Christine Lagarde

On being a woman... and the first woman in important roles:

Logan: In a lot of things that you've done, you are the first woman. Does it matter to you? Is it important?
Lagarde: What matter to me is that I am not the last one.

On what is important in life:
Lagarde: When my father passed away and then when later on I gave birth, those are sort of ground-breaking experiences that put everything else into perspective. You know, when I sit in meetings and things are very tense and people take things extremely seriously and they invest a lot of their ego, I sometimes think to myself, "Come on, you know, there's life and there's death and there is love." And all of that ego business is nonsense compared to that.

Just imagine ...

I found the analogy that Atul Gawande uses in this illustration of the consequences of errors made in medicine with errors made in the game of baseball to be intriguing and may worth reflecting. Here how it goes:

"Imagine, though, that if every time Mike Lowell threw and missed, the error cost or damaged the life of someone you cared about. One error leaves an old man with a tracheostomy; another puts a young woman in a wheelchair; another leaves a child brain-damaged for the rest of her days. ... Someone would want to rush to the field howling for Lowell's blood. Others would see all the saves he's made and forgive him his failures. Nobody, though, would see him in quite the same light again. And nobody would be happy to have the game go on as if nothing had happened. We'd want him to show sorrow, to take responsibility. We'd want the people he injured to be helped in a meaningful way." From Better by Atul Gawande.

I want to add a few sentences to this story. Yet, in the end, nothing happens. The world goes on as if none of these happened. The bottom line is, sometimes, we don't use these failures to be better.

What is the value of a teacher?

As a teacher, I often wonder if what we do in classroom matters to student lives years after graduation. Recently, I read a touching story in the New York Times from a writer who praises a few teachers from her high school days. These teachers went out of their ways to shape her life. Here is the link to the story.

Here are an inspiration thought from the story:

"If we want to understand how much teachers are worth, we should remember how much we were formed by our own schooldays. Good teaching helps make productive and fully realized adults — a result that won’t show up in each semester’s test scores and statistics."

Nothingness

Nothingness .... Emptiness?

Nothingness ... Being free?

Nothingness ... Hopeless?

Nothingness ... Meaningless?

Nothingness ... Impermanence?

Nothingness ... Absolute truth?

Meaningful computing education

Recently, I read two articles, one on Singapore and its success as a country and the other on Google.org and its not so successful attempt to make an impact in philanthropy. I find both articles inspiring as I continue my search for "meaningful computing education". I believe meaningful computing education can be built on the guided leaning approach of "problem-solution-impact". Here are some ideas of how to implement this approach from Thomas Friedman's recent article in the New York Times:

• Teaching and learning needs to make connections between “what world am I living in,” “where is my country trying to go in that world” and, therefore, “what should I teach in fifth-grade science.”, for example.

Here is another view of the problems that prevent Google.org, known as DotOrg, to achieve its bold objective of "ambitiously applying innovation and significant resources to the largest of the world’s problems" as suggested by Larry Page, Google founder, in 2004.

• The New York Times article reported that after five years "DotOrg has narrowed to just one octave on the piano: engineering-related projects that often are the outgrowth of existing Google products. Dr. Brilliant was sidelined in early 2009 after his loose management style created much disenchantment in DotOrg’s ranks."
• For example, "it focuses on projects like using Google Earth to track environmental changes and monitoring Web searches to detect flu outbreaks. Most of the experts it initially hired have left, and Google, a company obsessed with numbers and metrics, struggles to measure DotOrg’s accomplishments."
• What is the problem here? Joshua Cohen, a professor at Stanford, argued that Google has two different ideas about what DotOrg can do. One is that "DotOrg would completely reinvent philanthropy and, in doing so, reinvent the world and address a hugely important set of problems with solutions only Google with its immense intellectual talent and resources could find." And the other is that "DotOrg could make some headway, maybe a little, maybe a lot, in addressing these really big problems by doing what Google as a company is really good at doing, which is to say, aggregating information."
• Yet others attributed to the fact that Google used an engineering approach rather than a challenging problem approach makes it difficult for it to address important development problems. In other words, they are creating solutions and looking for problems instead of the other way around.
• For example, the idea of Google developed a system to track counterfeit drugs never got off the ground because it was proposed to build on top of SMS technology which did not excite Google engineers.
• Yet another evidence from previous DotOrg: "They never understood that technology is a means to an end, and that in the developing world, sometimes basic technology, like the collection and compilation of data, can have enormous impact."

All the evidence seems to point towards changing the way we teach computing to students.

Please call me by my true name

A beautiful poem by Thich Nhat Hanh:

Do not say I depart tomorrow,
for even today I still arrive.

Look deeply: I arrive in every moment,
to be a bud on a branch,
to be a tiny bird with wings still fragile,
learning to sing in my new nest,
to be a caterpillar in the hearth of a flower,
to be jewel hiding itself in a stone.

I still arrive in order to laugh and to cry
in order to fear and to hope.
the rhythm of my heart is the birth and
death of all that are alive.

I am the may fly metamorphosing
on the surface of a river,
and I am the bird, which when spring comes,
arrives in time to eat the mayfly.

I am the frog, swimming happily
in the clear waters of my pond,
and I am the grass-snake who,
approaching in silence,
feeds itself on the frog.

I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,
my legs as thin as bamboo sticks,
and I am the arms merchant, selling deadly
weapons to Uganda.

I am the 12 year old girl, refugee on a small boat,
who throws herself into the ocean
after being raped by a sea pirate,
and I am the pirate, my heart not yet capable
of seeing and and loving.

I am a member of the politburo
with plenty of power in my hands,
and I am the man who has to pay his
“debt of blood” to my people,
dying slowly in a forced labor camp.

My joy is like spring so warm it makes
flowers bloom in all walks of life.
My pain like a river of tears, so full it
fills up the four oceans.

Please call me by my true names,
so I can hear all my cries and my laughs at once,
So that I can see that my joy and my pain are one.

Please call me by my true names,
so I can wake up,
that so the doors of my heart can be left open,
the doors of compassion.

Dreams

"The old dreams are good dreams. They did not work out. But I am glad I had them."

From the movie "The Bridges of Madison County"

Bill Gates' Harvard commencement speech

Here is an excerpt from Bill Gates' speech. It makes me feel good that what I have been trying to work with undergraduate students to make them see the world and solve world problems through classwork is the right thing for college professors to do.

"I left Harvard with no real awareness of the awful inequities in the world – the appalling disparities of health, and wealth, and opportunity that condemn millions of people to lives of despair.

I learned a lot here at Harvard about new ideas in economics and politics. I got great exposure to the advances being made in the sciences.

But humanity’s greatest advances are not in its discoveries – but in how those discoveries are applied to reduce inequity. Whether through democracy, strong public education, quality health care, or broad economic opportunity – reducing inequity is the highest human achievement.

I left campus knowing little about the millions of young people cheated out of educational opportunities here in this country. And I knew nothing about the millions of people living in unspeakable poverty and disease in developing countries.

It took me decades to find out. ...

Melinda and I read an article about the millions of children who were dying every year in poor countries from diseases that we had long ago made harmless in this country. Measles, malaria, pneumonia, hepatitis B, yellow fever. One disease I had never even heard of, rotavirus, was killing half a million kids each year – none of them in the United States.

We were shocked. We had just assumed that if millions of children were dying and they could be saved, the world would make it a priority to discover and deliver the medicines to save them. But it did not. For under a dollar, there were interventions that could save lives that just weren’t being delivered.

If you believe that every life has equal value, it’s revolting to learn that some lives are seen as worth saving and others are not. We said to ourselves: “This can’t be true. But if it is true, it deserves to be the priority of our giving.”

So we began our work in the same way anyone here would begin it. We asked: “How could the world let these children die?”

The answer is simple, and harsh. The market did not reward saving the lives of these children, and governments did not subsidize it. So the children died because their mothers and their fathers had no power in the market and no voice in the system.

But you and I have both. ....

All of us here in this Yard, at one time or another, have seen human tragedies that broke our hearts, and yet we did nothing – not because we didn’t care, but because we didn’t know what to do. If we had known how to help, we would have acted.

The barrier to change is not too little caring; it is too much complexity.

To turn caring into action, we need to see a problem, see a solution, and see the impact. But complexity blocks all three steps. ...

Let me make a request of the deans and the professors – the intellectual leaders here at Harvard: As you hire new faculty, award tenure, review curriculum, and determine degree requirements, please ask yourselves:

Should our best minds be dedicated to solving our biggest problems?

Should Harvard encourage its faculty to take on the world’s worst inequities? Should Harvard students learn about the depth of global poverty … the prevalence of world hunger … the scarcity of clean water …the girls kept out of school … the children who die from diseases we can cure?

Should the world’s most privileged people learn about the lives of the world’s least privileged? ...

And I hope you will come back here to Harvard 30 years from now and reflect on what you have done with your talent and your energy. I hope you will judge yourselves not on your professional accomplishments alone, but also on how well you have addressed the world’s deepest inequities … on how well you treated people a world away who have nothing in common with you but their humanity."