lawrence. Nor did he fin­ish his own degree at NYU. But he had plen­ty to tell the grad­u­at­ing class. On his own web site, Sav­age calls him­self “a mak­er of things.” As a kid, he made his own toys. As a young adult, he began exper­i­ment­ing with spe­cial effects for films, then served stints as an “ani­ma­tor, graph­ic design­er, rig­ger, stage and inte­ri­or design­er, car­pen­ter, scenic painter, welder, actor, writer, and tele­vi­sion host.” (Per­haps you have seen his pop­u­lar Dis­cov­ery Chan­nel show, Myth­busters.) In short, Sav­age is a “col­lec­tor of skills, a poly­math. How did he get this way? By cast­ing his intel­lec­tu­al net wide­ly and by con­tin­u­ing to learn through­out life — which is pret­ty much what we’re all about here. There’s a lot of good advice in this short, feel-good speech. Some of my favorite bits include:

“Don’t work for fools. It’s not worth it. Get­ting paid less to work for peo­ple you like and believe in is much bet­ter for you (and your career) in the long run.”

“Stay obsessed. That thing you can’t stop think­ing about? Keep indulging it. Obses­sion is the bet­ter part of suc­cess. You will be great at the things that you can’t not do.”

“F. Scott Fitzger­ald wrote The Great Gats­by and is one of our nation­al trea­sures. A true giant of writing.The sil­li­est thing he ever wrote is the quote, “There are no sec­ond acts in Amer­i­can lives.” This is insane. If there’s one thing that typ­i­fies the Amer­i­can expe­ri­ence it is that rein­ven­tion and rebirth are intrin­sic to it. Ray­mond Chan­dler did­n’t write a sin­gle word of any con­se­quence until his 40s. Julia Child learned to cook at 40! Clint East­wood direct­ed his first film at 41. Don’t be afraid to be a late bloomer. Repeat­ed­ly.”

Good thoughts, all of them. You can find the full tran­script here. H/T @opedr

More Com­mence­ment Speech­es: 

‘This Is Water’: Com­plete Audio of David Fos­ter Wallace’s Keny­on Grad­u­a­tion Speech (2005)

Conan O’Brien Kills It at Dart­mouth Grad­u­a­tion

J.K. Rowl­ing Tells Har­vard Grads Why Suc­cess Begins with Fail­ure

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Morgan Freeman Teaches Kids to Read in Vintage Electric Company Footage from 1971

in Education, K-12, Television | May 17th, 2012

Every actor has to start some­where, and Mor­gan Free­man (Dri­ving Miss Daisy, The Shaw­shank Redemp­tion, and Mil­lion Dol­lar Baby) could have done worse than join­ing the cast of The Elec­tric Com­pa­ny, the PBS chil­dren’s tele­vi­sion series that aired from 1971 to 1977. The orig­i­nal cast includ­ed Bill Cos­by and Rita Moreno (not bad com­pa­ny), and the ver­sa­tile Free­man played a series of char­ac­ters: “Mel Mounds,” “Vin­cent the Veg­etable Vam­pire,” and then, of course, Easy Read­er. If you’re of my gen­er­a­tion, you might rec­og­nize his theme song above. Below, we show you Easy Read­er (a pun on the 1969 film Easy Rid­er) in action, teach­ing kids to read in his effort­less­ly cool, hip­ster way. H/T Metafil­ter

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

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