One of the kids on our street, Khalif, surprised me when, in response to the 2008 Presidential election, he said, “I hate Barack Obama.”

“What???” came my kneejerk reaction. Just a few weeks ago, I knew Khalif was rooting for Obama FTW!

“Because,” Khalif explained, “my teachers were always saying I could grow up to be anything… I wanted to be the first black President.”

This was a witty and insightful comment from one of the brightest kids on the block, and I assured him that being “the first” wasn’t everything, despite the emphasis our culture places on firsts. What’s more important is the climb to the top and the career that follows.

Dr. Skip Ellis
Credit: UoC at Boulder

In 1969, Clarence Ellis became the first African American to receive a Ph.D. in Computer Science. One of five children raised by a single mother on the south side of Chicago, Ellis was introduced to computers in 1958 when, at the age of 15, he got a part-time job as a security guard for an insurance company, guarding the company’s new and expensive computer. Although he was not allowed to operate the computer, he did read all of the operating manuals, which empowered him to play the hero one day when the computer technicians ran out of punch cards to complete an important project, Ellis was able to show them how to reuse old punch cards.

Illiac IV Parallel Computer
Credit: Steve Jurvetson

Dr. Ellis’ career includes helping to come up with the idea of clicking on icons to launch programs, a concept without which the majority of today’s users would be helpless to use a computer. At the University of Illinois, Ellis worked with the Illiac 4, one of the world’s first supercomputers. Today he enlightens students at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he teaches Groupware, Workflow Systems, and Computer Science, and established a 10-week Summer Multicultural Access to Research Training program. Despite his advanced contributions to the field, Dr. Ellis believes teaching an introductory Computer Science course is very important, especially for students who aren’t majoring in the field, as this science becomes increasingly enmeshed with our daily lives.

Even a half-century later, there are still plenty of “firsts” waiting to be achieved for all Computer Scientists. Unfortunately, according to the 2007-2008 Taulbee Survey, a scant 1.3 percent of current university faculty working in computer science identify as “Black or African-American.” Only 0.7 percent of 2007-2008 full time computer science faculty are black, up from 0.2 percent in the 2001-2002 survey. While the honor of “first African American CS Ph.D” was taken 40 years ago, there is still plenty of room for others to follow Dr. Ellis’ impressive career, and, in doing so, become leaders themselves.

Further Reading:

Eight Trigrams of the Yijing

In Sadie Plant’s book zeros + ones, she explores the duality of binary digits as fitting in with the human habit of dichotomizing concepts:

The zeros and ones of machine code seem to offer themselves as a perfect symbols of the orders of Western reality, the ancient logical codes which make the difference between on and off, right and left, light and dark, form and matter, mind and body, white and black, good and evil, right and wrong, life and death, something and nothing, this and that, here and there, inside and out, active and passive, true and false, yes and no, sanity and madness, health and sickness, up and down, sense and nonsense, west and east, north and south… Man and woman, male and female, masculine and feminine, one and zero looked just right, made for each other: 1, the definite, upright line; and 0, the diagram of nothing at all…

However she is incorrect in stereotyping this pattern to the greater “orders of Western reality,” when, in reality, the habit of framing concepts into dichotomies is a universal human habit. In fact, the best example of this in Eastern thought is the yin (0) and yang (1). I recently discovered that the Yijing, an ancient Chinese classic text/divination tool (I’m personally partial to thinking of it as a secular Confucian Philosophy text), uses eight trigrams with unique binary values that combine in pairs to express the 64 hexagrams within the text, each identifying a different concept.

Binary Concepts of the Yijing

The mathematician/philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz viewed these concepts within the Yijing expressed as binary numbers as evidence of major Chinese accomplishments in philosophical mathematics. The entire Yijing can be expressed through a looping string of binary digits, from which any set of six digits from the below string will key into a unique entry:

Seymour Papert’s Mindstorms

Dr. Seymour Papert is best known as the inventor of the Logo programming language, a tool for teaching children problem solving, but his influence in education goes much further than that. Papert has always been a visionary where computers and education intersect, and it is incredible how glacially society has moved to embrace his proposed pedagogical recommendations.

30 years ago, Seymour Papert argued for integrating computers into the classroom as a means of accelerating learning and empowering children with the means to direct their own educations. In his classic text Mindstorms he postulates that the cost of having a computer system for every child would actually save the school system money because it would shorten the number of years required to educate each student:

The problem of cost has not gone away, but it may be overestimated how much it would cost to put a computer for every child in a school. $1,000 a child spread out over 12 years? Plus, the use of computers could accelerate learning, maybe even cut a year off of the amount of time it takes to educate a student, saving 1/12th the cost of a child’s total education.

Papert was talking about computers in 1980 dollars, before the home PC had dropped in price to today’s more accessible levels and magnified power, so today the above statement is even truer. One laptop for every child in America would cut the number of years necessary to educate our children and enhance the quality of their education dramatically.

My Opponent Vicky

I’ve got a folder of great ideas I will never get to, and one meme I’ve had in there for a long time, but never knew how to implement, was a card game involving programming logic, where two players construct applications out of conditional logic to defeat each other. Then I recently found the card game Booleo, where two players race to complete pyramids made out of logic gates that achieve a specific result. It was a quickly-played game, with simple rules, but with an engaging logic that is quite satisfying to play with.

The game starts out with six bits randomly assigned values. The bits you are assigned are the exact opposite of the bits your opponent must work with. The goal is to reduce this random series to a single binary state that matches the rightmost bit in the initial sequence before your opponent. We quickly discovered there were certain logic functions that were much more valuable than others, after reviewing the frequency of results in the function tables:

Bait Ball
Credit: Lara Sobel

In the extraordinary documentary Blue Planet there were several examples of a school of fish forming a bait ball to defend against predators, where a school of fish swirls into itself, becoming a tightly-knit unit; however, what we see in the documentary is this school of fish becoming easy prey for a variety of larger predators, as marlins, seabirds, and even a whale come in to tear it to pieces in a feeding frenzy. On the one hand, there are safety in numbers with the fish gathering into a school; on the other hand, the bait ball seems like an evolutionary maladaptation, allowing predators to herd their prey into an easily consumed mass. The advantages of the school must outweigh the disadvantages; otherwise, smaller fish would have evolved to flee in all directions when threatened.

Check out when a blue whale swallows this bait ball whole:

As I was indulging in space warfare escapism with Star Trek Online, I saw how a team I was working with mimicked the flocking behaviors of certain animals. We flew together like a flock of birds into a battle against some Klingons, taking position in the center of the arena, and then pulled into a tightly-knit ball, flying circles around each other and daring our enemies to engage it. We had formed a bait ball, but one armed to the teeth and ready to lash out at the predators attempting to herd us. The tactic works exceptionally well, as the Klingon offense eventually cracked, taking the bait, and having their assault fall to pieces against our unified school of Federation starships.

Federation Starship Bait Ball

I still don’t know how it works to the advantage of bait fish though.

The Bit

Computer Literacy through Incentivized Learning

Communities in Northeastern Carolina still reflect the ethnic divisions created before the Civil Rights era. The schools, while no longer segregated by official policy, were never integrated, meaning there is a “Black School” and a “White School” as my conversations with locals have revealed, and attempts to force integration through public policy a few years back were met with protest. This environment creates social dynamics we who come from integrated communities aren’t familiar with.

For instance, I didn’t realize that the run down three-bedroom house I purchased for $50k four years ago, just a block down the street from similar houses selling for $150k, wasn’t the fantastic investment I thought because it was on the “Black Street” in the neighborhood. My choice of residence caused quite a stir on the street, with many residents being highly suspicious of my motivations for moving in (that I was an undercover police officer was a popular rumor I learned). Luckily, the neighborhood kids lacked the preconceptions of their parents and quickly befriended me.

Vicky (TGAW) and I let them hang out in our spare bedroom, where they surfed the web on an unused laptop we had lying around. As more neighborhood kids started coming over, we purchased extra netbooks so they could all get some online time; however, there were never enough laptops to go around, and breaking up disputes between children over equal computer time was wearying.

We make decent income as programmers and we live fairly frugally also, so it wasn’t too much of a stretch for us to consider buying all the kids on our street refurbished laptops. The only problem was that the kids wouldn’t know how to maintain or fully take advantage of their laptop’s capabilities, and like many computer-illiterate adults, the systems would quickly run down with bad practices and rendered useless.

So we came up with the idea of having the kids earn their laptops by attending a series of 12 classes covering a variety of computer science topics. The idea was to introduce the kids to Computer Science, Geek Culture, and empower them to control the complex systems resting at the tips of their fingers. The original batch of 10 kids turned into 12, ranging in age from 9 to 18, with a waiting list quickly forming as other kids in the neighborhood found out about the program.