A Brief History of John Baldessari

This five-minute video is a little story about the artist Baldessari, narrated by Tom Waits. His painting that is shown at 5:15 is one of my old favorites (ok so the video is six minutes. sue me).

Here's what I learned: Baldessari thinks every young artist should know three things.

1. Talent is cheap.
2. You have to be possessed, which you can't will.
3. Be at the right place at the right time.

The middle one is true of research as well. Tomorrow I walk across the stage at the Kohl Center, graduating with my Ph.D.! It definitely took many moments of being possessed to make it so far.

Maria Klawe from Harvey Mudd

My parents recently shared this newshour piece with me, an interview with Maria Klawe, president of Harvey Mudd.

My favorite part of the interview was her response to women who are considering careers in STEM fields. She said "My message is #1 try [computer science], because you won't know until you've tried it. Also if there are some male students who seem to know way more than you do, ignore it, because they tend to show it off more. Look for an instructor that is encouraging because that makes a huge difference."

Ira Glass on creative work

I think this little piece of advice on creative work is also applicable to those of us in research. Your work at first may not live up to your ambitions. Just keep working. Not all of your work will be good, in fact not all of it will be publishable. But write it all up and keep going.

It's the volume of work, the persistent effort, the 10,000 hours, that makes the difference between someone who tried and someone who succeeded.

Smartphone Holdouts

In December I bought my first smartphone-- a TMobile MyTouch, an android phone. So, though very recently I had a very hardy flip phone like the folks in this article, I can no longer say I'm a smart phone holdout.

Still, when I got my phone I decided not to get a data plan, and I think that was a smart move (ba-dum ching). When I'm on wifi I can check my email, and this was super helpful when I was traveling in Argentina and still needed to respond within a day or two to some work emails. Plus, if I'm away from wifi and desperate for information, I can always pay $2 per megabyte. But because of that barrier, in four months I haven't once used my phone for data on the cell network.

Another thing I did was enter a $300 bet with my family that I wouldn't use FB on my phone for 2 years. I can guarantee you I will not lose that bet!

My favorite parts of my phone so far are (a) using the hopstop app to get directions in NY, (b) using Ravid to send video messages to my friends and (c) Swype, the coolest touchscreen typing ever invented! Helpful! Fun!

But what I didn't want my smartphone to do was take away my fifteen minutes of daydreaming on the bus every day. I get to people watch and talk to my favorite bus friends, too. And I still read the poems posted, written by local highschoolers. Here's a recent favorite:

Tell a story
Take a chance
Dance around in your underpants
Do whatever you need to do
Listen to the voice inside of you.

-Brieann Robinson, Lafollette HS, Madison Wisconsin.

A Viral Video about Imaging

Ok I'm not sure if this video has gone truly viral yet, but at least two of my scientist friends posted it :)

About a week ago Nature.com posted this video about new research on imaging objects that are not in line-of-sight by using scattered light and an ultrafast camera. The researchers are from MIT, Harvard, and Rice University. So now if we can image hidden objects, what happens to the invisibility cloak?? :)

I watched the video yesterday and was excited to get into school and have access to the actual paper! It's fascinating what they've been able to do. Here are the parts of their "discussion" section which I find most interesting:

"Our reconstruction method assumes that light is only reflected once by a discrete surface on the hidden object without inter-reflections within the object and without subsurface scattering. We further assume that light travels in a straight line between reflections. Light that does not follow these assumptions will appear as time-delayed background in our heatmap and will complicate, but not necessarily prevent reconstruction."

The problem of reconstructing the hidden object using the scattered light is one example of what people in my field call an inverse problem. There are a lot of parameters involved-- the reflection surfaces, the textures of those surfaces, other cluttering objects. If you don't know the values of those parameters, then the problem becomes harder. Some of these problems have been looked at from a different perspective in the area of radar imaging.

One of the neatest things I have learned about recently is coded aperture photography. What that means is a type of filter is put on the aperture of your camera-- the filter is "coded" meaning that light from parts of the scene will be blacked out and parts will be allowed to pass (see this image for illustration). Coded aperture has been successful in improving imaging in many fields, including astronomical imaging and depth field imaging. In the Nature paper the authors also mention this as something that could be included, along with many other neat theoretical directions that are related to my work.

"A promising theoretical direction is in inference and inversion techniques that exploit scene priors, sparsity, rank, meaningful transforms and achieve bounded approximations. Adaptive sampling can decide the next-best laser direction based on a current estimate of the 3D shape. Further analysis will include coded sampling using compressive techniques and noise models for SNR and effective bandwidth. Our current demonstration assumes friendly reflectance and planarity of the diffuse wall."

UW Artist in Residence

Lynda Barry is this semester's artist in residence at the University of Wisconsin. I learned about Barry from a facebook post by my friend Leah. Leah is taking Barry's class "What It Is", and they had a special guest of Matt Groening last week!

Barry recently wrote a book and she elaborates on some of the ideas in this NPR discussion from talk of the nation.

She encourages us to create-- "Adults would never consider [drawing] on a piece of paper and then just throwing it away afterwards." I do that a lot with math, and with pictures when I'm with my nieces and nephew, but rarely otherwise. My friend Sheila is inspiring when it comes to creativity in action-- she's always making cards for friends, painting a wall in her house, making digital art.

Another quote from the Barry interview: "I think that creative work-- which becomes an elective after 7th grade-- has a lot to do with mental health. The way that I explain that is: One thing that seems to be universally understood-- all around the world-- is that if you had a kid, ...little Timmy, and I say Timmy I'm going to give you everything you ever want in your whole life except you will not be allowed to play until you are 18 years old. What do you know about that kid? Almost everyone around the world can tell you that kid will be crazy. ... Then what if I said Timmy you can't play, but I'm going to show you a video of a kid playing. Or I'm going to take you to watch this lego master-- you can watch him live, you can be right up front and watch him. That doesn't help either. I feel like as adults, that's kind of where we are. ...Mainly we feel like [creativity] is something best left to professionals-- like Jessica Simpson or something."

These ideas inspired me so much on Saturday that I went to Target and bought a watercolor set and some play dough. I already made a lovely painting (ask my roommate, she's going to frame it!) My favorite way to spend free time is to try something new-- right now I'm taking a martial arts class-- but maybe next I'll get back to writing stories, doing cross-stitch, or start something new like painting or collage. You know I still have my ee lab kit from sophomore year... it has proved impossible for me to throw it away, but I got a great suggestion recently that I should make a collage from it! Hmm... before I get carried away with ideas of what I could achieve, better to focus on Lynda's advice by doing something I wouldn't mind throwing away. Maybe tomorrow I'll open that play dough.

Traveling Salesman

After reading Jordan's review of William J. Cook's "In Pursuit of the Traveling Salesman," I'm excited to check the book out myself! I wanted to put a favorite quote from the review here, but I was getting ready to copy the whole thing, so just go read it.