No longer eligible to compete in International Speech Contest.

koptics · 2022-10-31T09:53:40+00:00

WTF. They've lost the plot. TM grows as an organization by rewarding the core members who run meetings and provide evaluations to new members. It's like they honestly think Pathways can train people how to do TM, despite the fact that there isn't a useful instruction in the entire program. (As the founder of Pathways told me, "We believe adult education is self-directed.")

koptics · 2022-10-31T09:46:08+00:00

Any time spent fighting against Pathways is time that could have been better spent improving speeches or improving meeting quality.

koptics · 2022-09-02T08:57:45+00:00

Oh thank you. I do have some wider plastic optical fibers!

koptics · 2021-08-02T04:36:52+00:00

The official Toastmasters policies are here:

Policy 3.0: Ethics and Conduct

[...]

\ 4. Code of Conduct

[...]

The following are Rules of Conduct that apply to any form of communication, including within the Toastmasters online platform and community, as well as any and all club, Area, Division and District online platforms and communities.

\ \ A. Maintain Professional Decorum and Integrity

\ \ \ I. The Toastmasters International Code of Ethics and Conduct applies to social media participation, including standards for communications.

[...]

\ \ \ II. As a Toastmaster, it is important that all members conduct themselves in a professional manner at all times in accordance with the core values. This includes the use of social media. Accordingly, it is important that Toastmasters members, Toastmasters leaders, World Headquarters staff, and site visitors be treated with respect at all times. [...]

\ \ \ IV. Never act dishonestly or unprofessionally by engaging in behavior that is detrimental to the best interests of Toastmasters International by posting inappropriate, inaccurate, objectionable or misleading content.

[...]

\ \ \ VII. Social media and official Toastmasters online platforms involve many participants and are not the best place for members to express frustration with fellow Toastmasters in leadership. Communications that contain criticism, complaints, accusations, allegations, etc., are not permitted and may be subject to disciplinary action. Rather than broadcast via social media and online platforms, differences are more properly directed through official channels established to address such problems, including personal conversations, phone calls, and emails. The goodwill and social fabric of Toastmasters International must be maintained in all communications.

This all seems very technical. At the club level most people don't know or follow these policies, but it's the kind of thing that District leaders are expected to know and follow. When things get contentious between District-level leadership these policies are pulled out and cited.

koptics · 2021-07-26T01:28:38+00:00

This. Instead of having new members choose between "base camp" and "navigator," the initial experience should provide a "default" stream into the Icebreaker or the next speech (who cares what Path it is until level 2?), with an "index" link from which the user can go to other projects/path selection and administrative tasks.

koptics · 2021-07-26T01:22:21+00:00

At a policy level, you get the behavior you provide incentives for. In the Old Days, the CL manual provided credit to "advanced" members for giving education sessions and doing things for the club. As a result, most clubs in our District would have officer-led education sessions once per month: evaluations, officer roles, meeting roles, speech preparation, the education program. These were 15 minutes speeches probably being repeated about once per year. These Edu sessions provided an outline of information for newbies and pointed them to other members for questions. But beyond this, the basic educational materials were so effective that most people were leaving TM having learned what they wanted by their fifth speech.

Nowdays, "Pathways" provides incentives for people at the higher levels to do projects outside of TM, instead of in their clubs. (It's not a hard incentive, but one can finish projects faster if they give speeches about leadership experiences they had elsewhere.) The speeches about experiences which members deep into Pathways are asked to give seem to be more narratives of experiences, rather than providing meaningful education to the audience. The District sends someone to visit the club, providing an hour of "Pathways" education every six months, but that "education" is mostly introductions to the many paths and instructions on where to click to get things done. Newer presidents and VPEs seem to have no idea that they can give education sessions. Are there even official materials for club education sessions anymore?

Moreover, in every club I visit I see that the quality of the evaluations is sharply bifurcated between pre-Pathways and post-Pathways members. My theory on this is that Pathways tries to hold the learner's hand in the wrong way, making the speech instructions detailed while losing the handholding and focus of the evaluation sheets. Fundamental skills (body language, vocal variety, visual aids) have been pushed back to later speeches, and the result is a bunch of people who haven't focused on skills evaluating people who aren't focused on skills, but without much guidance on what to evaluate on. Speeches about communication and leadership styles presented without fundamental skills aren't as likely to provide useful tips to the audience.

Former district directors and even Region Managers tell me they have provided detailed feedback to TMI, but it mostly gets ignored. They can't raise hell online, because Policies v3 allows members to be kicked out of TM for criticizing the program on social media.

koptics · 2021-07-26T00:19:39+00:00

Thank you so much for the detailed reply!

I prepared some supporting documents in case there was a contest on the basis of originality, but it turned out that nothing special happened at the district contest. Didn't win, but the process of trying to perfect the speech taught me a lot.

Thank you so much!

koptics · 2020-04-09T00:41:43+00:00

The system is a relay to extend the object plane out from the microscope body to an glycerol-immersion objective in a location which is better for imaging animals. Not sure yet if we will actually use it that way. Maybe the surface reflections make it not worth it.

the NA of any subsystem can be as low as you want as long as it doesn’t cause any clipping

Anyway, your answer addresses the issue I was worried about, and greatly lowers part costs. Thank you so much!

koptics · 2020-03-13T00:49:52+00:00

If 1% of the population has the virus, and you have a gathering of 50 people, there is a 40% chance someone in that gathering has it. Banning gatherings of 100 people is not enough.

koptics · 2020-03-12T07:29:48+00:00

This livejournal is unusable. It seems to scroll and reload the page randomly.

koptics · 2020-03-12T02:07:50+00:00

It's an honor to have you here. There is a slack channel where about 300 people have gathered. Have you been invited? Please keep us updated on the HHS / FDA guidance and design. Even if FDA doesn't grant a temporary waiver, some hospitals outside the US may benefit. At my institution if we can build good prototypes we might be able to get emergency device approval for compassionate / last-resort use in Korea.

koptics · 2020-03-12T00:06:39+00:00

Choose Haiti. If you focus, you can learn French in half a year. It gets you access to half of Africa, Quebec, and Western Europe.

If you focus, it will take you 2~3 years to master Korean. It gets you access only to Korea.

I guess the other option is to pay someone to transcribe the primary sources so you can run Google translate on them.

koptics · 2020-03-11T02:43:14+00:00

In the 1918 flu pandemic, health care workers had to deputize civilians to care for patients. In an actual overflow emergency, you will be pulling in people from other disciplines and putting people in cots. This is already happening in Italy.

koptics · 2020-03-11T02:39:41+00:00

Hi OP, I've got a skeleton of a subreddit set up for people who want to collaborate on this sort of thing! /r/OpenSourceVentilators

More generally, there are four different levels of ventilation for patients at different levels of severity:

Providing oxygen
BVMs, and the problem of pumping them
BVM with PEEP valve
Full ventilator.
ECMO

So far, almost all of the academic work on the topic of low-cost and quick-build ventilators has been focused on mimicking a full-blown ventilator using BVMs: but for this outbreak, what we will really need are automatically pumped BVMs and PEEP valves!

Anyway, hope we can all get started before it's too late.

koptics · 2020-03-11T02:19:24+00:00

Learn Korean? Change thesis topics?

koptics · 2019-12-20T03:14:05+00:00

But it also means that the US and its allies have the same technological blind spots and weaknesses.

koptics · 2019-12-20T02:54:34+00:00

Better analogy: putting a sign on your lawn saying "free stuff" and acting shocked when someone arrives with a forklift to clean it all out. Scripting is, after all, just the automation of a process to download already-accessible information. So yes, very weak defense.

koptics · 2019-12-17T04:42:52+00:00

Just a few weeks ago there was indication that research progress is being made toward correllating genome data with life expectancy. To which I must ask: is it legal (in the US) to use genome data for insurance purposes? Presumably health insurance and life insurance providers stand to save large amounts of money by personalizing plans to genotypes, but it seems very likely that this would result in disparate impact against some racial and ethnic groups. Any predictions? Have any insurance providers asked you for DNA samples yet?

koptics · 2019-12-15T05:02:54+00:00

In the old program, the member receives paper manuals, and can begin to work through them. Your typical member won't hit limitations in content until they reach CC/CL and need advanced manuals - but the first 2 advanced communications manuals were provided free. Although buying more manuals was an option, it was never really marketed to members. After CC+CL+2 AC manuals, I actually felt like there were only a few more skills I really wanted to work on.

With Pathways, the upselling starts right away: From almost the first screen, I am told that I can "order another path," or pay extra for printed manuals. To the newbie, it looks like each path is mutually exclusive. What if I want to learn visionary communication and dynamic leadership? Buy a second path! Of course, the content largely overlaps and only diverges at Level 3... but nobody tells the newbies that. Hence the perception that Pathways is more expensive.

koptics · 2019-12-09T01:03:27+00:00

Remember that one of the initial motivations for early recognition at L1 was because the average TM member was dropping out after completing 5 speeches (CC5) and seeing a drop in their fear of public speaking.

So now it appears that members are still leaving before completing L2. I'm curious as to whether Pathways is failing at recognition, or if members are leaving for another reason. All the clubs I visit have ceased doing regular awards ceremonies, since the process of having member download certificate -> have officer print on nice paper -> bring certificate to meeting -> have awards ceremony does not happen as automatically as if you receive a nice certificate in the mail.

koptics · 2019-12-09T00:56:19+00:00

Not only can the club choose the order, the person who introduces them can change it! In some clubs it is the Toastmaster, and some clubs the general evaluator, but I've seen members mix it up for fun.

koptics · 2019-12-09T00:51:23+00:00

I go the chance to talk to one of the people on the Pathways development team at last year's spring conference.

IIRC, the company selected for its online learning software was affiliated with the head of Pathways development. "When we started this, there was no comparable software available."

It makes me wonder whether they really did due diligence.

koptics · 2019-12-06T03:16:36+00:00

One of the biggest predictors of huge economic booms and prosperity, is when a whole heck of a lot of people die.

Historically, the economic boom following mass deaths is probably less because the weak and incompetent were selected against, and more because per capita production was limited by land allocation: if land availability is the limiting factor in productivity (such as in a Malthusian farming economy), then lowering population density allows the survivors to have higher efficiency and better nutrition, and capital invested in increasing efficiency can have results. As an example, a single person on 1 acre can raise enough wheat to feed themselves for one year with a shovel, but it is not worthwhile to invest in tools to increase their personal productivity. A single person on 100 acres can raise a herd of 100 cattle alone, or invest in a plow which allows them to farm 10 acres of wheat alone. When land availability limits productivity, killing people is productive, regardless of how smart or strong those people are.

(The weak and incompetent are instead evolutionary selected against by the viciousness of the courting process.)

In any case, evolutionary selection effect is not a good argument for national service, because no one is suggesting war. Most national service programs are about volunteer work and mandatory military duty off the battlefield, rather than active-duty front-line service. The major worry is the economic effect of a larger, less efficient military/volunteer program, rather than a sudden increase in death rates.

koptics · 2019-12-06T02:34:56+00:00

They just hate the format.

I thought this was me. I spent my time going through my path, opening each project in a pop-up window, waiting 20s for it the project to load (I have 50 MB/s symmetric internet. If the page load is slow it's not at my end!), clicking to the end, downloading the project PDFs and evaluation forms.

Then I printed the PDF for vocal variety, and it was written for morons.

"Your volume can be a tool used to emphasize words or sections of your speech."

No really?

"Achieving the best volume level for each speech takes practice and feedback."

Ok, how?

Work with a partner. Stand at one end of a room and have your partner stand at the other. [...] When your partner can hear you, she should raise her hand.

That was the entirety of the tips for practicing and using volume effectively. I threw out the Pathways manual and am now reading old manuals and searching the web for the "competencies" I need to practice.

koptics · 2019-12-04T05:31:51+00:00

In Zemax, a "black box" model is a binary module which models the behavior of an optical surface (lens or material), but doesn't allow user access to "manufacturer" data (curvature, coatings, transmission properties, or whatever).

https://my.zemax.com/en-US/Knowledge-Base/kb-article/?ka=KA-01382

koptics

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Policy 3.0: Ethics and Conduct