What Greg Learned #25

Four terms are now in the history books, and now a new term stands, a bit shy but obviously excited, on our doorstep trying to rally up enough courage to ring the doorbell. Let’s open the door, shall we? Full transcript follows.

Greetings! You’re listening to What Greg Learned, my pithy ponderings and pontifications on the particular peculiarities in my perennially puzzling professional pupil-hood. Whoo! I’m Greg, I like alliteration a lot, and only by writing stuff like that can I insure I read my script.

Hey, so this is the first class weekend of my fifth term. That’s fifth, as in comes after four others and as in the second-to last. This term I opted out of the last class slot of the weekend, as I didn’t see anything there I valued, so hopefully that translates into a less hectic term for me.

But before I start into talking about my classes this term, let’s jump into the way-back machine, all the way back to September, when a three-month-younger Greg had this to say: “It’s early in the semester. Usually the first doubts about classes appear after the second class, hit a low around class four, and have faded into emotional detachment by six.” That’s the transcript, so I probably said something to the same effect using many more words and liberal usage of the syllable “Uh”. So as I speak, remember Greg’s Law Number One: Optimism is directly proportional to the amount of time left in a term. From this you should correctly be inferring that I am at this point very upbeat about this term, the ONLY term of the six that includes no required classes. It’s all electives, though that’s a bit misleading in a world where usually there are usually two offerings in any given time slot. But… no! No room for pragmatism, cynicism, realism, rationalism, rationalizing, moralizing, or strategizing. It’s early in the term, and so of course classes are GREAT!

First thing every Friday I go to Robotics class. While there’s a lot great about the class, taught by the director of the school’s very prestigious robot lab, the best demonstration of his street cred came up early on as he informed us that there’d be no usage of that froo-froo Blackboard or other courseware. He mailed us a link to his raw apache directory index on his unix server, and when that didn’t work he was in at a command line chmod-ing +r the contents. When he wanted to pull up a different Keynote deck to show off a video, he opened that from a command line within OS X. Even beyond programmer cred, this is a guy who lives in the computerverse. Somebody who will never teach a course about some alien and mysterious “digital native” generation because nobody who uses graphical interfaces is really a native. They are immigrants, but THIS IS OUR SOIL. Um, I digress. Anyway, the neat thing about robotics is that it’s really an intersection of about four different Big Problems, and anything resembling what we seem to want as robots requires all four Big Problems be solved: sensing, so that a machine can actually figure out what’s going on, intelligence, so that it can interpret what’s going on and figure out what to do, mobility, so it can do whatever it’s suppsed to do, and interface, so that we can either control it or otherwise interact. For all the potential and all the cool things you could do if you solved even one of those problems, robotics isn’t really a growth industry, particularly in the US where almost all the R&D growth in robotics is military. Still, I found myself really engrossed in the subject during class and hungry for more, so I’m looking forward to seeing where this goes.

In the afternoon, we have Supply Chain Management. This class is actually taught by a fellow who’s both a department chair and author of the class textbook, and I really enjoyed the way he approached teaching. Unfortunately, there’s a downside when the teacher writes the textbook – his examples, even his choice of language exactly matches the text. If you read the text, you get the whole lecture spoiled for you, and that’s what happened. His teaching included a few moments of showing vague data and asking people to guess the right business decision. Having read the book (and the answer makes logical sense anyway) I knew what I’d guess, but the problem is when you do an example like this, you mostly want your students to guess the wrong thing so that you can have more discussion and learning. I kinda ruined that a bit. To some degree, understanding enough about teaching also enables me to know when to shut up and let the class go in the path that would help my classmates learn, not just the path that makes me look good. Anyway, the idea of supply chain management is one of those really key meaty bits of operations: how do you decide how much stuff to buy, how do you make sure you have materials and shipping and labor to do that, and how do you get that to the sellers… for that matter, how many sellers do you need? So much of business success and failure depends not on a great idea but a great execution, and that’s operations. Overall, another great class so far.

Then on Saturday morning, my class is in fourth generation… 4G wireless. As the professor quipped, the 4Gs are Girls, Gambling, Games, and Government Regulation. No, no. It’s a combination of factors, among them new encoding technologies that allow more bandwidth over the same frequency spectrum, plus more spectrum… which in turn should mean more bits going out to more mobile devices. As that becomes more possible, and as the devices improve, people will likely want to do more and more on them, just as has already happened with iPhones and droids. Where does that go next, and what will people be willing to do and share? One interesting tidbit is that the prof mentioned that we may have the opportunity to “pitch” our class projects with AT&T’s 4G initiative, which basically provides both venture backing and technology support to startups in the 4G space. All the more reason to have a good idea!

So as you can tell, I’m pretty darned happy about all three classes. During this term, I’ll also be spending time preparing for Japan, which will be plenty of challenge in itself, I’m sure. And the warning of course looms. What will prove to ruin one of these classes?

Ooo. Not going to even guess on that. But if any of those things happen, we’ll ask you about it next week here on What Greg Learned. See ya!