a wolf angel is not a good angel

Well, school. I’ve managed a week of it, and it’s tiring, in general. I understand almost everything, either because I know the word, it’s the same as in English, or I can get it from context. (I was immensely proud when I finally figured out that “lissage” means “smoothing”.)

I am debating taking the two courses — machine learning and “AI” — on top of the program courses. I am not sure if they will let me do that, though. Or if it’s at all smart. There is another course in the basics of machine learning next semester, which I suppose I could do instead. I can’t figure out what I would like to do. Or what I should do. Or if the machine learning course is interesting (the “AI” one is. I still don’t understand why it’s called AI, though). Or if I’m even allowed to take the other machine learning course next semester. I am sure of nothing. I ought to email about this.

I’m just not excited, or even particularly interested. I am not sure if my required courses will be easy (which I suspect they will, but maybe I’m wrong: I have in the past been wrong about things. Yes! Really!). I am sure that the machine learning class would be *useful*, though not as useful as the “AI” course. The class is huge — 70 people, all the math.finance group and the bioinformatics — and the prof seems to be . . . well-respected in the field, though I wasn’t too impressed with the first lecture.

The biggest plus about doing both of these courses now is that I could then take one more course and be done by May. Then I can’t do a stage, which is the biggest minus. It’s hard to tell which will matter, since I don’t know if there will be relevant stages — and I do, after all, have a job. Equally I could take one course this semester, one next, start working and then take one course in the fall while I continue to work fulltime.

It’s hard because of my lack of excitement; it’s hard because I’m not entirely sure what will matter. Also of course I am worried that my lack of programming skills will make taking two graduate cs courses (as well as two other courses) difficult at best.

I just don’t know.

Wow. So, I get home last night around 7ish, and I guess I pretty much went straight to sleep. I feel much better now. I didn’t realise I was that tired. I guess I did realise it, but not totally.

Yesterday we did a “why are we all taking this program” thing. When I answered, he looked at me oddly and asked if I wanted to do research or go into industry. Both, really, but in industry, thanks. I just said industry, though.

Oh well. I’m debating between two classes. I think I have a while where I can change classes — who the hell knows, you can’t do any of it online or on the phone, so I’ll be speaking to the secretary to find out when I need to tell her by — so I’m debating between two classes, the one that’s interesting and the one that’s convenient. Watching my French is fun, because there are some people whose every word I understand (or can figure out from context) and others — I think the non-native speakers — who sometimes say things I cannot parse into words. My production is much better than I had feared it might be.

The two courses are the machine learning one and the so-called AI course. I call it so-called, because the title is just AI, but the content is all about various forms of natural language processing. It’s got bunches of linguists in with the computer scientists, too. It’s smaller — 20 people instead of 60 — and the professor wasn’t actively trying to get people to agree to dump the course. Both would be useful, but I really truly cannot take both. I *could*, I guess, but I’m trying not to kill myself. I’m supposed to work 20h/week on top of school.

One looks like much more fun, but it would make my schedule much uglier. Who knows. I can’t really take both, because between the two of them, they overlap with a lab. I have one class left of each before the overlap becomes a problem, so maybe by then I will have decided.

The other class I went to yesterday, we ended up watching part of an old BBC program on the history of computing. I like the BBC, but I rather felt for the people in the class who don’t speak a word of English. (Quite a number of international students, from France, Sudan, Cameroon, and various parts of the French-speaking Middle East.) Then I started to feel for me, because he kept pausing and translating.

I have no real conclusions I’ve drawn, other than the fact that I am entirely not excited about this (except possibly that “AI” course; shut up about the fact that it’s 100% clear I should be taking this course, I’m undecided). Michelle, you are right, because whatever conclusion you’ve drawn, not only have I also come to that same conclusion but I’ve also come to the OPPOSITE conclusion. So you will always be wrong! And also right! (Also: it was glass fusing; the class is over; I am going to decide where to buy my kiln this weekend, in theory.)

Breakfast, I guess. We like breakfast, and coffee. Then I will set up books for today, get dressed, go to the “AI” class and think. Maybe even get my student ID. Thinkthink. Figure out why I’m so reluctant to choose the obviously more intelligent course (for me — he described one of the (big) homeworks, and I thought “oh, fun”, I can’t imagine why I’m feeling at all torn). Coffee.

Well. Yeah. The excitement of the first day of a programming course. I swear you were once required to have done some before entering this course. Not really, I guess. My French seems to be up to the challenge, vaguely. I can usually figure out a word based on context and educated guessing. Hey, did you know that the word for spam in (Quebec) French is pourriel? Isn’t that a great word (courriel = email; poubelle = trash)? Pourriel. It’s fun to say.

I now know that:

• it’s called “une programme helloworld”;
• this can sound strangely like saying L O L out loud, if you have the right accent; and
• in a weird twist, you only print out “Bonjour”.

I didn’t write the program because they haven’t actually created a username for me (or lots of other people). They also have the world’s strangest temporary password creation rules. Your password is: nnffamdd, where nn is the first two letters of your last name, ff of your first name, a is the last number of your year of birth, m is the letter corresponding to the month of your birth, uppercase for men, lowercase for women, and dd is the date of your birth. I guarantee I will remember this method of password creation forever, because it’s so useless, and my brain only stores useless stuff.

Parking there sucks, but I was too tired to bike (all the way uphill) this morning. Oddly, despite there being big signs all over saying no parking Wednesday, 9-10, March 1 to Dec 1, there was parking. I parked there: yay! No ticket! And if you get there around 9, there are some spots. So this should be okay in the winter, when it’ll be way too dangerous to bike.

I managed to go to Duc de Lorraine for a croissanty lunch. Mmmm. Tomorrow is other required course, whatever it is, and my machine learning one, which should be interesting. Now I will go and lie down because listening to another language for hours is really tiring. Or I slept only maybe 7 hours last — oh, forget it, why should I bother to make excuses? I am always tired. But so far . . . not too much, yet.

I’m amazed at how *poorly* this whole program has been organised. The webpage uses frames — frames! Big honking obvious hideous frames! — and they don’t really bother about things like avoiding course conflicts.

Don’t get me started.

I will hold my breath and see what happens tomorrow. For the record: 20 people, 4 women; 3 or 4 black (all men); no one Asian (that I recall). I have no idea what this means. I’m not sure if I’m surprised about the balance, either. I am happy about the size.

Altogether I am mostly tired at the whole thing. On the other hand, there was only one word I didn’t know (octroyer, which means to grant or bestow).

I’m working up to rewriting something, but I felt the first draft wasn’t well-written (I lost it, I didn’t actually decide it was too badly written for this blog: my standards are appallingly low here), and this one is much worse. Also I haven’t finished it, but need to take a break.

The best line I’ve read today:

What I can’t get behind is their weird romanticization of the grad-school mindset, especially when humanities programs are already bursting with the next generation of grumpy, disillusioned bloggers.

And the title of the post is from my absolute favourite Barenaked Ladies song.

Tomorrow is the day of reckoning. Or of finding out what’s going to happen for the next 12 months, anyhow. I’m exhausted already, but figure I can’t go to sleep yet. Dead Like Me is on at 9, anyways, and I want to find out what that wad of cash in the last episode was all about. It’s hard because I’ve missed more shows than I’ve seen.

I’m not sure what else to say about this. I guess nothing, not until I find out. I have no idea what I’m thinking or feeling about this, but I must be nervous, since I (literally) was up all night, and just napped very briefly today. Not that I feel nervous. Tired. All my answers tomorrow.

But!

When I napped, Matilda slept on the bed with me. Success! Demon duck, your powers are weak.

I’ve been having conversations with my sister; she’s going to start at Concordia in a week, or whenever classes start. Wednesday? Let’s say it’s Wednesday.

Because her marks at Cegep have been abysmal, she couldn’t get in as a mature student; it’s hard to prove something’s changed when you haven’t done anything different in ever. And I think she’s one of those people who probably shouldn’t go to university (except, perhaps, for a BSW); she has some incredible skills, there are things she could do that I never could. But she should not be trying to study psychology.

I often wonder why the craziest-in-a-bad-way people I know are always the people who study psychology. (Sorry, psychologists.)

I try, sometimes, to explain to her why I didn’t continue on for my PhD. The job situation — lack of jobs, number of 1-year jobs, moving. I said I wasn’t interested in playing a lottery with my life. She told me I was being dramatic.

Of course I wasn’t. In many ways, that was EXACTLY what I would have done. And had I been happier in my program, had I not been so terrified, always, of not having money, had I not despised with every fiber of my being the place where I was living . . . but there weren’t enough upsides for the risk I felt I was taking. And, in being so unhappy, I started to hate linguistics. I don’t, now.

I do regret it, a bit. But not really. I regret that I will not be able to do what I think (still) I would have loved to. But I would regret having given so much up even more. I have a job that’s about to become significantly more interesting. My boss really actually thinks well of me. I’m planning to buy a house within the year. I feel like I’m myself here.

These aren’t the things I told her, though they’re true. She doesn’t understand. She doesn’t understand how the world works. She doesn’t get balancing wants, where choosing some dreams requires you to let go of others.

She wants a new, expensive car. She has nowhere to go in it, and we’re in a city with great public transportation. But she refuses to take it.

She wants to be sure the field she goes into gets her money. She was so angry I told her I didn’t think she should be going back to school. She was so angry I told her I didn’t think she’d ever make it as a clinical psychologist. She wouldn’t; she could never get into the programs. She didn’t want to go into social work: it doesn’t pay enough. She expects a job starting at maybe 60,000, maybe more.

The classes she’d like to take are closed to her, but she refuses to speak to the professors to see about getting a space (there is room, but only for BA/BSc students). That would be too much like sucking up.

Right now she likes the idea of a BSW. Okay. And she’s not really listening when I try to tell her it would take at least two years to get to the point where she could transfer. She’s not listening when I tell her that volunteering at lots of different places isn’t the goal, showing follow-through & consistency is.

There are no words for how dysfunctional she is, and I can’t explain it. I can’t describe how incredibly frustrating she gets to be. Which is why no one believes me. She’s crazy. I should be more sympathetic, and now she really does seem to be trying — but it’s a new school year, we’re all so good-intentioned now, let’s see how she does in October, how much she tries when it’s cold and miserable and November. I don’t believe in her, really; I think her trying is misguided. Though this is so much more sensible than her thing about working in Hollywood, which she only just let go of.

Still. She figures she’ll walk up and get a job, when she asks people to order for her in restaurants. She figures she’ll just walk into everything working out, no real effort, no changes, no extra time because she has so many years of fucking up under her belt.

How do you explain how unrealistic that is? How can you explain to someone what the world is, when their opinion of the world is what they see on tv?

And time continues to pass, and I don’t know what I’ll be doing in two weeks from now. I assume I’ll do the whole computer programming and French in one easy step thing, but since no one ever got back in touch with me and graphics appears to be the only course I can take . . . But then I’ve not bothered to try emailing again, or phoning. There’s a meeting in a week and a half, at which point I assume they will explain to us what the course timing means.

On the horizon, I might have a contact at a search engine co, which might allow me to work from afar. Might. I could quite possibly continue working where I am now, except for the part where I really don’t want to, long-run. And of course one of the good things about this program is that it’s in touch with the community in Montreal, and they point out who the good programmers are. No reason I can’t be one. (Though I admit I will need to get past the being an anglophone issue, and definitely not mention the Jewish bit. The latter is probably the bigger problem, sadly; my French is more than good enough.)

Mostly I’m feeling confused. And so tired of the whole school thing. I think it’s a good plan — it’s 8 months, then a paid stage, not much, given how much school I’ve already done — but still. I’d like to have a normal ordinary job. I keep telling myself this will get me to where I want to be. And it’s true. But.

Things need to start. I have a meeting with my boss enxt Friday to discuss where I am going.

I haven’t slept well. Once I caught up on my sleep, I started finding it impossible to go to sleep, I’ve been sleeping badly. I don’t know why. Tonight I am having hot chocolate, in the faint hope that it will help. If not, well, it’s chocolate.

All the cool kids are blogging it! I must be cool, too. (I tried to provide a bunch of trackbacks, but gave up, eventually.)

There are a few questions which seem to be raised about identity in blogging.

Do we want academic credentials to matter in blogs? I don’t think so. You can value your readings in whatever way you like, of course, but it’s odd to decide an article (in the non-internet context) is better or worse based on if the person who wrote it is tenured, tenure track, a student, etc. I believe most people would judge a given article based on its merits.

As I mentioned, I am entirely incapable of judging an academic history, or English, paper on its merits. I can say whether it’s well written, whether the internal argument holds up, but I can’t place it within a context of the field.

I can, however, determine whether an article on blogging knows about blogs; it’s even easier for me to determine this about a post about blogging. This has nothing to do with credentials; when someone talks about blogs as diaries, I know they’re missing the point, even if they’re tenured. I am likely to give more leeway to someone I read more often.

Academic credentials can be useful things. But complete non-academics can say perfectly intelligent things about blogging, and discounting them because they were written by non-academics is the worst kind of snobbery. Lots of non-academics blog about how work impacts their life; this is not considered odd. Nor is it considered odd when they do it pseudonymously. Academia is much more of an identity than other jobs: how it has influenced your sense of self is relevant. And it’s not all that important to know if the academic has studied art history or medieval literature — many of the results will be similar.

Otherwise, though, I have a lot of respect for anonymity on the web. Anonymous bloggers are doing something very pure, building a reputation on the strength of their words alone, and not trading on the false authority of their employing institution or their degree.

PZ Myers said this, but I think he’s wrong. I think everyone builds a reputation on the strength of their words, online. I do not know of anyone who read blogs based on institutions or degrees.

I don’t think people who use real names automatically have significantly more credibility, and certainly a longstanding pseudonym is entirely credible (to me): no one puts that much effort in order to dump it. (His post did discuss good points about why truly academic posts are better off nymed.)

At the beginning, a pseudonym is probably somewhat less credible. But I’ve used this one for, what, 13 months? Even if I started calling myself something else (which would be my real first name, if any change), I would keep the name of the blog (which I like, despite the fact that lots of people link me as “wolf angel”, and not by my blog name — I find the nick to be problematic in a few ways, something I didn’t think of until too late). I could not dump this identity and create a new one without all the people in this community figuring it out (if they found my new blog). I could, of course, leave this community entirely, but I’ve built up some measure of relationships with people here. I own my words as much as I have invested in this blog, the comments I’ve made, etc.

Blogs are the new! exciting! internet! media!, but there’s confusion about some of the realities of it (which will, I assume, sort themselves out in time) and what the underlying assumptions should be. But it is certainly not like academia, and credentials of that sort aren’t relevant. The assumption that people look at them is pervasive — people are careful to make it clear how very good their unnamed schools are, for instance, or how they are respected in the field, really (I do this, I know) — but I think it’s in ways a holdover from academia. (It is, of course, relevant when talking about the job market.)

Another basic assumption is (as has been pointed out) that a real name is the automatic choice, while a pseudonym needs to be explained. But I can’t be the only person to remember the initial “never ever give your real name out online” stories. Why not stick to that?

Real names aren’t permanent, anyhow — marriage, divorce? One of the professors I knew changed her name at some point (I do not know if this was on marriage or on divorce). Post name-change, she didn’t cite her earlier work, with her other name, as is fairly common, in a talk. Of course someone asked why she hadn’t cited this work that was on many of the same topics.

And a real name is no proof of truthfulness. I can’t know if “Jaime Anderson” is really truly Jaime Anderson — you can, of course, fake a CV, if it’s not an academic one (as lots of people writing blogs aren’t academics) — and I don’t know if the posts are true or fictionalised truth or just plain fiction, written as truth.

People agree that owning your words is important; blogging is discourse, and it’s important to own your words in a discourse. But the question of how to own words is open. A pseudonym isn’t license to ignore other people; but a real name isn’t license to treat people with pseudonyms as fake or secondclass.

Dorothea mentioned that using a blog helped to create her sense of self; danah boyd uses her blog to collapse her social identities. I’m not sure if the former necessarily requires a real name. The latter certainly does. But for people who are super stable, just like me! (hah), this isn’t necessary. I don’t actually know why I blog, and perhaps it would be good to figure it out, but I don’t use my posts here to figure out who I am, in general. Sometimes I do, particularly when I am depressed, but I also talk to friends about the same issues, and use that, too, etc. Blogs can be useful for focussing parts that aren’t, otherwise, or figuring out what kinds of identities fit. Or what kind of writing fits.

I have not told friends about this place; I don’t think I intend to. I don’t want them to find out things about me from reading the internet, and I don’t want to have to wait to write about things until I can talk to my friends. (Some people I know are, I am sure, reading this already. That’s fine. I can pretend they’re not.)

But there are a number of ways that blogs can help with a sense of self; some require nymity, some pseudonymity, and some will depend on the person. It also depends what you’re blogging about. I understand why bitchphd might not want to have her real name associated with her discussion of her open relationship, and why you might not want a possible employer to know about your history of depression. On the other hand, if your “personal” blog talks about going on vacation, losing weight, and playing with your children, then you don’t necessarily need to be pseudonymous. Choosing what people see about you when they google your name because they’re curious what their grade 7 class is up to is not a bad idea.

I sometimes wonder — a bit unfairly — if the people who are so vehemently against other people’s choices (in blogging with names, or anything to do with pregnancy, adoption, parenting, where to live, etc) are on some level unsure of their own choices, or feel they made the wrong ones and need to defend them.

I hate Powerpoint. Let me be clear. I have once — once! — seen a presentation where Powerpoint added to the presentation; this was one of the major presentations at BUCLD one year. Many many many others used Powerpoint, unfortunately.

The one professor I had in undergrad who liked using Powerpoint didn’t use them for the class I took, which is good, because he liked to use blue fonts on black backgrounds. (Why?) Only one professor in grad school used them — I still don’t know why; they didn’t add anything to the presentation. Really, watching animated OT tableaux doesn’t actually help make them more understandable. It might have been helpful for earlier discussions, but maybe not. Handouts are better.

When I worked at ETS last summer, we had lots of Powerpoint presentations. Never necessary. Using computers sometimes was, but not Powerpoint, which usually lost a great deal of info. (There’s an article I have somewhere about why Powerpoint is almost information-free.)

The linguistics conferences I have been to have had very few Powerpoints, and very few “Here’s an article and let me read it” talks. (Of a few I can remember offhand, all were by tenured professors, and one was very good — it was written to be read — and most were terrible.)

The way I’ve experienced conferences has been unlike the way Timothy Burke seems to have. There are “neat facts” in linguistics, which stand apart from the theory you look at them in. Facts need some interpretation, and a talk that just gave a fact wouldn’t be a success, but they can stand on their own in a way.

I use bullet points, especially for conclusions. They’re useful. I always have handouts, which are essentially a bunch of things I could put up, but don’t. This is pretty standard.

Still, Powerpoint isn’t going to work for harder social science, either, because it’s so limited in what you can present on a page.