All posts by nouyang

Uncategorized

Actively countering unconscious bias

tl;dr I’m pro-actively consuming more media featuring women, e.g. by going through lists like this on wikipedia: list of 21st century women by occupation

Lately I’ve been thinking* about how to identify what might be contributing to my “unconscious” biases, and actively counteracting them. The idea is to track what sort of daily input we’re consuming — as a silly example, if we almost always encounter bulldogs as aggressive dangerous dogs, then when we see a bulldog we’ll assume it’s aggressive by default.

* Due to another conversation, saved for another blog post, about concrete tips for diversifying applicant pools. Many of my friends are now in hiring positions, and facing frustrations with working without support in their companies, even from the Human Resources department, on how to diversify the applicant pool even, not even the company itself.

In the past I’ve thought about creating machine learning algorithms to identify the sort of consistent image I see on, for instance, youtube of 8tracks.com or other sites, where techno seems to be accompanied by scantily clad women (or just closeups of their butts or their busts or feet or whatever).  For instance, doing some sort of gender swap in with hot pics of men instead.

However, an even simpler thing to do, is simply to tally the number of hours I spend consuming media, both well-intentioned media and not, which doesn’t counteract the consistent image I get day-to-day of not seeing women in positions of power, importance, and influence.

For instance, on average I likely spend 10+ hours a week nowadays listening to podcasts, of which maybe 20% is narrated by a woman.  I have female peers, but I don’t interact often at all with women in positions of power / senior women.

As a result, I’d like to consume media, not specifically about women, but authored by women. Women founders, giving talks about how they created their companies; women CEOs, talking about making billion dollar decisions; women keynote speakers, and other ordinary forms of everyday media (well, ordinary to me).

I’m actually having a hard time finding a “stream” or pre-made mix of such material. But I think I’ll start out by finding lists of movies.  I looked through them, and now I’m making a prioritizing of movies to watch:

Movies

  • Ocean’s 8
  • Legally Blonde
  • Suffragette (film)
  • Hidden Figures
  • Crazy Rich Asians
  • Star Wars: The Last Jedi
  • Sicario (2015)
  • Erin Brockovich (2000)
  • Hunger Games (#2, #3)
  • Flashdance (1983)
  • Lady Bird
  • Gone girl
  • Nothing But The Truth

Watched:

  • Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
  • The Avengers
  • Atomic Blonde
  • Ghost in the Shell
  • Star Wars: The Force Awakens
  • Wonder Woman
  • The Sound of Music
  • Hunger Games (#1)
  • Kill Bill

Animation

Watched

  • Kiki’s Delivery Service
  • Nausicaa
  • Princess Mononoke

Read

  • Jane Austen: Gone with the Wind
  • Pride and Prejudice

Eh? TV series

  • The Great Jang-Geum  (TV series.. though it’s set in those old palatial times)

Conclusion

Well, those were a really partial and unordered list of movies to watch. What I really want to find nowadays are online videos (talks) and especially podcasts, but it’s hard to find ones that don’t focus at all on the fact that they’re women…. A perfectly fine thing, just not what I’m looking for. I don’t need to be any more sensitized; I actively work on being de-sensitized. I just want to counter my unconscious bias by explicitly feeding myself a better “diet” of media consumption.

In the meantime, back to learning about the OpenAI gym, POMDPs, numerical methods, all that jazz.

Research

Updates (further sources I found) 17 Oct 2018:

Thoughtful

On Impurity, by J. Seale [for little red sailboat aka Olde Indie]

i emailed out to a few lists “selling” my sailboat for the cost of a poem. The sailboat found a happy new home with Alex H, a MITERS member & Hannah & their baby. I did get another poem though, by someone who enjoyed the prompt, and found it again in my inbox just now:

J. Seale
On Impurity

True voyages are never maiden nor the hands that helm them
Fearful of falling afoul of that form.
Sometimes joyful but always impure the sea is impervious,
Gently hugging the shores it meets,
Lying spread betwixt them and a comingled firmament,
Then mounting and roaring in the face of rocks and spitting gods
in the same unconcerned coupling that brought about the first cell’s split.

In a permanent embrace that stays true only to its indifference,
disrespected creed, code, race, gender are all ignored in favor of
the same militaristic contract known to voyagers across millennia
with its blue-black ink of clicks and luffs
as a pledge to the unknown,
possibly beautiful and possibly vile,
signed each day in whatever bodily issue
might be demanded as partial payment
with trembling hand lashed to the tiller if so bidden.

On pain of death all who greet the cold wind from the rail
with digits raised on both hands
in so doing leave innocence on the dock
and instead thereby pledge to sport this same death as needed
while waking and dreaming, on hand and on brow:
As her breed I will respect the intricacies of the sea.

– For Nancy Ouyang, September 2017

Gardening, Uncategorized

Trader Joe’s $5 Mini Potted Roses — keeping them alive and blooming for months

2 Comments

I recently (over the last 2 years? wow time flies) discovered that you can keep the Trader Joe’s $5 mini roses alive for months.

TJs_rose

I killed my first (overenthusiastic-buying-spree) batch of 4 potted roses by over-watering and not knowing what spider mites are. By the time I decided to look up whether they were a problem, the plants were pretty much goners — there were spider webs on the plants, which is a sign of major infestation. Despite my best efforts to soap them down, they slowly died.

I learned from that experience. This time, I took them out of the pot they came in right away, and put them in bigger pots so their roots could grow and the water could drain. When I first took them out of the pots, the roots were super bunched up.

I also freaked out and thought that the normal fuzz on the plants was a mildew infestation, and cut off all the flowers buds! I’d read that it was far better to prune the roses (they can grow back from twigs) and to not treat them too delicately. Fortunately the rose sprouted more flowers in a few weeks.

very normal fuzziness
very normal fuzziness

Pots

The first thing to do is to re-pot the roses in a bigger pot, and put a tray underneath so that the water can drain out — then, when you water, make sure to empty out the water and not let the roots rot in water.

The re-potting procedure is simple. Fill the new pot about 1/3 full. Tilt the old pot sideways, then shake it gently / tape the bottom until the plant slides out. Then you can kind of muss up the bottom to “de-compact the soil / root ball”. Put the rose in and gently sprinkle in soil to fill the sides, then gently push on the soil with your fingertips. Fill in a bit more soil. Finally, put some more soil until the top of the soil is ~3 cm from the top of the pot — this is so there’s enough space to water the roses. (these are all rules-of-thumb, adjust according to what seems reasonable for the plant).

Another important thing was to step up the size of the pots. It got kinda expensive, and I kept running out of soil. Recently though, I left for 2 weeks and put two of my roses in bigger pots and left one in a smaller pot. The two plants are noticeably bigger then the other one, and the small one had a little spider mite infestation (not bad at all).

roses_begin

roses_nov

 

bigger_rose

recent_roses

From a few days ago.

(I also started growing some succulents — including some from seed! but that’s for another post)

Pruning and Dead-heading

An important thing to do, in terms of warding off insect infestations and diseases, is to keep the center of the rose fairly airy — no crossing branches, and the branches all facing mostly outward. When I first got the roses, I (somewhat aggressively) pruned them. Keep in mind that roses can sometimes grow from just shoots planted in the ground.

The pruning procedure is simple, cut each shoot right above a 5-leaf stem facing outward (well, about 3 cm above it). A new stem will grow from the “bud eye” above that stem — a little bump in the stem. I just use scissors.

You do the same for flowers that have started to wilt, so that they put their energy into more flowers.

https://www.wikihow.com/Deadhead-Roses

Bulbs

At first, since it was winter, I bought special “full spectrum” lightbulbs to encourage them to keep blooming (Interestingly, all the sources online about which “temperature” of lamp to buy was full of anecdotal recommendations on marijuana growing forums). I definitely think it helped them grow. They were $15 on four “ALZO 45W Full Spectrum CFL Light Bulb 5500K, 2800 Lumens, Daylight White Light” — they plugged into standard sockets but are a lot longer, so they stuck out of the $10 target lamp I bought. I cut up some folders to shade people from the lamps.

small_rose

Fertilizer

However, eventually they still stopped blooming even though the days were getting longer. Eventually, I decided to get some fertilizer. I spent “Miracle-Gro Rose Plant Food, 1.5-Pounds (Rose Fertilizer)”$7 on ebay, though I’ve since seen them in hardware stores and Target and other places everywhere, probably for cheaper. It wasn’t immediate, but the roses really did get a lot happier and start blooming again in 2 to 4 weeks. I just got a gallon milk jug and mixed it with water — the fertilizer is applied every 2 weeks.

Insecticide

I also bought actual insecticide to spray the roses to kill spider mites, and I’ve just got a bottle always at the ready now. I used to just use dish detergent and water, but after 3 or 4 sprays (over the course of 3 or 4 months), the roses started looking really sad. So I got $10 of “Safer Brand 5118 Insect Killing Soap – 16-Ounce Concentrate”.

I’ve been very bad about it, but you’re supposed to re-spray the insecticide after a week, since that’s when the eggs hatch. But make sure to wash the insecticide off the leaves in-between. I also considered placing towels under the leaves when I spray, to get less of the insecticide in the soil. But I decided it might be better to ensure that all the mites, including some that might be crawling around on the soil, got killed.

Watering

I recommend pouring close to the soil — what happens is that the soil will compact over time.

Flowers on water

A neat thing you can do is fill a small container with ~3 cm of water and float the rose flowers you cut off in it. They’ll last a surprisingly long time — days, maybe a week.

water

rose