[00:18.960 --> 00:19.720]  I love this.
[00:19.780 --> 00:22.780]  The first time I was in this room, I was playing my viola.
[00:23.080 --> 00:24.340]  At the age of 13.
[00:25.020 --> 00:25.320]  Really?
[00:25.580 --> 00:27.640]  Then you go to Carnegie Hall and play here.
[00:27.640 --> 00:29.520]  Feeling like really freaked out and nervous.
[00:29.820 --> 00:30.400]  I know, I know.
[00:30.560 --> 00:31.020]  It's totally crazy.
[00:55.660 --> 00:57.520]  Are you all happy to do this?
[00:58.060 --> 00:58.260]  Yeah.
[00:59.240 --> 00:59.760]  Is this you?
[01:00.000 --> 01:00.480]  Yes, it's me.
[01:01.380 --> 01:01.820]  Alright.
[01:15.150 --> 01:17.750]  Alright, we're going to get started on the next panel.
[01:18.550 --> 01:26.710]  Again, if you have questions for these guys, please make sure that you walk up to one of the microphones because there are a lot of people that can't be.
[01:27.150 --> 01:30.690]  at this convention and will be purchasing the DVDs to watch.
[01:31.410 --> 01:34.850]  And that awkward silence where you hear wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah.
[01:34.990 --> 01:40.590]  And then somebody answers the question and the person following along doesn't understand what is being said.
[01:40.590 --> 01:43.390]  So if you have a question, please just walk up to one of the microphones.
[01:44.730 --> 01:47.970]  Another announcement, we've had some cancellations on the schedule.
[01:49.350 --> 01:54.750]  Again, if you turn to eight o'clock this evening.
[01:56.290 --> 02:00.110]  The Kevin Mitnick unplugged has been moved to Saturday at eight o'clock.
[02:00.250 --> 02:02.870]  And off the hook is supposedly today at eight o'clock.
[02:03.930 --> 02:08.090]  Also, the exploring dusty corners of the web has been cancelled.
[02:09.050 --> 02:13.290]  And is being replaced by something called biological science fiction.
[02:13.950 --> 02:15.550]  Which I have no idea what that is.
[02:18.850 --> 02:22.550]  Coming up, we have hackers and academia.
[02:27.940 --> 02:31.720]  With number 21, number 90, and number 144.
[02:32.640 --> 02:36.460]  Which are also known as Java Man in the middle.
[02:36.540 --> 02:37.320]  Or Adam.
[02:37.500 --> 02:38.080]  Or Adam.
[02:38.960 --> 02:41.980]  Matt Blaze, number 90 on the end.
[02:43.040 --> 02:45.800]  And Gus is 144.
[02:46.980 --> 02:47.460]  You guys ready?
[02:47.460 --> 02:48.280]  Yes.
[02:49.880 --> 02:50.580]  Hello.
[02:55.240 --> 02:56.520]  Why don't you...
[02:56.520 --> 02:57.800]  I guess I could give an introduction.
[02:58.440 --> 03:02.340]  So, the title of the panel is Hackers and Academics.
[03:02.520 --> 03:05.280]  And this is a couple different...
[03:05.280 --> 03:10.440]  It's about a couple different ruminations on several different things.
[03:10.440 --> 03:15.620]  Such as differences in methodologies by which hackers approach problems.
[03:15.620 --> 03:17.160]  And academics approach problems.
[03:17.160 --> 03:23.240]  As well as what happens when a computer hacker tries to go and get their PhD.
[03:23.920 --> 03:27.580]  Or goes through graduate school and formal education.
[03:28.560 --> 03:33.080]  As well as what happens when they go into the university system and educate their students.
[03:33.440 --> 03:37.280]  And I think that's a very quick, brief overview.
[03:37.500 --> 03:39.220]  And we want this to be a very interactive thing.
[03:39.680 --> 03:41.140]  With people asking questions.
[03:41.340 --> 03:43.300]  Especially anyone who's going through...
[03:43.300 --> 03:47.000]  Looking to go into graduate school to study computer security.
[03:47.000 --> 03:47.920]  Or computer engineering.
[03:48.880 --> 03:50.020]  Or the like.
[03:50.500 --> 03:52.960]  And I'll give an introduction.
[03:53.180 --> 03:54.200]  A little bit of background on myself.
[03:54.940 --> 03:56.640]  My full name is Adam J.
[03:56.820 --> 03:57.100]  O'Donnell.
[03:57.420 --> 04:00.820]  I recently completed my doctorate about 11 months ago.
[04:01.160 --> 04:02.940]  At Drexel University in Philadelphia.
[04:04.460 --> 04:06.380]  There's no woo from the Drexel.
[04:09.320 --> 04:10.580]  Some Drexel people here.
[04:10.580 --> 04:11.580]  They don't care about school.
[04:12.020 --> 04:14.960]  And it's largely true.
[04:15.580 --> 04:21.000]  So my work was in officially titled in computer engineering.
[04:21.000 --> 04:25.500]  And the problem I studied was about how diverse software systems interact.
[04:26.100 --> 04:31.880]  And how computer networks can be made more secure by having a diversity of software systems.
[04:33.900 --> 04:37.640]  I also have been a member of the hacker community for some time.
[04:37.920 --> 04:39.800]  I'm a member of the cult of the DECAL.
[04:42.260 --> 04:42.700]  So...
[04:44.860 --> 04:45.520]  Thank you.
[04:47.460 --> 04:48.060]  Thank you.
[04:48.560 --> 04:49.000]  Hey!
[04:50.400 --> 04:50.840]  And...
[04:52.160 --> 04:55.100]  Also, I've worked in a computer security industry for some time.
[04:55.400 --> 04:59.120]  I worked for a company now owned by VeriSign.
[04:59.300 --> 04:59.320]  There's an industry?
[04:59.540 --> 05:00.160]  There's an industry.
[05:00.240 --> 05:00.740]  Believe it or not.
[05:00.980 --> 05:02.180]  It's largely disappeared.
[05:02.380 --> 05:02.900]  It's been...
[05:02.900 --> 05:03.980]  Now it's been bought by...
[05:03.980 --> 05:04.460]  So watch.
[05:04.600 --> 05:08.200]  I worked for a company called Garden that was bought by VeriSign.
[05:09.200 --> 05:14.000]  And the other places I worked either were bought by Symantec or bought by McAfee, I guess.
[05:15.580 --> 05:20.460]  So nowadays, I work for an anti-spam company called Cloudmark, based in San Francisco.
[05:21.080 --> 05:26.240]  And so if anyone has a Cloudmark safety bar, Cloudmark toolbar, and Outlook, you know what this is.
[05:26.340 --> 05:30.840]  Also, it's the commercial extension of Razor, for those of you who run Spam Assassin.
[05:34.180 --> 05:41.460]  And my experience through graduate school is definitely a little bit challenging than most other people's experiences through graduate school.
[05:41.480 --> 05:43.800]  I have to learn new methodologies for exploring problems.
[05:43.840 --> 05:45.420]  And I'll talk about that a little bit later.
[05:46.420 --> 05:48.140]  But I guess, Matt, you want to...
[05:48.140 --> 05:48.740]  Okay.
[05:50.020 --> 05:51.880]  So, I'm Matt Blaze.
[05:52.540 --> 05:56.040]  I've been a hacker for as long as I can remember.
[05:57.440 --> 06:00.960]  And right now, I'm a professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
[06:02.000 --> 06:06.100]  I'm going to just talk a little bit about my own career.
[06:07.980 --> 06:16.840]  And what I think the relationship between computer science academia in particular, but I think academia in general.
[06:17.420 --> 06:22.420]  And, you know, the hacker mindset is as I see it, kind of from my perspective.
[06:22.420 --> 06:26.020]  And how, you know, we think that they're very different.
[06:26.020 --> 06:29.000]  But in fact, I think they're really exactly the same.
[06:29.160 --> 06:31.240]  And I don't think you had to learn a new methodology.
[06:31.480 --> 06:34.680]  I just think you had to learn new names for things that you already understood.
[06:34.880 --> 06:38.760]  Or at least the important ones were just new names for things that you already understood.
[06:39.400 --> 06:44.080]  So, I got my PhD a long time ago.
[06:45.280 --> 06:46.560]  Or, you know, back in the...
[06:46.560 --> 06:49.560]  It started in the 1980s, so in the previous century.
[06:51.100 --> 06:59.680]  And at Princeton University, probably the most, you know, stodgy sounding university you're going to come up with in the United States.
[07:00.580 --> 07:09.040]  And, you know, was one of a fairly small group of people in the computer science department there who was interested in systems.
[07:09.480 --> 07:14.160]  Princeton, at the time that I was there, was very heavy on theoretical computer science.
[07:14.160 --> 07:18.180]  I was kind of interested, you know, the joke was, and this didn't make me a lot of friends, you know.
[07:18.380 --> 07:20.680]  A lot of people there were theoretical computer scientists.
[07:20.680 --> 07:23.080]  I wanted to be an actual computer scientist.
[07:23.660 --> 07:30.760]  And, you know, the irony is that as I've gone on, I've become actually more theoretical.
[07:33.560 --> 07:39.340]  And all of the theoretical things that I've become interested in have fed back into my kind of hacking interests.
[07:41.280 --> 07:50.340]  So, when I finished my degree in 92, you know, I thought, okay, now I have to go and get a job.
[07:50.820 --> 07:58.370]  And, you know, as a hacker and, you know, former telephone enthusiast, or I guess there's no such thing as a former telephone enthusiast.
[07:59.230 --> 08:03.930]  You know, the obvious place to want to go is Bell Labs.
[08:04.150 --> 08:12.370]  And, you know, this is the pinnacle of places for an academic computer scientist because it had all of the advantages of academia.
[08:13.070 --> 08:17.670]  That is, nobody tells you what to do and none of the disadvantages of academia.
[08:17.930 --> 08:20.470]  You know, that is, you don't have to teach and you don't have to raise money.
[08:20.470 --> 08:22.170]  There's just this... it was really nice.
[08:22.350 --> 08:26.370]  You'd go in there and there was this giant suitcase full of $100 bills.
[08:26.830 --> 08:30.830]  And, you know, you'd take a bunch of them and, you know, you could just buy whatever you wanted.
[08:31.250 --> 08:34.690]  And it was just, you know, the streets were paved with gold.
[08:34.850 --> 08:38.090]  You know, there was hot, cold running water and champagne in the bathrooms.
[08:38.370 --> 08:40.450]  It was just unbelievably nice.
[08:40.630 --> 08:43.430]  But, you know, as a hacker environment, it was perfect.
[08:43.430 --> 08:46.470]  I worked... I started out working at Bell Labs Homedel.
[08:47.850 --> 08:50.710]  I had a boss, Tom London.
[08:50.930 --> 08:54.530]  He never asked me what I was doing.
[08:54.690 --> 08:57.670]  I would tell him every now and then what I was doing and that was fine.
[08:57.990 --> 09:01.510]  The requirement was you had to, you know, be doing interesting stuff.
[09:02.750 --> 09:08.570]  And, you know, eventually I moved to Bell Labs Murray Hill in the northern part of New Jersey.
[09:08.570 --> 09:13.110]  For some reason, New Jersey is kind of the epicenter of telephone research.
[09:14.630 --> 09:18.530]  And the thing that kind of summed up the environment of the place.
[09:18.650 --> 09:19.930]  I had the best office in the world.
[09:20.970 --> 09:23.990]  It did have windows and it actually had a fairly nice view.
[09:24.210 --> 09:28.150]  But they were completely covered up by filing cabinets that covered the windows.
[09:28.330 --> 09:31.670]  I had this corner office, but you couldn't actually see out of the windows.
[09:31.870 --> 09:37.590]  And in order to get to the office, you had to walk down this hallway with danger.
[09:37.590 --> 09:38.430]  Do not enter.
[09:38.570 --> 09:39.790]  This is not a hallway in it.
[09:40.170 --> 09:46.230]  Climb over a bunch of glass pipes from some lab with toxic chemicals upstairs.
[09:46.570 --> 09:50.250]  It was kind of some old machinery that you had to kind of shimmy past.
[09:50.690 --> 09:53.190]  And then, you know, kind of down at the end of the hall, there was my office.
[09:53.290 --> 09:55.750]  And I thought, this is absolutely the perfect office.
[09:56.010 --> 09:59.590]  Because on my way to my office, in that little hallway, people...
[09:59.590 --> 10:04.850]  Because there was this little passageway nobody knew was a passageway that you had to go through to get to it.
[10:04.850 --> 10:06.590]  People would leave their trash there.
[10:07.070 --> 10:10.110]  And so, you know, every now and then there would be a microscope there.
[10:10.290 --> 10:12.850]  And, oh good, now I get to play with a microscope.
[10:13.050 --> 10:15.070]  And I'd kind of move that into my little lab area.
[10:15.510 --> 10:18.610]  And, you know, every now and then somebody would leave a spectrum analyzer.
[10:18.670 --> 10:20.730]  Okay, now I can play with a spectrum analyzer.
[10:20.850 --> 10:25.750]  And I would just kind of accumulate toys and play with them and learn how to use them.
[10:26.090 --> 10:28.450]  And, you know, basically, you know, hacking for a living.
[10:28.450 --> 10:30.530]  And that was just wonderful.
[10:30.950 --> 10:41.770]  Now, for those of you who have been following the telecommunications boom, you know, eventually things kind of turned sour in the telecom industry.
[10:41.990 --> 10:47.090]  And the, you know, supply of suitcases full of money started to dry up a little bit.
[10:47.530 --> 10:57.410]  And because my research area was computer security, the interesting thing is that didn't really have much effect on me or my group.
[10:57.410 --> 11:02.330]  They still said, you know, in this environment, well, you know, you guys are important.
[11:02.490 --> 11:04.290]  What you're doing is important for the business.
[11:04.850 --> 11:19.030]  But the people that made it such a special hacking environment, you know, there were artists working at Bell Labs, there were physicists, theoretical physicists doing, you know, doing things like inventing the transistor.
[11:20.270 --> 11:25.410]  And, you know, those people didn't have a direct connection to the company that could be articulated.
[11:25.870 --> 11:28.310]  And so they kind of started flying away.
[11:28.430 --> 11:34.670]  And it became less of a hacking community and more of a business-oriented community.
[11:34.890 --> 11:39.930]  And that's when, you know, life as a hacker started to turn intolerable.
[11:40.170 --> 11:42.490]  So at that point, I thought, well, what do I want to do?
[11:42.550 --> 11:44.810]  And I moved back into academia.
[11:44.810 --> 12:03.970]  And so in... at the end of 2003, I joined the University of Pennsylvania as a faculty member, took a substantial pay cut, and easily working twice as hard.
[12:04.270 --> 12:08.230]  And, you know, absolutely loving every minute of it.
[12:08.230 --> 12:28.110]  One of the differences between the academic world and even the most benign, benevolent, wonderful, nurturing, industrial environment is that in the academic world, you are in a very, very real sense, your own boss.
[12:28.370 --> 12:34.190]  You may have a boss in an industrial world who appreciates what you do and never tells you what to do.
[12:34.190 --> 12:36.470]  But you're still actually working for that person.
[12:36.730 --> 12:41.050]  You still actually have to articulate what you're contributing to the company.
[12:42.010 --> 12:50.290]  And as an academic, what you really are is the CEO of a very small brand, you know, that is essentially your own research.
[12:50.630 --> 12:53.650]  And you do have to raise money in order to support that.
[12:53.810 --> 12:54.730]  You know, you have to collect...
[12:54.730 --> 13:04.390]  You have to attract investors like, you know, the National Science Foundation or companies who might want to support your research because you're going to do good things.
[13:04.550 --> 13:06.230]  But there's a mechanism for doing it.
[13:06.450 --> 13:10.470]  But you are fundamentally, you know, in charge of your own destiny.
[13:10.690 --> 13:17.850]  Tomorrow, I decided that computer security and crypto wasn't interesting and I wanted to start working on time travel.
[13:18.350 --> 13:24.430]  There is nobody whose job would be to stop me from doing such a crazy thing.
[13:25.810 --> 13:36.090]  And that's a very, very real difference that's just perfect for the hacker mindset if you learn the little rules of that game.
[13:36.590 --> 13:39.630]  So, right now, you know, the...
[13:41.950 --> 13:45.310]  One of the things you have to think about as an academic is what are you trying to accomplish?
[13:45.310 --> 13:58.810]  And, you know, I've realized that since I don't have kids that my only hope for immortality is to produce grad students who become professors and produce more grad students who become professors.
[13:58.990 --> 14:02.150]  So, one question you have to ask is, well, what kind of grad students are you trying to attract?
[14:02.410 --> 14:10.330]  So, I think about the students that I'm working with as being people who want to study hacking.
[14:10.330 --> 14:18.650]  You know, that in a very broad sense but also in the narrow sense that can be made to fit in the academic environment.
[14:19.450 --> 14:24.250]  Ken Thompson, who if you don't know who he is, you should know who he is.
[14:24.290 --> 14:26.010]  He's one of the great hackers of the world.
[14:26.150 --> 14:27.990]  He's one of the co-authors of the UNIX system.
[14:28.150 --> 14:32.210]  He's also from Bell Labs, although we worked in different departments.
[14:32.490 --> 14:36.370]  In his Turing Award lecture, if you don't know what the Turing Award is, you should.
[14:36.370 --> 14:42.770]  It's the Nobel Prize in computer science given by the ACM.
[14:42.910 --> 14:45.150]  He won the Turing Award a while back.
[14:45.310 --> 14:53.530]  And the wonderful thing in his Turing Award lecture is he said that when he fills out his tax return, there's a second question on there right after your name.
[14:53.670 --> 14:54.710]  It's occupation.
[14:55.070 --> 14:56.370]  And he writes down programmer.
[14:57.270 --> 15:07.850]  You know, even though this guy is like, he's not, you know, calling him a programmer is like calling, you know, because that's an honorable thing to be.
[15:08.070 --> 15:13.710]  So I, for the last ten years, I've been writing down hacker on my tax form.
[15:14.230 --> 15:21.070]  And, you know, I believe that's the most honorable title that somebody in our world can aspire to.
[15:21.550 --> 15:23.830]  And, you know, let me encourage you to do that.
[15:23.970 --> 15:28.210]  Everybody here, next April 15th, put hacker on your tax return.
[15:28.210 --> 15:31.130]  This is my little Alice's restaurant moment.
[15:31.310 --> 15:32.690]  I want to start a movement here.
[15:36.210 --> 15:39.890]  So, anyway, let me, I guess, I don't know which way we're, I guess.
[15:41.150 --> 15:44.730]  Oh, I just have two additional comments.
[15:44.850 --> 15:48.930]  I also worked for a period of time at Lucent Technologies, which was basically Bell Labs as well.
[15:49.170 --> 15:54.870]  And one of the things I did for the engineers was, it was called Technical Trash Day.
[15:55.270 --> 15:58.750]  And basically it had these large bins they put out and everyone would throw out the technical trash.
[15:58.910 --> 16:01.030]  And the idea would be that a lot of stuff had gold on it.
[16:01.130 --> 16:02.530]  So they want to re-salvage the gold.
[16:02.650 --> 16:05.350]  But they made sure they left those bins out for at least a week.
[16:05.750 --> 16:15.090]  And so about five o'clock, six o'clock in the afternoon, you'd see, you know, maybe 50 to 100, you know, engineers, shirt, tie, digging through trash.
[16:15.590 --> 16:16.490]  They're going to pick crap out.
[16:16.610 --> 16:18.170]  What's with the shirt and tie thing?
[16:18.810 --> 16:19.750]  That, I don't understand.
[16:19.870 --> 16:21.330]  It was an electronics lab too.
[16:21.490 --> 16:24.190]  And you'd see these engineers have little burn marks all over their ties.
[16:24.190 --> 16:28.990]  Because, you know, sitting there soldering and you'd catch a tie in it.
[16:29.750 --> 16:31.350]  But it was a little bit more formal.
[16:31.670 --> 16:33.450]  This is a Whippany.
[16:34.190 --> 16:37.210]  So it was a little bit more formal of an environment than a Murray Hill.
[16:39.110 --> 16:39.730]  What else?
[16:41.550 --> 16:42.490]  Yeah, I'll shut up.
[16:42.730 --> 16:49.150]  So I'll probably, yeah, I'll comment a little bit more on the graduate school experience for those in a few more minutes.
[16:49.330 --> 16:50.570]  And I, Gus?
[16:50.730 --> 16:50.910]  Sure.
[16:52.790 --> 16:54.050]  My name is Gus Andrews.
[16:54.190 --> 16:56.650]  I'm a doctoral student at Teachers College at Columbia University.
[16:56.930 --> 16:58.550]  No, I'm not going to be a teacher.
[16:58.830 --> 16:59.830]  We do other things there too.
[17:00.110 --> 17:04.170]  I actually want to start schools and that is something I'm going to talk about more in a second.
[17:04.570 --> 17:09.250]  This is my third hope, although you'd never guess it, by the fact that I brought a PowerPoint to bore you all to death with.
[17:09.250 --> 17:10.830]  So I'll try to keep it pretty lightweight.
[17:12.610 --> 17:21.950]  So I've been in this doctoral program studying communications and education, specifically media literacy and virtual worlds for three years now.
[17:22.150 --> 17:28.750]  And the thing that's kind of surprised me is that everything that hackers have said about why school sucks was absolutely correct.
[17:29.210 --> 17:34.030]  And we actually have, you know, research that's been done in cognition that will basically back this up.
[17:34.110 --> 17:38.930]  So what I've done is I've taken a bunch of quotes from people who've been defining the term hacker and what hacking is.
[17:39.070 --> 17:44.010]  So we've got stuff from the jargon file, stuff from Stallman, and stuff from Steven Levy's book Hackers.
[17:44.750 --> 17:53.530]  And then I've given you a couple of footnotes of, like, things that you can go and read if you want to have, like, fodder for an argument with somebody where you can say, aha, actually, no, we shouldn't do this to kids in schools.
[17:53.770 --> 17:55.270]  You know, we shouldn't have to learn this way.
[17:55.790 --> 18:02.370]  If you have a kid who's, you know, going through the process yourself now or if you yourself are going through, you know, undergraduate or high school or whatever.
[18:03.570 --> 18:04.890]  So I'll just take it on from there.
[18:05.730 --> 18:07.810]  Mistrust, authority, promote decentralization.
[18:07.810 --> 18:11.250]  This is one of the tenets from Steven Levy's book Hackers.
[18:13.810 --> 18:22.450]  One of the big things that we talk about a lot is moving from a model of having the teacher be the sage on the stage who's doing lecturing to having the teacher be the guide on the side.
[18:23.010 --> 18:25.110]  This is basically what we call constructivist education.
[18:25.290 --> 18:30.450]  We're trying to have more education where students get to define their own problems.
[18:30.450 --> 18:31.750]  They get to define their direction.
[18:32.110 --> 18:35.290]  And they're not just being treated as vessels whose minds should be filled.
[18:35.390 --> 18:37.070]  Because it's basically not how the human mind works.
[18:37.110 --> 18:37.830]  We all know that.
[18:37.830 --> 18:40.910]  It's just, you know, obviously taking schools a long time to get there.
[18:41.230 --> 18:43.210]  So that's something we've been talking about.
[18:43.390 --> 18:47.650]  There's a time for lecturing, as the Time for Telling article mentions here.
[18:48.110 --> 18:49.610]  But it's not all the time.
[18:49.750 --> 18:56.750]  It's after you've had a moment to, you know, get into a problem and muck around and compare some of its details.
[18:57.510 --> 19:02.150]  Being able to set your own goals and work to challenge yourself really does work.
[19:02.550 --> 19:05.470]  Like, it helps people have more flexible knowledge in the long run.
[19:07.410 --> 19:08.090]  First point.
[19:08.990 --> 19:10.710]  Always yield to the hands-on imperative.
[19:11.090 --> 19:19.030]  The fact that hackers want to get into things and touch them and mess around with them and test their hypotheses is absolutely also a good instinct.
[19:19.990 --> 19:24.110]  There's a lot of movements in education to move toward case-based education.
[19:25.070 --> 19:27.830]  That's basically like, in law schools, you have legal cases.
[19:28.010 --> 19:33.470]  You actually look at, you know, past cases that have happened in the past and, you know, look at how they worked out.
[19:33.550 --> 19:34.430]  And that's how you become a lawyer.
[19:34.670 --> 19:38.310]  To become a doctor, you look at past medical cases and learn about the symptoms and stuff like that.
[19:38.410 --> 19:41.290]  You actually go and you, you know, dissect a human cadaver and things like that.
[19:41.810 --> 19:44.010]  At early stages of education, that should happen too.
[19:44.310 --> 19:47.570]  And there's a lot of us who are trying to get that to happen more in education.
[19:48.370 --> 19:51.850]  But it's not always a great match for some of the stuff that's going on in schools right now.
[19:53.110 --> 19:54.630]  This is how the real world is built.
[19:54.730 --> 19:55.250]  We all know that.
[19:55.570 --> 20:05.070]  And abstractions like, you know, basic mathematics being taught with abstract word problems and things like that are really not the best way to learn.
[20:06.150 --> 20:07.210]  I do have a question for you.
[20:07.270 --> 20:09.930]  Is that similar to the IMP program that's popular nowadays?
[20:09.930 --> 20:10.450]  Which one?
[20:10.650 --> 20:10.890]  IMP?
[20:11.370 --> 20:11.810]  I don't know.
[20:11.910 --> 20:12.470]  Oh, okay.
[20:12.670 --> 20:18.030]  At some high schools, they have something where they break math students off into groups and they discover math.
[20:18.350 --> 20:18.570]  Yeah.
[20:18.710 --> 20:34.130]  And I know when we were sending mail back and forth, you mentioned that, yeah, it's sort of having students to some extent go through the discoveries of theorems that have been discovered in the past by, you know, like Archimedes and things like that is actually a useful process.
[20:34.230 --> 20:37.110]  And like you pointed out, it's also very time consuming, so you can't do it all the time.
[20:37.110 --> 20:45.950]  But there's ways to sort of do what they call scaffolding and sort of help students at the beginning get the things that they wouldn't get on their own and then sort of work them through from there.
[20:46.930 --> 20:59.450]  The Jasper experiment, which is mentioned up here, was actually something done by my advisor at Vanderbilt, where they had a problem where you're supposed to go and rescue an eagle and you have a plane and you have to figure out how much gas the plane needs and how much weight the plane can carry and things like that.
[20:59.550 --> 21:04.490]  So you're actually just doing basic math in context, which makes for more flexible learning.
[21:04.590 --> 21:10.190]  A lot of times when people just learn things from textbooks, they take cues from the context they've been taught in school.
[21:10.350 --> 21:14.750]  So they'll be like, why is this word problem not structured the same way as the last one was?
[21:14.830 --> 21:20.530]  Or why can't I go and, you know, relate the problems in the back of the textbook to the part of the chapter I know they're in?
[21:20.530 --> 21:22.230]  And that's not the way the real world works, obviously.
[21:22.590 --> 21:24.130]  So those are not good ways of teaching.
[21:26.070 --> 21:30.390]  Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position.
[21:32.570 --> 21:39.810]  A lot of the things we, you know, SAT testing obviously is not the best way to test for the kinds of learning we really need nowadays.
[21:40.470 --> 21:47.750]  You know, ill-structured problems, things that don't have simple solutions where you really have to do problem solving rather than just regurgitating the answers that you were taught in school.
[21:50.710 --> 21:56.390]  And the other thing that things like SAT tests don't really test well is your tacit knowledge, the stuff that you can't actually explain.
[21:56.590 --> 22:05.990]  Whereas in the hacker community, you can go out and if somebody says, you know, I don't know how to get past this particular obstacle, you can just do it rather than telling somebody how to do it and they'll be like, oh, okay, you know how to do that.
[22:06.070 --> 22:12.810]  Whereas in school, a lot of times we ask people to write it down or to, you know, do the, write out their math work.
[22:12.810 --> 22:19.330]  And that just is not a particularly, you know, it doesn't honor different styles of learning where people may be better at actually showing things off than telling about them.
[22:20.750 --> 22:24.890]  Information sharing is a powerful positive good and it is an ethical duty of hackers to share their expertise.
[22:25.730 --> 22:33.090]  Some of the stuff you were saying about working at Bell Labs actually makes a lot of sense where you're in this community of, you know, artists and of engineers and things like this.
[22:33.090 --> 22:35.810]  You learn from the people around you at your workplace.
[22:36.450 --> 22:38.050]  That's not something we can really do at school.
[22:38.670 --> 22:40.570]  Obviously, teachers are just teachers.
[22:40.790 --> 22:45.470]  They haven't really had an experience to go out and have real practice a lot of the time to really do the things that we do in real life.
[22:45.850 --> 22:48.490]  And that is something people in academia are actually critiquing.
[22:49.270 --> 22:50.270]  It's not, yeah, I know.
[22:50.570 --> 22:53.370]  It takes a while to get people to pay attention to that.
[22:53.530 --> 22:58.990]  But, and certainly teachers get on their high horse about like, oh, well, we're teachers and therefore we must be good.
[22:58.990 --> 23:01.590]  So, that also takes some work.
[23:03.930 --> 23:06.090]  Also, sort of along the same lines with the Bell Labs thing.
[23:07.830 --> 23:10.250]  Isolating students and saying, it's all up to you.
[23:10.350 --> 23:11.470]  You don't get to use a calculator.
[23:11.470 --> 23:13.730]  You must be able to do all this math from your head.
[23:14.070 --> 23:15.970]  You can't refer to things on your computer.
[23:16.110 --> 23:16.890]  You can't use the Internet.
[23:17.050 --> 23:18.150]  You can't talk to your peers.
[23:18.790 --> 23:20.630]  That also is not the way the real world works.
[23:20.810 --> 23:22.570]  And as obviously everybody knows.
[23:23.810 --> 23:26.010]  And that's something that's also being critiqued in school.
[23:26.330 --> 23:28.630]  Talking about doing more team-based learning and things like that.
[23:29.750 --> 23:32.730]  Ah, and the important person to pay attention to here is Lev Vygotsky.
[23:33.010 --> 23:35.410]  Who has this idea of the zone of proximal development.
[23:35.590 --> 23:40.350]  Which is the, one of the best ways to teach is to have kids work at the absolute edge.
[23:40.490 --> 23:41.490]  The forward edge of their ability.
[23:41.610 --> 23:42.370]  The best they can do.
[23:42.510 --> 23:43.990]  Which schools obviously don't do most of the time.
[23:44.590 --> 23:47.210]  And work with a little help from the teacher.
[23:47.490 --> 23:50.770]  And then once they are sort of, you know, the teacher gives them a couple of models how to do things.
[23:50.850 --> 23:51.870]  Gives them a little bit of support.
[23:52.370 --> 23:59.930]  They're able to progress a lot faster than if they were being asked to just, you know, repeat the things that, you know, they're already pretty good at.
[24:01.430 --> 24:05.630]  Hackers enjoy exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities.
[24:05.630 --> 24:09.250]  As opposed to most users who prefer to only use, learn the minimum necessary.
[24:09.470 --> 24:14.390]  Again, the zone of proximal development says that you should be working at the edge of somebody's capacity.
[24:14.390 --> 24:16.410]  Rather than just sort of working in their comfort zone.
[24:17.310 --> 24:18.810]  Also, getting people to reflect.
[24:19.610 --> 24:27.370]  Being able, if you sort of do a problem and then you can go back and say, Okay, well, I think maybe I should have tried this strategy next time.
[24:27.610 --> 24:29.550]  Or, here are my hypotheses.
[24:29.770 --> 24:30.950]  And you can go back and test them.
[24:31.070 --> 24:32.530]  And then you can come back and make hypotheses.
[24:33.550 --> 24:36.510]  Those kinds of cycles make for the kind of learning that you will transfer.
[24:37.210 --> 24:38.490]  Transfer is a big issue in schools.
[24:38.490 --> 24:40.890]  Like, if you learn it in the classroom.
[24:40.890 --> 24:44.650]  Like, I learned all kinds of algebra, which I would never know how to use in context.
[24:44.670 --> 24:48.390]  Because I didn't have a lot of experience using it in realistic situations.
[24:49.310 --> 24:52.110]  So, with all these things that we know, why don't we have decent schools yet?
[24:52.290 --> 24:53.890]  And obviously, do you really have to ask?
[24:54.530 --> 24:55.830]  Cruft is the big problem.
[24:56.030 --> 25:00.790]  Schools are a bunch of accreted, agglomerated stuff that's added up over years.
[25:02.350 --> 25:05.630]  Bells and standardized grading and things like that.
[25:05.730 --> 25:08.470]  Those all come from this idea that students are a product.
[25:09.750 --> 25:11.430]  That's what they call the factory schooling system.
[25:11.570 --> 25:15.410]  People actually did talk in educational theory about how we should have...
[25:15.410 --> 25:18.570]  You know, we should develop students to be better industrial workers.
[25:18.730 --> 25:23.950]  And obviously, that's not something that is particularly useful for us with technology that we have today.
[25:24.690 --> 25:26.950]  But that still remains as the system of our schools.
[25:27.070 --> 25:29.530]  And people continue to teach that way just because that's how they were taught.
[25:29.670 --> 25:30.530]  That's what they're comfortable with.
[25:30.670 --> 25:37.010]  So, unless you really go in and actively work with teachers in schools of education, it's very hard to get them to break their habits.
[25:37.930 --> 25:43.630]  Nationalism also, we still have a lot of stuff that's sort of left in the education system about like, well, here's what democracy ought to be.
[25:43.790 --> 25:44.570]  You ought to learn history.
[25:44.810 --> 25:49.410]  I hear that they just passed a law in Florida, unfortunately.
[25:49.530 --> 25:50.650]  Did anybody else hear this?
[25:50.830 --> 25:58.330]  Where history is to be taught as fact and not as something that's been written by people in the past with viewpoints.
[25:58.970 --> 26:01.770]  So, there's this real trend that we're working against.
[26:01.890 --> 26:03.850]  And the biggest problem is the No Child Left Behind Act.
[26:03.850 --> 26:21.090]  If you care at all about child abuse in the terms of like, you know, telling students that they have to sit down and shut up and not explore their own, you know, their own questions, fight the No Child Left Behind Act with every tooth and nail because it's basically causing all teachers to teach to the test,
[26:21.350 --> 26:22.730]  to teach to standardized tests.
[26:23.190 --> 26:24.550]  We're hearing things at conferences.
[26:24.790 --> 26:36.210]  Like, I was at a literacy conference a little while ago and a teacher stood up and said, I was in a school a little while ago and this kid went up to a shelf and picked up a little truck off the shelf and came over to me and said, teacher, remember when we had recess?
[26:37.010 --> 26:38.270]  I mean, they're canceling recess.
[26:38.430 --> 26:42.050]  It's not just that they're canceling math and, you know, time in the computer labs.
[26:42.110 --> 26:48.570]  They're actually canceling things that would keep the kids from like running around and being completely nuts all day because they're, you know, they have too much energy.
[26:48.570 --> 26:51.150]  So, this is really destroying schools.
[26:51.570 --> 26:54.610]  It's destroying any kind of critical thinking teaching that's going on.
[26:55.370 --> 26:56.410]  I hated recess.
[26:56.830 --> 26:57.610]  You hated... I know.
[26:57.670 --> 27:02.430]  A lot of us did, but then, I mean, like, I was pretty lucky because I had a chance to go to the computer lab during that point in time.
[27:02.430 --> 27:04.110]  I used to get my ass kicked during recess.
[27:04.290 --> 27:05.050]  Yeah, me too.
[27:07.690 --> 27:09.510]  But you didn't like standardized tests either, though.
[27:09.850 --> 27:11.830]  I didn't like those, but I hated recess more.
[27:11.990 --> 27:13.590]  I'd rather taken a standardized test than that.
[27:13.590 --> 27:19.810]  Well, this is also the kind of thing where, like, you know, if you have a one-size-fits-all education system, you have teachers who are like, you must go out and play at recess.
[27:19.990 --> 27:23.810]  It's good for you to have your ass kicked because you have to learn about the social order, you know?
[27:23.970 --> 27:31.950]  So, I mean, you know, the more we can sort of fight the way schools try to turn everybody into the same people, you know, that's absolutely key.
[27:32.250 --> 27:33.830]  Yeah, those guys pump my gas now.
[27:33.950 --> 27:35.190]  I sure as shit know the social order.
[27:36.590 --> 27:36.910]  Exactly.
[27:37.950 --> 27:41.810]  So, I've been trying to figure out how to hack schools, and I've been trying to figure out what their vulnerabilities are.
[27:42.890 --> 27:47.350]  There is an increasingly... there's increasing numbers of people who are heading out to homeschool instead.
[27:47.990 --> 27:49.970]  Some of these people, I think, are doing it in a great way.
[27:50.090 --> 27:57.350]  Other people are trying to do it in order to make sure that their kids have only... are only exposed to fundamentalist Christian ideas.
[27:57.370 --> 28:06.230]  I don't really support that, but I do wonder whether if we could develop more units, if we could develop more spaces that people can use outside of class, what we call third spaces.
[28:06.230 --> 28:07.130]  You can see down at the bottom.
[28:08.150 --> 28:13.330]  Places where... which are not the home, and they're not the school, but they're places where learning can happen, and it's in a non-coercive kind of a way.
[28:14.290 --> 28:16.470]  I'm hoping to find hackers and bring them there.
[28:16.750 --> 28:18.770]  I think, actually, we've got good models for this already.
[28:18.870 --> 28:22.270]  The way a lot of people learned over IRC and BBSs back in the day.
[28:22.830 --> 28:25.450]  You know, there's been... hackers have always taught each other this way.
[28:25.670 --> 28:27.290]  Geeks in general have always taught each other this way.
[28:27.350 --> 28:35.570]  And I'd actually like to, you know, find a way to sort of formalize that, not to make it like, okay, we're all gonna have grades, but like to be able to put it on your resume, you know, in a way.
[28:35.570 --> 28:41.970]  Because I know there's a lot of hackers out there who didn't get BAs, and may find that to be a liability in the job market right now.
[28:42.170 --> 28:43.310]  People who dropped out of high school.
[28:44.990 --> 28:46.270]  Actually, that's another interesting issue.
[28:46.410 --> 28:54.350]  I was reading some articles a while ago about, in New York City, there's kids who hate the school system so much that they're like, I'm dropping out of school, but it's not that I'm, you know, dropping out to do nothing.
[28:54.350 --> 29:00.630]  I'm going to go to a GED program and get my GED, maybe two or three years in advance, you know, so that they can just get out of schools as fast as they can.
[29:00.810 --> 29:05.230]  And I'd like to be able to support students like that as well, to work with charter schools.
[29:06.130 --> 29:13.930]  The other sort of interesting resource that I can think of offhand, high-tech companies in general, I think, have a lot of resources to put towards it.
[29:13.990 --> 29:17.590]  Obviously, we've got the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Google.org.
[29:17.710 --> 29:20.370]  You know, there's a lot of funding possibly available there.
[29:20.530 --> 29:29.490]  But then Google also has this thing where their employees are allowed for 20% of their time on the job to go and, you know, do something pro bono.
[29:29.490 --> 29:33.210]  So a lot of them went down, say, to after Hurricane Katrina and helped out down there.
[29:33.790 --> 29:46.690]  I'm hoping to maybe enlist some of them and then also volunteer hackers in general who would be hanging out in IRC anyway to maybe help teach in sort of a, you know, guide on the side, kind of a, you're just helping kids out kind of a way.
[29:47.150 --> 29:50.370]  So, oh, and then the other thing I wanted to say is librarians are awesome.
[29:50.370 --> 29:53.810]  As a third space client, that's great.
[29:54.210 --> 29:59.810]  It's nice to hear librarians getting applause because you do sometimes get people being like, oh, my God, they told me not to touch the computer.
[30:00.030 --> 30:03.150]  So, you know, there's a lot of librarians who are very forward-thinking.
[30:03.410 --> 30:12.230]  I actually know if you go to librarian.net, that's the site of Jessamyn West, who is the daughter of Paul West, who was the subject of the book Soul of the New Machine.
[30:12.850 --> 30:23.270]  She is very into increasingly doing work with digital rights, getting more computers into libraries, and, you know, figuring out what librarian means in a sort of a digital age.
[30:23.370 --> 30:24.870]  So, I think librarians will be a good resource, too.
[30:25.090 --> 30:27.970]  And I'll stop talking now, but these are a couple things I'd suggest reading.
[30:28.730 --> 30:32.930]  How People Learn is a great introduction to cognition, if you want to, you know, get some ammo there.
[30:33.470 --> 30:37.530]  And What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy is also a very readable book.
[30:38.570 --> 30:39.090]  Thank you.
[30:46.320 --> 30:48.240]  So, I would like to open up the floor to questions.
[30:48.380 --> 30:52.300]  And also, specifically, why don't you ask, like, if there's any things you want us to elaborate on.
[30:53.360 --> 30:58.280]  I want you to elaborate on epistemologies, because I wasn't really sure what you were going to talk about with that.
[30:58.700 --> 31:05.820]  So, epistemology is like the way humans construct knowledge and build bodies of knowledge.
[31:06.060 --> 31:17.440]  And I have been thinking a lot about how hackers in the traditional sense, I guess, versus academics build up pools of knowledge.
[31:17.680 --> 31:29.720]  And it seems almost that hackers almost build up knowledge by swarms of experimentalism, whereas academics do it by model building and theory testing.
[31:30.800 --> 31:34.640]  And this is both traditionally and stereotypically.
[31:35.100 --> 31:38.520]  And I've been thinking a lot about the advantages and disadvantages of each.
[31:39.480 --> 31:46.380]  The advantage of...the primary disadvantage for the hacker model, for example, is that there may be a huge amount of unseen bias.
[31:46.580 --> 31:52.760]  A good example is that the statement that Windows is insecure as compared to OS X.
[31:54.840 --> 32:02.120]  And because, you know, because all these hackers keep running all these exploits for Windows, but if you get down to the source code and you look at it and you want to sit down and break Windows...
[32:02.720 --> 32:08.120]  modern Windows versus modern OS X, OS X is far, far easier to break and there's far more problems with OS X.
[32:09.080 --> 32:11.200]  Most of you...I have an OS X machine myself.
[32:11.880 --> 32:24.120]  And the reality is that the reason why Windows is easier to break has been perceived easier to break is because it's much more economically profitable to invest your time in running an attack against Windows because you have more systems you can apply against versus OS X,
[32:24.180 --> 32:26.780]  which is very hard to get a vulnerability propagating.
[32:27.540 --> 32:38.680]  And the primary disadvantage of academics is a lot of times when you construct these models, you have to abstract them to the point that they may no longer be holding a basis in reality.
[32:38.680 --> 32:44.420]  And when you go to apply them, they may not be descriptive of anything in the world anymore.
[32:44.760 --> 32:50.640]  A good example of this is financial market modeling and how people...
[32:51.520 --> 32:52.240]  What's it called?
[32:52.320 --> 32:54.060]  The Black-Scholes equation is a very good example.
[32:54.260 --> 32:57.880]  It is how people came up with methods of option pricing.
[32:58.020 --> 33:02.740]  And it's based upon a market model where, over the short term, the market moved in a...
[33:02.740 --> 33:05.240]  what's called...it formed...what's called a normal distribution.
[33:05.240 --> 33:06.880]  And this is an abstraction.
[33:07.120 --> 33:09.180]  In reality, it forms what's called a heavy-tail distribution.
[33:09.420 --> 33:10.880]  What ends up happening in reality?
[33:11.060 --> 33:13.000]  Well, a couple guys used this model.
[33:13.100 --> 33:14.860]  They made 30% return on investments.
[33:14.880 --> 33:17.280]  And then one year, they almost crashed the world's stock markets.
[33:17.440 --> 33:17.900]  All of them.
[33:18.000 --> 33:18.980]  They almost all shut down.
[33:20.420 --> 33:25.840]  Because they used a model that was too heavily leveraged and they had too much faith in it.
[33:26.320 --> 33:30.940]  And in reality, the model did not accurately track what happened in the real world.
[33:30.940 --> 33:32.960]  And things almost broke very bad.
[33:34.500 --> 33:39.800]  So, both those...I mean, I'm kind of interested in how both those methodologies kind of can intermesh at times.
[33:39.840 --> 33:42.620]  And how they both work together and don't work together.
[33:42.780 --> 33:44.180]  And how knowledge is reached through both.
[33:44.680 --> 33:48.180]  It's just an abstract thought that's been kicking around in the back of my head for some time.
[33:50.120 --> 33:52.440]  So, I think we have our first question.
[33:53.420 --> 33:54.060]  You, sir.
[33:54.520 --> 33:57.120]  Also, for the best questions, we're going to vote on them.
[33:57.120 --> 33:58.220]  They get a donut.
[33:59.980 --> 34:01.460]  They've been around since the last panel.
[34:01.560 --> 34:02.680]  We can't guarantee their freshness.
[34:03.820 --> 34:06.860]  I actually have a couple of things.
[34:07.020 --> 34:11.200]  Real quick, your discussion about different epistemologies.
[34:11.380 --> 34:14.320]  I think that academia has a truth-based epistemology.
[34:14.460 --> 34:17.760]  In the sense that they have statements that they evaluate as true or false.
[34:18.620 --> 34:25.040]  And the hacker is more of a process slash utilitarian idea of building knowledge.
[34:25.440 --> 34:32.800]  Where, for instance, your critique of the Windows is easier to hack is truth-based.
[34:33.080 --> 34:38.380]  Because, technically, a person, you know, you put them in a place, hack Windows.
[34:38.680 --> 34:42.080]  It will be easier for them to hack Windows than to hack OSX.
[34:42.660 --> 34:46.580]  It doesn't mean that the code, you know, it's two different statements.
[34:47.340 --> 34:54.000]  Saying that the Windows code is equally insecure or Mac OSX code is more insecure.
[34:54.000 --> 34:57.960]  It's a different statement than saying it's easy to hack.
[34:58.260 --> 35:03.260]  It's just, again, truth-based epistemology versus process slash utilitarian-based.
[35:03.400 --> 35:03.560]  Right.
[35:03.680 --> 35:05.120]  And I largely agree with that.
[35:05.280 --> 35:11.020]  It's, while it's not, I mean, it's much more nuanced than that, I think that is largely true.
[35:11.020 --> 35:17.500]  And mostly not because of necessarily the way these people are trained, but also it's what is expected out of them.
[35:17.820 --> 35:25.520]  By, largely by people who fund them and their peers that taught them when they went to university and the like.
[35:26.380 --> 35:30.840]  Yeah, I mean, although, let me just say one thing in kind of defense of academia.
[35:30.840 --> 35:47.160]  You know, I think in our modern society, pretty much the only people who are supported by society whose job is quite specifically to be as subversive as possible are academics.
[35:47.680 --> 35:47.760]  Right.
[35:47.900 --> 35:58.640]  This is the, you know, this is kind of, if you want the job description of an academic, it is to be disruptive, to change things, to undermine, you know, our existing thoughts.
[35:58.640 --> 36:07.320]  So, you know, that, you have to kind of temper this very structured model for what constitutes, you know, an acceptable increment in academia.
[36:07.540 --> 36:08.780]  And it certainly is tedious.
[36:09.560 --> 36:19.140]  But on the other hand, you know, the flip side of that is, you know, disruptive is the ultimate success.
[36:19.680 --> 36:23.140]  You know, which is, I think, a very hacker-friendly...
[36:23.780 --> 36:25.260]  But that's not... That's also not completely protected.
[36:25.420 --> 36:29.620]  I mean, obviously we have, you know, the right-wing making attacks on academics right after 9-11.
[36:29.820 --> 36:29.860]  Right.
[36:29.860 --> 36:36.860]  But then also, on top of that, there's a movement afoot to try to standardize education at the higher education level.
[36:37.060 --> 36:39.000]  Much in the way that they're doing with the No Child Left Behind Act.
[36:39.140 --> 36:46.380]  So they're trying to say, okay, if you're in such and such a program, you know, you're going to learn this and this and this and this.
[36:46.380 --> 36:51.820]  So they're trying to standardize that as well to make academics into products, which is really sad from my point of view.
[36:51.960 --> 37:02.560]  Because I'm in a department where I work with sociologists and linguists and historians and an artist and, you know, classicists who are insistent that we read Plato five times a year.
[37:03.280 --> 37:10.320]  So, like, you know, I have this really sort of, like, weird, you know, synergy going on with all these different ideas.
[37:10.460 --> 37:11.100]  And that really helps.
[37:11.200 --> 37:19.720]  And I think, you know, it's a problem if we begin to let people say, you know, you are going to have to be able to perform on a standardized test, things like that.
[37:20.340 --> 37:23.140]  And, in fact, so two additional statements to that.
[37:23.520 --> 37:24.520]  That's absolutely true.
[37:24.580 --> 37:31.980]  In fact, the only time I could really say that I had complete freedom to really do what I wanted to do was when I started my graduate degree.
[37:32.520 --> 37:39.980]  After undergrad was finished, after I had that piece proven that I was able to do that, I received a grant from the National Science Foundation for my work.
[37:39.980 --> 37:46.540]  And that grant basically said, here is about close to a quarter million dollars.
[37:47.920 --> 37:49.100]  Go pay your tuition.
[37:49.280 --> 37:49.920]  Go pay yourself.
[37:50.280 --> 37:51.660]  Come back in three years with whatever.
[37:51.960 --> 37:52.200]  Right.
[37:52.580 --> 37:53.500]  And that's what it was.
[37:53.900 --> 37:57.180]  So that was an incredible amount of freedom.
[37:57.180 --> 38:12.840]  And one additional comment to what you were saying is it's very ironic that the standard formula for academic research is read a bunch of papers, pick a flaw across the entire idea set, and then change the way the world is.
[38:12.980 --> 38:16.420]  So it's almost like it's a formula to break things.
[38:16.640 --> 38:18.700]  And that is a good dissertation.
[38:19.240 --> 38:25.600]  Is read papers, figure out what everyone believes, understand why that's wrong, and prove why it's wrong.
[38:25.600 --> 38:33.000]  And then your student will go and do, you know, when you become a professor, your student's job is to go read your papers and everything that you contributed.
[38:33.180 --> 38:35.220]  Not mine, but someone else's.
[38:35.320 --> 38:35.560]  Not me, no.
[38:36.360 --> 38:40.160]  But there's, you know, actually I wanted to say also, and I'm sorry we're running over the questions.
[38:40.900 --> 38:46.440]  I mean, the very epistemologies, the ways that we know are also being threatened.
[38:46.700 --> 38:49.820]  Also, it's just this administration is doing some pretty rotten things.
[38:49.820 --> 38:52.640]  I mean, when it comes to things like NSF grants, specifically.
[38:53.020 --> 38:58.720]  And when it comes to education grants from the, forgetting the foundation's name.
[38:59.140 --> 39:03.840]  But they are beginning to ask for only quantitative data.
[39:04.000 --> 39:06.660]  Which may sound fine to you as people who deal with numbers a lot.
[39:06.920 --> 39:11.360]  But there are questions, social questions really should not be answered in my opinion.
[39:11.360 --> 39:13.540]  And I can give you a philosophical background on this some other time.
[39:14.620 --> 39:16.600]  By, you know, quantifying them.
[39:16.720 --> 39:21.500]  By turning, you know, human feelings, pain and suffering and joy into numbers.
[39:22.220 --> 39:31.360]  So, they're beginning to cut down on the amount of funding for research that doesn't, you know, that's just asking people about the quality of their life.
[39:31.620 --> 39:33.120]  And this really matters in education.
[39:33.500 --> 39:37.480]  They've actually shut down some of the clearing houses for qualitative data.
[39:38.740 --> 39:39.840]  They're actually defunding them.
[39:39.960 --> 39:44.700]  And so, there will not be a place anymore where people can go to sort of go, okay, what is the experience of children going through school right now?
[39:45.380 --> 39:46.320]  So, that's another way.
[39:46.920 --> 39:48.700]  Epistemologically, they're saying only this way of knowing.
[39:48.820 --> 39:50.160]  Only the numerical way of knowing is valid.
[39:50.260 --> 39:54.820]  And speaking also to the crowd that would very much be concerned with this.
[39:55.420 --> 39:58.980]  So, there once was a wonderful, wonderful organization called DARPA.
[39:59.340 --> 40:05.860]  And DARPA gave out huge sums of money to computer scientists who are studying anything.
[40:05.860 --> 40:07.080]  And they said, dream.
[40:07.620 --> 40:09.280]  Go come up with something that's wonderful.
[40:09.520 --> 40:10.780]  And we'll use it to kill people.
[40:10.960 --> 40:11.860]  Well, the...
[40:12.960 --> 40:15.600]  Well, use it to protect American lives.
[40:15.920 --> 40:20.900]  But DARPA gave the funding to create the Internet and many other wonderful technologies.
[40:20.900 --> 40:26.980]  And now they've changed the message from go off and dream and come up with something wonderful to on the ground in Baghdad in 18 months.
[40:27.120 --> 40:27.280]  Right.
[40:28.280 --> 40:30.460]  Which is a major shift.
[40:30.720 --> 40:33.540]  So, from pure research, I've produced things like the Internet.
[40:33.780 --> 40:37.440]  Produced engineers who can go out and build incredible pieces of technology.
[40:38.580 --> 40:40.360]  And so, it's like I'm not...
[40:40.360 --> 40:41.120]  Well, let me just...
[40:41.120 --> 40:46.040]  I've been in the academic-ish game, even though I was kind of at Bell Labs for a while.
[40:46.040 --> 40:57.960]  But, I mean, one thing that is absolutely short, any time you get a bunch of academics together and talk about academia, the discussion at any point in history, the funding situation is intolerable.
[40:58.100 --> 41:02.160]  It's much worse than it ever was before, and we're all going to die.
[41:02.380 --> 41:02.440]  Yeah.
[41:02.580 --> 41:05.440]  You know, that's kind of all academic discussions.
[41:05.460 --> 41:06.560]  Let me summarize that way.
[41:06.720 --> 41:07.480]  So, I'm not...
[41:07.480 --> 41:11.220]  You know, we need to temper that.
[41:11.220 --> 41:15.440]  The funding situation, by the way, is absolutely intolerable, and we are all going to die.
[41:16.680 --> 41:17.080]  But...
[41:17.080 --> 41:18.660]  It's worse than it's ever been before.
[41:18.860 --> 41:19.880]  It will never be as bad again.
[41:20.040 --> 41:23.380]  On the other hand, you know, we academics have been around for, you know, a while.
[41:24.280 --> 41:26.200]  We survive political systems.
[41:26.200 --> 41:29.200]  We're kind of the cockroaches of the economy.
[41:29.920 --> 41:31.480]  So, you know...
[41:31.920 --> 41:36.840]  And in reality, it's more true than you believe, because they eat week-old donuts and Ramen noodles.
[41:37.100 --> 41:38.260]  By the way, we have donuts.
[41:38.560 --> 41:38.700]  Yeah.
[41:39.120 --> 41:39.680]  If anyone wants to.
[41:39.680 --> 41:40.160]  One second.
[41:40.500 --> 41:40.640]  Okay.
[41:41.460 --> 41:42.080]  So, we have donuts.
[41:42.080 --> 41:42.800]  Not a question.
[41:43.020 --> 41:43.900]  Just information.
[41:43.900 --> 41:59.520]  I heard an article on NPR last week that Scottish University, the Abertay-Dundee, will be offering an undergraduate course in ethical hacking and countermeasures, where they teach students how to use hacker tools in order to secure their own networks.
[42:00.720 --> 42:02.420]  I love that they call it ethical hacking.
[42:02.540 --> 42:02.800]  That's cool.
[42:03.040 --> 42:03.460]  You got me.
[42:03.460 --> 42:06.720]  I generally take a lot of the undergraduate things to be a gimmick.
[42:06.720 --> 42:23.460]  Mostly because I know that people don't like the idea of learning the fundamentals sometimes, but if you know assembly language, you'll be able to break systems far better from now to any time in the future than if you learn what the current set of hacker tools is.
[42:23.980 --> 42:25.600]  Apparently they require a background check.
[42:25.600 --> 42:26.800]  They require a background check.
[42:26.920 --> 42:26.980]  Yeah.
[42:27.160 --> 42:27.800]  That's really...
[42:27.800 --> 42:31.540]  That's a gimmick to get undergraduate, you know, reputation.
[42:31.560 --> 42:31.720]  Makeup scene.
[42:32.360 --> 42:32.460]  Yeah.
[42:32.920 --> 42:33.220]  More.
[42:34.080 --> 42:34.320]  Yeah.
[42:34.480 --> 42:40.420]  So, I'm not all that convinced that DARPA is necessarily doing the funding for 18 months from now.
[42:40.420 --> 42:40.800]  Speak up, please.
[42:41.040 --> 42:45.160]  I'm not all that convinced that DARPA is just doing the 18 months from now funding.
[42:45.160 --> 42:50.520]  I think they also have a lot of programs for five years off, ten years off, and all sorts of things like that.
[42:51.520 --> 42:55.520]  But that was just from, like, recently reviewing the webpage with solicitations.
[42:55.940 --> 42:58.640]  In any case, back to my actual question.
[42:58.780 --> 43:00.180]  Well, actually, let me just speak to that real quick.
[43:01.360 --> 43:01.440]  Okay.
[43:01.440 --> 43:04.460]  I want to just get to one of my pet peeves.
[43:04.520 --> 43:13.620]  One of the big problems is if you look at the DARPA budget, it used to be about 50-50, and that might not be exactly the right number, but classified and unclassified programs.
[43:13.860 --> 43:18.920]  The academics, you know, are kind of limited to the unclassified programs because academia is inherently open.
[43:19.060 --> 43:21.820]  That's the basis for the scientific method, really important.
[43:21.980 --> 43:23.360]  Never get a security clearance.
[43:25.540 --> 43:29.260]  The, you know, that is the surest form of selling your soul out.
[43:29.560 --> 43:35.400]  DARPA funding has been shifting more and more into these classified programs that the open community can't be in.
[43:35.400 --> 43:42.820]  So, a lot of those forward-looking ones are in programs that the open academic community is excluded from.
[43:42.940 --> 43:43.780]  Do you have a new percentage?
[43:43.940 --> 43:44.840]  Because you just said 50-50.
[43:46.060 --> 43:47.120]  That's about right.
[43:47.360 --> 43:47.600]  Put this right.
[43:47.740 --> 43:49.040]  The classified budget is classified.
[43:49.560 --> 43:56.040]  But, I mean, DARPA is very heavily oriented toward classified programs right now.
[43:56.180 --> 43:58.000]  So, we're kind of cut out of those.
[43:58.700 --> 43:59.440]  Anyway, sorry.
[43:59.780 --> 44:00.160]  All right.
[44:00.620 --> 44:05.380]  So, my question, I guess, comes to these new sorts of schools.
[44:05.400 --> 44:08.060]  that you kind of are considering opening.
[44:08.320 --> 44:09.960]  What sort of testing might you do?
[44:10.160 --> 44:18.880]  Because I understand standardized testing currently wants something efficient where potentially you can take one test and slam a number on someone and send them off.
[44:19.140 --> 44:26.160]  So, with like a different sort of school, you'd need a different sort of testing system, right?
[44:26.380 --> 44:26.720]  Yeah.
[44:26.820 --> 44:28.980]  Are you saying what kind of testing should we do instead?
[44:29.240 --> 44:29.420]  Yeah.
[44:29.420 --> 44:30.340]  I'm just...
[44:30.340 --> 44:35.620]  One of the things that seems to work because it's portable and it really provides examples is portfolios.
[44:35.820 --> 44:39.020]  Like, you do projects and then you have documents that you can carry around with you.
[44:39.080 --> 44:40.120]  It actually happens a lot now.
[44:40.120 --> 44:52.100]  And I'm pointing to my friend who's teaching over at Montclair State in schools of education, like we're in, where you have teachers who are like, okay, here's the leftover materials from this particular unit that I taught or here's a paper that I wrote on this.
[44:52.660 --> 44:58.680]  So, that kind of stuff, I mean like that's sort of more like the SAT-2s where you actually have exams, you know, writing exams and stuff like that.
[44:58.820 --> 45:06.580]  People can actually see what your work is and that could come in the form also of websites or, you know, snippets of code or things like that.
[45:06.840 --> 45:14.300]  So, that I think is sort of more what we're suggesting for a more complex means of evaluating people.
[45:14.540 --> 45:17.440]  And at the graduate school level, that really is what you have.
[45:17.600 --> 45:19.800]  You have very much a one-on-one experience with your advisor.
[45:19.800 --> 45:20.600]  You have articles.
[45:20.880 --> 45:21.420]  You have CV.
[45:21.600 --> 45:23.140]  You're responsible for producing articles.
[45:23.360 --> 45:24.360]  You're responsible for giving talks.
[45:24.960 --> 45:25.100]  Right.
[45:25.180 --> 45:26.140]  No one looks at your grades.
[45:26.380 --> 45:29.100]  No one cares about that.
[45:29.800 --> 45:33.060]  My question is also about the No Child Left Behind Act.
[45:33.160 --> 45:33.320]  Yeah.
[45:33.840 --> 45:46.360]  I'm wondering, so I see the No Child Left Behind Act as sort of risk management done by the government on schools because in a world where there are no tests, there are certain risks.
[45:46.960 --> 45:54.820]  It comes at a, in my opinion, a higher cost than is worth it in the terms of quality of education.
[45:54.820 --> 46:00.940]  But I'm wondering what you think are the risks of, I guess, particularly leaving children behind.
[46:02.740 --> 46:03.840]  Well, that's what the...
[46:03.840 --> 46:04.360]  It's a bad name.
[46:04.380 --> 46:05.300]  The Act is really doing that anyway, yeah.
[46:05.520 --> 46:13.940]  But what do you think would happen if we decided to maybe abandon or not entirely abandon, but let schools be less structured?
[46:14.920 --> 46:20.960]  And what risks do you think the government is trying to prevent that maybe are valid or invalid risks?
[46:20.960 --> 46:30.680]  Well, if you produce students who aren't just quantifiable products, honestly, there is kind of a mismatch with the rest of the economy as a whole because everything else is a commodity.
[46:30.940 --> 46:32.140]  Ultimately, it can be standardized.
[46:32.620 --> 46:35.360]  It can, you know, a McDonald's hamburger is the same wherever you go.
[46:35.540 --> 46:38.920]  You know, there are ISO 9000 standards for all kinds of different things.
[46:39.080 --> 46:41.220]  Like, you know, so it's the same kind of thing.
[46:41.500 --> 46:47.320]  It's to make it so students can go very far away and do work and people say, this is who you are.
[46:47.320 --> 46:50.360]  But I actually, I mean, honestly, you can't standardize people.
[46:50.500 --> 46:51.980]  And so, ultimately, that's not really working anyway.
[46:52.180 --> 46:58.020]  Like, my grades, when I went, you know, 3000 miles away to college, you know, who knows?
[46:58.140 --> 46:58.820]  Who knew who I was?
[46:58.940 --> 47:01.040]  Like, they thought they knew, but I just, I don't know.
[47:01.100 --> 47:01.560]  It's up to you.
[47:01.640 --> 47:05.540]  I think it's up to each of us to decide whether we think that people can actually be judged that way.
[47:07.580 --> 47:13.200]  Yeah, so I think the risk is that you end up with a great deal more unknowns, basically, as you said.
[47:14.380 --> 47:19.260]  And I don't know if that's a, you know, a suitable response or whether you want to hear more.
[47:19.380 --> 47:22.980]  But that's, you know, that's ultimately what you're risking, is having mismatches.
[47:23.100 --> 47:26.880]  And, you know, the sad thing is a lot of these things would not be necessary if we had a...
[47:26.880 --> 47:31.620]  I mean, this is really preaching to choir, but if we had a culture of learning in our society, which we really don't.
[47:31.700 --> 47:32.500]  We have a culture of work.
[47:32.500 --> 47:32.960]  Yeah.
[47:33.360 --> 47:33.840]  Right.
[47:34.020 --> 47:35.320]  But if we had a...
[47:35.320 --> 47:42.600]  I was raised in a household where my father was going to school while being a teacher.
[47:43.260 --> 47:45.120]  And my mother was a substitute teacher.
[47:45.740 --> 47:47.300]  So, if there's like a...
[47:47.300 --> 47:49.880]  I guess if a family industry, it's education.
[47:50.820 --> 47:52.520]  My entertainment was going to the library.
[47:53.840 --> 47:59.560]  And there was definitely a very strong culture of wanting to learn and wanting to read and wanting to do things.
[47:59.560 --> 48:00.200]  And so...
[48:00.200 --> 48:01.640]  That's an interesting point.
[48:01.840 --> 48:02.900]  I mean, one of the big things...
[48:02.900 --> 48:08.120]  And speaking of mismatches, there will always be mismatches on the other end, too, if you continue with standardized testing.
[48:08.260 --> 48:17.340]  What you get is kids who do not come from academic households, especially from, you know, poor working-class households, who are sort of like, what is this school thing?
[48:17.380 --> 48:18.900]  It's nothing like what I do at home.
[48:19.000 --> 48:19.400]  When I go...
[48:19.400 --> 48:27.340]  When I'm at home, like, there's been some work done on African-American communities and how the way parents ask questions to kids is very different.
[48:27.340 --> 48:33.540]  Like, for example, like, parents will ask kids in African-American communities when they really want to know an answer and they don't know the answer to it.
[48:33.600 --> 48:39.120]  Whereas in schools, generally we ask, you know, questions that we already know the answers to.
[48:39.320 --> 48:41.560]  And so we're asking students, but students don't quite...
[48:41.560 --> 48:44.680]  Like, sometimes African-American students are seen as surly by teachers.
[48:44.720 --> 48:46.140]  And this is the research that's been done.
[48:47.300 --> 48:50.520]  Because they're like, you obviously know the answer to that question.
[48:50.520 --> 48:51.580]  Why are you asking me?
[48:51.580 --> 48:54.120]  So there's these mismatches in how we ask questions.
[48:54.340 --> 48:55.400]  There's mismatches in how we know.
[48:56.880 --> 49:12.240]  And so when you have a standardized system that middle-class and upper-middle-class students are really good at doing, if they have models at home for it, like their parents read the paper, their parents ask certain kinds of questions, then you end up leaving behind the kids who are not born into that culture.
[49:12.680 --> 49:14.640]  And I think probably a lot of us were born into that culture.
[49:14.640 --> 49:15.980]  So that's just something you have to consider.
[49:16.260 --> 49:17.480]  That's the other side of the equation.
[49:17.780 --> 49:19.540]  I mean, and really, it doesn't...
[49:19.540 --> 49:22.000]  While it is strongly correlated with economics, it doesn't have to be.
[49:22.120 --> 49:24.380]  I mean, we were poor and working class, actually.
[49:24.540 --> 49:32.500]  It was just that at some point, my family made the decision that they're not going to be working in box factories all their life, pretty much.
[49:32.820 --> 49:35.760]  And so that's really what the issue is.
[49:35.860 --> 49:36.320]  If you...
[49:36.780 --> 49:43.220]  When you have kids, or if you have kids, if you want them to want to learn, you have to learn in front of them.
[49:43.820 --> 49:45.860]  You have to be people that are interested in learning.
[49:46.000 --> 49:49.020]  You have to be people that ask questions why things are the way they are.
[49:49.820 --> 49:52.200]  And it doesn't matter if it's technology or whatever.
[49:52.380 --> 49:56.680]  It just has to be an inquisitive mind and wanting to break it down and say, why is this the way it is?
[49:56.900 --> 50:04.400]  And if your children... just like children will learn from their parents to smoke, children will learn from their parents to be inquisitive and to want to learn.
[50:05.820 --> 50:06.220]  Thanks.
[50:08.380 --> 50:20.840]  So while we're talking about all this, how bad tests are and stuff, and how we can get rid of them, I went to a school through kindergarten through eighth grade, where we didn't have grades, we didn't have tests.
[50:21.320 --> 50:32.560]  And we had parent-teacher conferences and a portfolio sort of thing, where we wrote down everything we learned in a pretty cool book, and eventually we even bound our own books.
[50:32.760 --> 50:34.560]  And I think it was really effective.
[50:34.920 --> 50:41.920]  And given the non-government-funded, mandated structure, we were able to walk to the library and just hang out.
[50:42.020 --> 50:45.440]  And I thought it was wonderful, and I think that sort of system really can work.
[50:46.180 --> 50:46.700]  Cool.
[50:46.900 --> 50:50.400]  And that works very well for many people or many self-motivated students.
[50:50.400 --> 50:51.760]  I think that's a big part of it.
[50:52.260 --> 50:53.400]  Sometimes that's...
[50:54.160 --> 50:54.460]  Yeah.
[50:58.360 --> 50:59.720]  Can we have somebody who hasn't gone before?
[50:59.900 --> 51:00.060]  Let's see.
[51:00.180 --> 51:00.620]  Yeah, there we go.
[51:01.260 --> 51:01.580]  Are we...
[51:01.580 --> 51:02.060]  Do we have time still?
[51:02.260 --> 51:03.880]  I think we have about five minutes, right?
[51:04.040 --> 51:05.340]  And we didn't give out any donuts yet.
[51:05.540 --> 51:05.640]  Yeah.
[51:06.560 --> 51:10.540]  I have a question on the sort of the pro bono bit that Google's doing.
[51:10.740 --> 51:10.920]  Yeah.
[51:11.900 --> 51:14.920]  I'm wondering how long is that going to last before they have to...
[51:14.920 --> 51:15.780]  Good question.
[51:15.780 --> 51:18.900]  ...or says, hey, this doesn't do anything to our bottom line.
[51:19.460 --> 51:19.480]  Right.
[51:19.480 --> 51:19.520]  Yeah.
[51:19.820 --> 51:20.600]  Well, I mean, I think...
[51:20.600 --> 51:23.320]  I know a bunch of people at Google.
[51:23.520 --> 51:29.660]  And, you know, basically, you know, it's the 20% you do after the 150% that you've already done...
[51:29.660 --> 51:30.900]  That's a thing they don't tell you.
[51:31.120 --> 51:31.320]  Right, right.
[51:31.840 --> 51:35.660]  So, you know, I mean, ultimately you have a job and you have to get that job done.
[51:36.020 --> 51:38.840]  And, you know, I think that's true in any environment.
[51:38.980 --> 51:41.380]  The question is, though, how broadly is that job defined?
[51:41.620 --> 51:44.920]  And what do you have to do to attract good creative people?
[51:44.920 --> 51:49.220]  I mean, Google has really, really good people working for it.
[51:49.340 --> 51:52.400]  And one of the reasons that it's been so successful is those good people.
[51:52.560 --> 51:58.940]  In order to attract them, you have to convince them that they're going to be able to have, you know, an interesting environment and an interesting work day.
[51:59.100 --> 52:01.030]  So, in a lot of ways, I think that 20% is...
[52:01.720 --> 52:08.360]  I've never worked there, but I think that's kind of a gimmick for describing a larger culture that they're trying to...
[52:08.360 --> 52:17.620]  In fact, for all the people who have heard the freshman 15 from university, there's actually something called the Google 15 because they have five-star chefs there that cook you lunch and dinner if you want it.
[52:18.480 --> 52:21.100]  And it's people put on a lot of pounds.
[52:21.640 --> 52:21.700]  Yeah.
[52:23.680 --> 52:23.940]  Yeah.
[52:23.960 --> 52:24.420]  Go.
[52:24.620 --> 52:24.920]  Please.
[52:26.140 --> 52:33.420]  One of the things I wanted to ask, actually, was about some of the connections, maybe, between technology and academia.
[52:33.420 --> 52:37.460]  A lot of us have decided to continue and go on and get our doctorates and that sort of thing.
[52:37.560 --> 52:40.540]  So, what are some of the natural connections that you see?
[52:40.640 --> 52:47.840]  Some reasons that people might want to continue, particularly women in the field, that you can speak to?
[52:48.560 --> 52:53.640]  So, I mean, let me just give you the quick, my quick resume.
[52:54.040 --> 52:58.380]  So, working backwards, I have a PhD from Princeton.
[52:58.380 --> 53:08.340]  So, I have a tenured faculty job at the University of Pennsylvania, PhD from Princeton, undergraduate degree from Hunter College in New York, and before that, I'm high school dropout.
[53:09.060 --> 53:21.080]  One of the things that I have definitely found is that education gets a lot more interesting and your opportunities get a lot more interesting as you move up that hierarchy.
[53:21.380 --> 53:27.460]  You know, one of the wonderful things is that graduate school is not simply a harder version of high school, right?
[53:27.460 --> 53:42.460]  You know, as you kind of move up in the academic ranks, the amount of creativity required versus the amount of kind of rote learning, that ratio inverts.
[53:43.540 --> 53:47.720]  And, you know, to the point where at the end, it's ultimately supposed to be all creativity.
[53:48.580 --> 53:57.920]  And, you know, unfortunately, people aren't allowed to be creative at the point at which they're making choices that are going to affect their opportunities much, much later.
[53:58.160 --> 54:08.280]  And I think the reason that I got a PhD, frankly, is because by the time I had gotten into the academic groove, this was just the path of least resistance.
[54:08.420 --> 54:13.960]  This was the only way I was going to have the kind of autonomy in my life to be able to have the kind of life I want.
[54:13.960 --> 54:17.120]  And, you know, I think you get a more interesting job at the end of it.
[54:17.760 --> 54:18.700]  Not for the money.
[54:18.880 --> 54:23.040]  You know, the opportunity cost of getting a PhD, economically, bad deal.
[54:23.260 --> 54:28.200]  But, you know, if you want to enjoy your work, it's a surer bet.
[54:28.740 --> 54:31.100]  And I think that's an excellent point to end on.
[54:31.340 --> 54:36.020]  I'd like to thank everyone for attending, and we'll be able to still take questions after we step off.
[54:36.020 --> 54:36.940]  Thank
[54:43.340 --> 54:43.840]  you.
[54:44.060 --> 54:48.780]  Coming up next in five minutes is How To Steal Someone's Implanted RFID.
[54:48.780 --> 54:48.880]  Ready?