Measuring my own focus and productivity

(Not quite inspired by xkcd today, but it's topical.)

The freedom of the researchey life is a blessing and a curse, and the difference between success and failure is likely the ability to stay on target.

How can I keep myself on target? How can I even know if I'm on target?

I was inspired by Robin Barooah, who found out that he concentrated no less (and probably more) after he stopped drinking coffee. More interestingly, he quantified concentration: every 25 minutes, if he had concentrated for 25 minutes, he marks an X. Then he was able to improve it by trying something and seeing that it correlated with more concentration. (actually, by looking through his history to see that it correlated with more concentration.)

So what will I try? A few options:

1. The very rigidly scheduled day I was trying. I think this will not work; it was hard to squeeze into my day. And it was prescriptive; it made me feel guilty about chunks I missed.

2. Forget it! Just work! I think this will not work either, because my research is on a computer, so the distracting internet is always around the corner. Also, I'm unfocused enough right now that I could just read things forever and not converge.

3. Something in between: Pomodoro. I've tried this at Google with mixed success, ultimately abandoning it. But maybe it's worth another try. It's nice that it's descriptive and works in 25-minute chunks, instead of 90-minute. It's hard to find 90 unbroken minutes, and it's nice that, if something comes up and interrupts me, I could just skip this chunk, lose 25 minutes, and keep trucking.

This research: now on Twitter.

I think this is not a terrible idea. Follow me on twitter at @dantasse, and you'll get... links to this blog's posts.

Why? So that if someone wants to know what I'm researching without reading long blogs, they can get a title blast in three seconds. And if someone wants to find me and say "I'm researching that too" or "I already did that", they'll have an easy no-pressure way to contact me.

And in the perfect future, when I become a creature of pure idea slinging, I'll be already jacked in to this twitter web. When my colleagues and I are just full of such brilliance that we can only speak in 140 characters because otherwise we'll get too many new ideas to write them all down, we'll have an outlet.

Journal pay walls: why why oh why?

I think this is a common complaint. But maybe I'm missing something, and someone can fill me in, either on a workaround or a reason behind the problem.

When you're looking for an article in a journal or a conference, like, say, "Measuring Alertness" by Michael I. Posner, you can't freely get the full pdf. You often run into sites like this. If you belong to a university, they often have a subscription to the journal, and you can log in and get your article. If the author was kind enough to post the file elsewhere on the internet, you can find it via Google scholar or something, and then download it directly. Otherwise, you're left with three choices: pay something absurd like $20 for a pdf, subscribe to the journal (in this case, the ever-thrilling "Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences) for an even more outrageous fee, or do without.

I believe, and tell me if I'm wrong, that no human in the history of the earth has ever chosen choices 1 or 2. So the net result is that top-level academic research is limited to those lucky few who have access to a university.

But sending a pdf costs nothing, and because nobody pays, journals aren't making money off of these walls anyway. Journal owners could easily enable all 6 billion of us (or at least the 2 billion who have internet access) to do any kind of research, anytime, anywhere. Wouldn't that be at least a bit of a net positive to the world?

Counterpoint: if they didn't have paywalls, universities wouldn't pay for huge memberships, and journals would go out of business.
Counter-counterpoint: well this is fine too. (what are journals for? so peer-review can happen? why not just let this self-organize?)

More meta-research, or, Dan's plan for optimal productivity and happiness, take one.

On my research days, I have pretty much complete freedom with my time. (I think it's not quite so complete for real students.) As everyone knows, this is a blessing and a curse.

So I'm trying the following plan:
90 minutes on, 30 minutes off. Call them "cycles" or "work chunks" or whatever. During each cycle, I am only working. And no email. I'm using Workflowy to track my to-do list, and if I need to know what to do, I check my to-do list. During each cycle, there's one 5-minute break if needed; I will usually need it.
Start whenever I wake up and am ready for work.
90 minutes: first cycle, at home
30 minutes: bike to the lab at UW
90 minutes: another cycle; I'll handle email at the last 30 minutes of this cycle.
30 minutes: lunch
90 minutes: another cycle
30 minutes: nap if needed, or slack
90 minutes: last cycle, checking email once more before I go home.

Important points:
- hard focus. No email!
- any work outside of this time is purely "if I feel like it." I want to avoid feeling like I should work all the time. Although if I am inspired to work all the time and I'm having fun, I won't stop.
- I wonder if this is enough. I've heard you shouldn't expect grad school to fit into 9-5. However, 6 hours of hard focus is pretty good; if I can fit those 6 hours in 8 hours instead of 12, maybe I just get more free time. I am emboldened by this post.

Meta-research

When I'm still kind of an outsider in academia, I'd like to record things I think about the research world. Mostly so that I can look back later and see what I think now, but also in case there's something I could work to change, or some way I should act to avoid getting caught up in a big groupthink.

I'm spurred by posts like this one. Daniel Lemire says that the following problems exist:
1. People write irrelevant papers because of incentives to publish.
2. Important papers have errors.
3. Nobody ever fixes those papers.
To solve these, he proposes maintaining papers like we maintain open-source projects.

Sounds good. Particularly because the structure of information is moving from static chunks (books, magazine articles) to streams (blogs, podcasts, twitters), and I'm not sure if the research world can change to accommodate this shift.

In the ideal world, there'd be no incentive to publish; you could publish if you want, and if you have something worth publishing. Otherwise (and also), you could keep a blog, and talk about ongoing projects instead of 8-page chunks.

I'd like to stay in this mode. I'd like to keep blogging here as I research, keep a wiki page up to date, and not worry about whether I can publish a particular paper or not. I'll keep you posted (hah!).

Today is the first day of the next part of my life.

or, equivalently, "I've been replaced by another me who does research AND work, not just work."

Today I started as a Visiting Researcher with the Ubicomp Lab at the University of Washington.  As I arrived, Prof. Shwetak Patel was explaining to some students how to use this flying styrofoam hovercraft (powered by 4 big fans).  Neat.

If you browse the lab's site, you'll notice that they do a lot of incredible magic.  I'm going to be working on the "help you sleep better" magic.  I will probably play with some EEGs to help you sleep, and if that doesn't work, resort to more prosaic means.

My ultimate goal is "help you live a better life."  I think the best way to do this is to increase your ability to pay attention, be mindful, and concentrate.  However, there are a lot of other things that go into it, and sleeping well is one of them.  Furthermore, I'm not going to solve mindfulness in the 6 months I have to work with these guys, but maybe together we can make some headway on the sleep question.  So hey, seems good as any.  Also, maybe dreams will work their way into this.

At any rate, I'm excited.  The group seems really cool, both brilliant and fun.  And my job half the time is becoming "read about, and do, cool things." I ordered a NeuroSky MindSet today; can't wait till it comes in.

No deferrals? Plus, search by brute force.

First of all, it seems harder than I thought to defer grad school admission (apply now for 2011, and then say "I'm coming in 2012 instead").  It was a thing you could do in undergrad admissions, and my advisor seemed to think it was pretty reasonable for grad school too, but maybe not:

Stanford CS: "A student admitted to the Ph.D. program can defer admission for one year only. However, very few deferrals are granted, and then only for compelling reasons." (I'm assuming "I want to travel" is not a "compelling reason.")

CMU CS: "This policy may vary from program to program. After you are admitted, please contact your program coordinator."
The MIT Media Lab, UW, and U. Michigan all say nothing about it, and Tufts says flat out no.  Maybe I'll be applying next year instead.  That's too bad, because it feels like I was getting to the point of sending out apps, and then I'd be done with the application process.  I guess on the plus side, I've got another year to prepare.

Well, s'okay, it's been a bit of a slog anyway.  How do you find the right professors at the right schools when your goal is specific, interdisciplinary, and without a good name?  "Improving our minds in not-necessarily-cognitive ways with small computers" doesn't have a department at most universities.  So I've been looking mostly at HCI departments, but also media/etc programs, learning departments, neuroscience, and stuff as far afield as communications.  It's almost a buzzword search (which I'm not entirely proud of, but meh): "ubiquitous", "cognitive", and "persuasive" all get +1; "affective", "emotions", "brain-computer interface",  and "attention" all get +2, and "mindfulness" or "neuroplasticity" would get +5 if I could find them.

I was going from conferences first: reading the last 2-3 years of CHI, Ubicomp, and ACII, finding some papers that interested me, and looking up their authors.  But this clustered around MIT, CMU, Stanford, and UW, with a LOT of one-offs from other universities.  It's like trying to figure out what baseball teams are good, when only given a list of home runs and who hit them.  I already know those 4 schools are all-stars; where else can I apply too?

So I went bottom-up.  (or "top-down"?  I dunno.)  I went to schools that I heard were good at HCI, and looked through all the HCI professors.  It's borne a little fruit, not a huge amount of fruit, but some fruit.  Here's what I've found:

UC Berkeley: surprisingly little that's interesting to me.  Big HCI lab, but it's big on collaboration, new interfaces, and vision.

U of Maryland: probably not in HCI.  Again, interfaces, visualizations, collaborations, work with kids, physical devices.
There's interesting stuff in other labs on the AI side, but then this veers into the whole AI can of worms, which I'm not interested in.  I want to understand how we think (and feel and act), and help ourselves currently, not make computers think how we think.

U of Toronto: nothing in HCI very interesting to me.

U of Michigan: some work going on with a project called D-Sense, to try to help with the management of depression.

VA tech: again, not so much in HCI.  Maybe the Mind-body lab, more psych-ish and less computery.

Tufts: surprisingly interesting.  They've got a lab doing brain-computer interfacing, within a larger HCI lab, that sounds pretty neat.  Harvard too, doing some BCI work.  Either of these places would be cool, because I know that they've got solid programs in many departments, and they're in Boston.  (I imagine MIT collaboration is, well, not unheard-of.)

UC Irvine: has a cool ubicomp lab, but I'm not so interested in just straight-up ubicomp anymore.

Georgia Tech: I haven't actually looked at them, because I don't really want to live in Atlanta.

... perhaps with another year I'll find some more options!

Research?

I write code a lot. Tips about that will go on I Lessen Data, my programming blog. This here is for more abstract stuff: ideas, musings, and research interests. Generally, I'm most interested in Cool Things On Your Smart Phone or Other Gadgets You Might Have On You. Beyond that, a little bit about software engineering or servers might creep in here, or maybe something about CS as a whole.