The Hanover Collaboration

Dear America,

I know a lot of you are anti-bailout. And I can understand why— those are my tax dollars, too. But as a line worker at GM, I’ll be the first to feel the effects of my company’s collapse. So please, hear me out on why I want to keep my job at General Motors:

I want to keep working for a company that turned my labor into expensive, impractical, environmentally-destructive vehicles. I need that paycheck, because, thanks to deceptive financing, buying those vehicles has put me deeply in debt to my company’s insolvent financial arm, GMAC.

I want to keep working for a company that created, then buried the first modern production model electric car —a car that could have saved me thousands of dollars this summer when gas prices peaked above four dollars a gallon, as well cut back on greenhouse emissions, along with ozone, smog, and noise pollution in my neighborhood

I want to keep working for a company whose CEO who makes 250 times what I do. I want to keep working for a Vice Chairman of Global Product Development who called global warming a ‘total crock of shit’ and took pride in producing a hybrid that somehow gets less than 22 miles a gallon. I want them to keep their private jets.

I want to keep working for a company that funneled millions into lobbying against higher fuel economy standards, instead of pushing for the same universal health coverage that allegedly makes competition with foreign manufacturers ‘unfair’. Without that coverage, I’m pretty much forced to keep working here.

I want to keep working for a company that raked in record profits less than a decade ago, and turned the new income into innovative vehicles, like an SUV that converts into a pick-up truck, and FlexFuel systems that get equally poor mileage running on gasoline or even-less-carbon-friendly corn ethanol.

I want to keep working for a company that helped buy out and all but destroy the extensive public transportation infrastructure that existed in America in the 1930s. I might get stuck in traffic on the way to work, but at least I do it in my own car.

I want to keep working for a company that admitted in a full-page ad that it’s been ignoring the needs of the American consumer for years, but still expects us to buy their vehicles because…well, I’m not sure why.

And I especially want to keep working for a company that, over the past four decades, has dismantled the American auto industry piece by piece, outsourcing jobs, closing factories, and bringing unprecedented economic blight to what was one of America’s most promising Midwestern cities.

So please, America, write your congressman. Tell them to support the company I work for with an infusion of your tax money. Because clearly, if my loyalty to GM is indicative of anything, it’s that I’m too stupid to work anywhere else.

Sincerely,

GM Auto Workers.

I’m somewhat ashamed to admit that I use my local bike shop for repairs. I realize that in this crowd that is a major faux pas. I can clean and adjust most stuff on my own as part of a regular maintenance routine, but I’ve had three real repairs (i.e. something just plain broke) that I couldn’t do myself.

I just drove Courtney to the airport. She’s headed out to Sas Fee for some glacier skiing. Getting on the plane turned out to be a challange.

As some of you might know, a piece of ceiling fell in Ted’s tunnel. There is a cement subceiling to allow adequate ventilation in the case of a fire. I’m not entirely sure why they decided to go with cement. Probably because it’s cheap. But anyway, a piece fell and killed a lady a few weeks ago. So pretty much everybody has lost their mind over this and tunnels are getting closed all over the place.

You guys might have also heard that there was a terrorism plot broken up today. So no toothpaste, or waterbottles, or any liquids or gels of any kind were being allowed through airport security.

I’m taking a class austensibly about automation but for all practical purposes, it’s an algorithms class. The problem is that it is in Aero/Astro. About half of the class are engineering kids with really none of the background that I would consider prerequisite to this sort of class. They don’t know reduction, complexity, or a number of other computer science concepts that you would might consider crucial for an algorithms class.

So the class goes sort of like any of the engineering classes at Dartmouth where the kids didn’t have the fundamentals but we needed to move on. The prof talks for a while and then like a voice from the sky there is some psuedo-code and then we move on. We’ve got other shit to do.

This isn’t the source of my complaint. They’re engineers—they can code it—what else do they need? I mean, it would be nice to ask for a higher level of understanding but of course it’s unnecessary.

My complaint is in application. On the test or the homework, the questions are all terribly under-defined. You could expect to see a question like “How many function calls are there in the execution of AllPairsShortestPaths on this graph?” like there is a unique implementation. Another example is “What is the on the queue after you expand node 4 if you use such and such an algorithm?” for an algorithm that doesn’t even require a queue.

On the midterm, there was a big(O)run-time question. To give a tight answer, we would have needed to know about half a dozen things we weren’t given. So rather than write an essy to that effect, I gave a trivially correct big(O) of something like VE^2 and a justification like “well I could easily implement this by just…” I didn’t actually get zero points for that. Almost though.

The thing that has gotten me upset today is I’m supposed to draw a search tree for such and such an algorithm. The format of the tree is very clearly defined. But structure itself breaks the algorithm itself¹. Actually, that isn’t what I’m upset about. What I’m upset about is that this problem came from last year’s final exam.

Which brings me to what pained me so much about many of my Dartmouth engineering class. I know that the kids who went to recitation and copied everything verbatum and understand the thing less well are getting perfect scores. I also know that I will receive no credit for my counter-example for the correctness of the problem. How do I know? Because the verbatum kids went on and became the graders.

¹ For Fromberger: the algorithm is DPLL, the problem is thattthe variable order in the tree is pre-defined which means that even if DPLL would prune assignments to variable D right off the bat, I have first assign variables A, B and C. This has the potential for exponential-time search in regions of the graph that I already know to be invalid.

Though reasonably computer literate when it comes to using software and programs in daily life, I’ll admit I’m completely ignorant of what is going on behind those programs and inside my laptop. Which is probably the reason I’m so upset at what I went through two weeks ago.

I’ll save you the long version, but basically, after a lot of haranging Applecare informed me that my logic board had failed and needed to be replaced. After $330, it now has.

Though I love macs (I have a 2002 15” Ti Powerbook G4), I have to admit this is the second apple that has had a mother/logic board failure on me in the past few months (the other was the DOC Freshmen Trips computer a week prior to the arrival of the first `09’s.)

I understand when hard drives, disc drives, screens, keyboards, and operating systems fail: all have dynamic and therefore vulnerable mechanical or program-based components. Isn’t a motherboard just a large circuit board with a bunch of stuff plugged into it? So what gives? How does a motherboard fail to the point that it needs to be replaced?

I try to live my life as if grades aren’t important to me, but the Thayer School has some simply outrageous practices. I attribute them almost entirely to the homework graders, who are mostly students.

Today I got back a problem set.

In part 1 my Modified Newton’s Method had an error, and didn’t converge as rapidly as it ought to have. The number of iterations is circled, and 10% is taken off. Fair enough.

I noticed the bug right before the assignment was due, and typed up a paragraph documenting it, and stating what I thought was the probable cause. This cost me another 20%. Academics frequently provides powerful incentives for unethical behavior, and equally powerful disincentives for ethical behavior.

One of the problems said “Specify the asymptotic oder of convergence, α, and write the asymptotic error constant λ.

I started the problem by writing out the text book definition of lambda, with the variable α correctly filled in as 3. Six pages of algebra later, I had a correct expression for λ. I then derived the general definition of λ itself, and again wrote in the correct value for α, and I included written explanation of the technique used in the for the derivation.

I’ll admit that nowhere did I use the precise phrase ”α = 3”.

Literally directly under my second restatement of the definition, not even 2 cm from the value for alpha, is written “where is α? – 22%”.

Finally, we were asked to comment, qualitatively, on the rate observed rate of convergence on an application that required 2 iterations. My answer of “3 data points is not enough to determine a rate of convergence” was, apparently, incorrect. The correct answer was “quadratic”.