AiriZel: Thoughts

So around 2:47AM today, (IE when I started this blog post), I pretty much finished testing the backend of the new survey I coded for the School of Management. What’s really cool is that the survey is very much related to one of my favorite shows on television, Lie to Me, which is about a main character named Cal Lightman who’s based on Paul Ekman who’s the guy who created the entire idea of micro-expressions, which is one of the things this survey is testing. So I don’t want to say too much, but micro-expressions are awesome. The idea of a person being able to see how another person is truly thinking/feeling despite their intention to hide it seems like an awesome thing to be able to do. I focus on a lot of decision making aspects of a variety of things. In fact, it’s probably going to be the focus area of whatever major I decide to take. The reason I’m interested in decision making is because I love trying to figure out how people think. Micro-expressions fall in line with these things.

In other news, I’m in desperate need of sleep, but I’m not sure when I’ll be able to get it since there’s a BBQ at my house tomorrow and I’m leaving for New York on Saturday. I also have to get this data entry done for the SoM’s 4th of July study… Wow lots of work, but it’s about time I sleep (I have to meet with Andrew in the morning tomorrow).

Oh well life goes on! I’ll sleep when I’m dead? heh.
-Sebastian

I haven’t had a legitimate blog post since I moved something over from my English seminar in Late January. Oh well. February is a bad month. Heh.

Anyway, I’m porting another post. This time it’s from YaleLawTech.org, which is the blog for my seminar on Intellectual Property in the Digital Age. Good stuff.

You can find the actual blog post here. But if you don’t want to visit their, well to be honest more beautiful blog website, here’s the entire text of it after the break.

read more »

So I’ll be required to blog for a few class blogs this semester on a variety of subjects. I’ve decided to replicate said posts in this blog so I can have a general idea of what I’m writing about and when. This is the first of the series and in this particular case in response to Barry Schwartz modest proposal to make college admissions random.

So just a sidenote. The view expressed in this blog post series does not necessarily reflect my own. At times, I will take the devil’s advocate point of view to enhance my own thought process (something I’ve done many times in debate).

Also, I tend to be pretty introspective, which may explain why writing out my thoughts can actually change my beliefs on the topic manner.

So without further to do, this is my blog post titled:

Good Enough? Not Quite.

Oh the good ol’ modest proposal…

In explaining his essay as a “modest proposal,” Barry Schwartz pays tribute to Jonathan Swift as he compares Swift’s proposal to eat babies to how colleges admit students.

To be fair, there are a lot of similarities between college admissions and the consumption of babies. For one, they’re both messy affairs that upset parents. Two, they’re both solutions to their respective “overpopulation” problems; Switching to a random lottery would supposedly solve the “overpopulation” of overly competitive students gaming the system and eating babies would solve population problems in general.

However, I believe there is a fundamental problem with the premise of the lottery itself. First, there is Schwartz’s insinuation that intense competition should be accepted as inherently bad (citing a slippery slope decrease in academic vitality and what not). However, as seen by the thriving cultures on universities such as Yale (a university that has experienced decreases in admissions and increased competition for the better part of two decades), this so-called “intense competition” manifests itself as a proactive student body driven to succeed at their craft. Competitive ambition and blood-seeking competition are often confused. In a sense, being driven is itself a minimum standard for a person needs to succeed in college and in life. So is it not that the fact that people subjected themselves to such competition makes them that much more suitable to thrive in college (or at the very least prevent the degradation of academia).

Second, his solution doesn’t solve any problem. Although the main benefit of a lottery would be to stop gaming, the “gaming of the system” will always exist. Any set of rules has a metagame, a game beyond the rule set, that can and will be accessed for individuals who seek to maximize their efforts. By switching to a lottery, you’d replace overachieving metagamers with “minimum effort for maximum results” metagamers. Not exactly a pleasant change at all. This is a fundamental part of how people work and as a result, should not be considered as a valid reason to implement a lottery.

Lastly, simply taking a lottery would work if we could quantitatively assess individuals for their intelligence, motivation, and potential. Such a measure does not exist in the least, which is why the universities currently employ staffs of admission officers to discern these traits. A lottery assuming individuals at a certain will be “good enough” without a perfect assessment is to disregard the holistic view of an individual and his or her ability to contribute to the university.

-Sebastian Park

-Sebastian Park

PS. Oh yeah, Freshman Screw was fun. I have a draft of what my thoughts were before and after screw on file on this blog, but who knows when I’ll get around to actually cleaning that up.

Apologies for a downed blog for a few days (eh, give or take 5), VlexoFree changed over the host and for some reason there was a DNS error with godaddy (I thought I had saved my changes to the DNS server, but it wasn’t recorded and what not..).

I’m in my Intro to Psych lecture right now.

-Sebastian

Studying for an Microeconomics final. Hopefully it’ll go well. What’s more to say.

For anyone who reads this and is in SoCal, I’ll be at the PTQ San Diego event on the 19th of December at Costa Mesa. My only real life PTQ this season, hopefully I’ll only need to that one that qualify for PT San Diego (at which point, you’ll see me coming back to LA to participate next year)./

Lastly, today a few of my friends and I had our first really legitimate idea for an entrepreneurial venture. I’mma roll it out as it comes along, but this is the first one I’ve had in college that I feel will work very well. Hopefully the first success of many.

Back in LA the 15th.

-Sebastian

So Google Chrome’s apparent securities holes were well… apparent.

Yesterday, an accidental ad click led to a Google Chrome exploit that installed Antivirus Live, a rogue spyware (I’d even go as far as to say virus) onto my computer. After attempting to quarantine it myself in safemode, I failed (being unable to completely kill it before it propagated itself the next start up).  Luckily, my Thinkpad T400 comes with a built in factory reset button (useful if I ever decide to sell this extremely awesome machine). After using the included software to retrieve some files (namely about 300 MBs of photos recently updated. Being somewhat paranoid, all my files are backed up in 4 places. Using Dropbox, there’s a copy of all my notes and assignments and other important files on my netbook, the dropbox server, and the laptop. The 4th place is an external harddrive that I keep files on as well. ).

What have I learned? Well a few things.

• Being paranoid has its benefits. I didn’t have any hesitation giving up (saving myself hours of headache) and resetting my system to its factory functionality. In whole, the entire recovery process has taken 4 hours (and a lot of that was making sure I got the 300MBs of photos onto an external without corruption)
• Dropbox again proves itself to be amazing. All my magic decks, assignments, notes, and important information just simply stayed safe. Installed dropbox on the fresh install and boom, it starts to put those files back on here.
• Google Chrome’s amazing speed has its consequences. It really does have some security issues.
• Firefox again claims itself as my default browser. It also helped that because I had backed up my google chrome bookmarks on firefox, I could just sync those back in.
• I’m not running any of my customized desktop interface applications (rainlendar included). This makes me sad, but I just don’t have to time and energy to reconfigure everything to my own need. Maybe I should have backed up these files too (but given that I edited my desktop over a period of 3 months, I really lost about 2 months of customization).

Anyway, a few funny last notes. Yale’s Freshman Holiday Dinner was overhyped, yet enjoyable. It’s definitely an interesting thing to see a 20 foot long piece of bread and lobsters thrown into the crowd. The ice sculpture thing was awesome as well.

Well that’s all folks. I have an econ final next monday and then I head back to LA the following Tuesday

-Sebastian

EDIT: Edited for a reason. heh.

Well today is the morning after the first night at the homestay. Man, not what I expected. From what I undestood, the homestay program was supposed to put us with a traditional korean nuclear family. That is to say a mother, father, and kids. Instead I and Nicolas Pang (a very bright kid from Hawaii) ended up with a god-fearing grandmother, similar in style to that you would see in a western movie in regards to an old grandmother figure.

So what does that mean? It means near unlimited freedoms equivalent to what I have not only in the home, but also what I’ll have when I’m in college. Simply put, the grandmother of this small apartment lives by herself. If you put it into the perspective of a grandmother living alone, the apartment is not that bad at all. I could definitely live in something like this by myself (which brings me to the funny point that I may not have a suite room year 1 at Yale. But rather a very big room. I don’t know how that’s going to go). That said, for the three of us, it’s a bit smaller than anticipated (but not overtly uncomfortable by any means).

In addition, the son, IE the hypothetical father figure of this house seems to work all the time, living away from this apartment. In addition, the grandmother is a god-fearing woman who attends church everyday until 6PM. So what does that afford Nick nad myself? Well we get keys to this apartment and the freedom to come and go as we please whenever. That’s a lot more freedom than I thought I’d have, but also we lose out on the immersion into Korean families. I feel worse for Nicholas than I do for my own situation, having grown up in in fact a Korean nuclear family, knowing that my father sits at the head of the table, knowing that the respect I show to my parents is infinite. Nick will never have that experience at this rate.

That all said, the family is still very supportive as if we were college students. The grandmother graciously took us to the nearby YMCA equivalent so that we could spend 31000 won to open membership. I’ll probably be heading there every morning from 6-6:30 or around that time (with the exception of maybe wednesdays when the program takes us away). She also took us into town, which is about 1 km away I think from this apartment complex, where we bought bread, power adapters (since the prongs on american adapters differ), and ice cream. Lots of ice cream.

So moving on to talking about last night. Man I could not sleep well. I costantly felt like I was waking up, and my back couldn’t seem to realign itself with the bed. Meh, hopefully tonight will be better. Also, my eyes seem to be failing me lately. I don’t know if it’s becuase I’m tired, but I can’t seem to focus my eyes on people. Words and letters no problem. People… they seem to be blurry at a not that far distance. I’m thinking it’s just a lingering effect of my jetlag, but if it continues when I return to the States, I’ll get a contact in my right eye or something.

Back to the living of Korean life!
-Sebastian

Heh, my first post with a legitimate degree in something.

So last thursday, I graduated from Granada Hills Charter High School. The occasion was a bit surreal, but definitely enjoyable. I had the opportunity to take pictures with all of my friends (well not all, but a good number of them. Simon! Where the hell were you!? I could definitely not find you, molly, and many others). Afterwards, I had a fun time at Disneyland. I mean it was alright. Could have been better, but hell, it was disneyland. It’s been a while since I was at Disneyland (flash back to 8th grade), and it’s finally a relief to go through disneyland with friends instead of by myself (as the previous occasions had done). So definitely worth going to and something I’ll recommend the now seniors of Granada to attend as well.

As for my grades, in a strange twist of events, I ended the second semester of high school with all As once again. Coach Ruivenkamp apparently gave me the 5% I needed (I had dropped a letter grade in that class due to my college visits to Yale and Stanford). On top of that, I did well in every other AP class I took, and I’ll finish with a pretty ridiculous final GPA (something I have yet to find out ,but possibly finishing #1 in my class after the 2nd semester).

So yeah. Overall graduation was fun. Strangely enough, I’ve made better friends of my year (which is Class of 2009 in high school and class of 2013) in the past month than I did my entire senior year. Strange isn’t it? It just turned out that way as I decided to hang out with more people with my new found time, I met cooler people. Definitely enjoyed that.

So now, I’m preparing for NSLI to South Korea. I have an oral test in a couple of hours and I’m preparing mentally for the challenge. In addition, I began working out at YMCA, which basically translates to my muscles being really really really sore. I’m glad intense mental exercises doesn’t make my brain sore for days, else I might have not studied as often (not saying I’m going stop working out. I’m definitely working out again this afternooon).

Lastly, my Lenovo T400 is arriving 10 days ahead of schedule, which would be great, except it’s arriving the day I leave for my family trip to New York. Am I alright with not having a laptop in New York? Of course. Am I comfortable with my laptop being delivered when I’m not home? Not so much. Hopefully I can get all that taken care of today. I might give UPS a call and ask them to hold all of my packages until I get back. Sounds like a plan to me. I’m going to enjoy this week in New York and visiting my to-be Alma Mater (I can actually say that now since I declared to attend Yale). It’ll be a lot of fun.

I think that pretty much sums up everything. I’ll probably post if I can while in New York, else I’ll recant the trip this weekend.

-Sebastian

Krishna, the captain of Science Bowl at Granada Hills, is also an amazing singer. Here’s a link to the song he made as part of his final project for our AP Physics C class in Mr. Van’s K-2.

Enjoy. It’s good stuff. MP3 link coming soon.

-Sebastian

EDIT: Here’s the link to download an MP3 version of the song. Download it here.

I turned in every book.
Presented the teachers who aided my college applications gifts.
Finished every final and project of high school.

Now all that’s left is graduation.

Heh it’s over. But that just means it’s time to begin the next stage.

Anyway, in school ending news, Interact Banquet and the now traditional after banquet karaoke was a blast! Nathan sang his heart out, Kim is a good singer, and the rest of us just went crazy! Now all I have left is the Speech and Debate banquet, the pre-swim banquet banquet, and the actual swim banquet. Hehe.

Oh in terms of laptop news, my hunt is over! Yesterday, before leaving my house for the banquet, I purchased a Lenovo T400, with a very strong set of specifications off of the Yale Student Purchasing Lenovo website. It’s set to ship 6/17, which is pretty late, but makes me really relieved that I purchased my laptop this early, since I definitely need it before NSLI-Y Korea.  Here are the specifications:

	Intel Core 2 Duo Processor P9500 (2.53GHz 1066MHz 6MBL2) 25W
	Genuine Windows XP Professional (preinstalled via downgrade rights in Windows Vista Business)
	Genuine Windows Vista Business with Windows XP Professional Downgrade and Vista Recovery media US English
	14.1 WXGA+ TFT, w/ LED Backlight, Camera
	ATI Mobility Radeon 3470 with 256MB
	3 GB PC3-8500 DDR3 SDRAM 1067MHz SODIMM Memory (2 DIMM)
	Keyboard US English
	UltraNav (TrackPoint and TouchPad) with Fingerprint Reader
	320 GB Hard Disk Drive, 7200rpm
	DVD Recordable 8x Max Dual Layer, Ultrabay Slim (Serial ATA)
	Express Card Slot & 7-1 Media Card Reader
	Integrated Bluetooth PAN
	Intel WiMAX/WiFi Link 5350 (AGN) with My WiFi Technology
	Integrated Mobile Broadband upgradable
	6 cell Li-Ion Battery
	Country Pack North America with Line cord & 90W AC adapter
	Language Pack US English
Services and software
	4 Year Depot Upgrade with 4 Year ThinkPad Protection
	Computrace LoJack for Laptops 4 Yr lic.

A few notes about the specs: The P9500 is the highest processing 25W processor. I’ve heard a good deal about how amazing 25W processors are, so I opted for that one. I bought Vista Business, downgraded to XP. I really prefer XP over Vista. The downgrade will also possibly allow me to upgrade to Windows 7 eventually. the 14.1 WXGA+ TFT with LED backlight was bought instead of the High Nite (extremely bright) screen. The reason? I felt that with a 14.1 inch screen, the increased resolution capacity of the monitor would help a lot. Lastly, I opted for the most expensive Intel WiFi link because I’ve had problems with wireless cards on laptops in the past and didn’t want to take the chance.

Alright! Time to get ready to have another fun day.

-Sebastian