[Bootcamp Week 1] 🥴 "Impostor Syndrome", ☯️ Experience Report, 📚 Reading, 📊 Visualization

[Allangikonyo]

Do

• Get out a blank piece of paper and a pen. (e-ink counts, maybe not iPad or Android without e-ink); physical handwriting helps us process information differently. Take notes with physical pen and paper as you complete this. What is confusing? What do you want to remember? Where do you need help and where might you offload cognitive difficulty? Where might your locus of control be -- internal or external?
• Try putting your phone on do-not-disturb, disable apps, put it in another room, for periods of at least 20 minutes to budget your time and block out times you can focus on these tasks -- they'll get done more quickly and you will retain more of this knowledge :)
• Try calendaring more intensely than you might be used to: for one or two days, try scheduling every minute of your day. Waking up, brushing teeth, reading, eating, socializing, appointments, work, tasks like the above. Notice whether you trust the resulting data: did you do what you intended or not? Would you trust anyone's calendar to be an accurate reflection of what they did, or their intentions? What is lost?
• If any of this reading is long, feel free to ask ChatGPT or Claude to summarize it for you: copy and paste the text and ask for a markdown table, or for extracting the main bullet points, or ask for the tl;dr (too long; didn't read in internet-speak). In fact, feel free to copy and paste this entire text and ask ChatGPT, Claude to make it a fun game for you every step of the way if you feel like.

Read

• How we schedule time matters, in order to do deep work like understanding the core concepts in this bootcamp! It's tricky and practicing attention and time management can help: https://calnewport.com/text-file-time-blocking/
• Who gets to define what a word means? https://jsomers.net/blog/dictionary
• What is a kernel according to one dude a hundred years ago? http://www.websters1913.com/words/Kernel
• How we conceptualize confusion, stuckness, frustration matters, in addition to how we prescribe these labels to some of our experiences and people that surround us but not others: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/02/13/the-dubious-rise-of-impostor-syndrome
• Why is it hard to know where to save things? https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z
• How do we send emails? https://matt.might.net/articles/how-to-email/
• How we communicate matters: https://styleguide.mailchimp.com/writing-principles/
• Read about how to create a filter in Gmail: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6579?hl=en

Review

• The lecture recordings (link in email)
• The Figma whiteboards:

• first lecture: https://www.figma.com/file/8awNcglOJSvXWyj9acstHO/230606-data-thinking-bootcamp-introduction-and-outline?type=whiteboard&node-id=0%3A1&t=lsQvpeuqgXBHsFjo-1
• second lecture: https://www.figma.com/file/hIIMHSXC0fOxhyPjHCRnFG/230608-princeton-university-week-1-information-management-definitions-of-AI-visualization-basics?type=whiteboard&node-id=7%3A108&t=PYFWeIwv1os3IPna-1

Code

• After reviewing the above, see if you can get this Jupyter notebook to open in Visual Studio code: https://nbviewer.org/github/onefact/datathinking.org-codespace/blob/main/notebooks/princeton-university/week-1-visualizing-33-million-phone-calls-in-new-york-city.ipynb (you'll need to follow the instructions in the README: https://github.com/onefact/datathinking.org-codespace#data-thinking-codespace-running-copilot-in-jupyter-notebooks-in-github-codespaces-and-locally - and you might need to ask for help from ChatGPT, Claude, and on Zulip, or attend office hours!)

• See if you can get the visualization to match what is rendered here: https://nbviewer.org/github/onefact/datathinking.org-codespace/blob/main/notebooks/princeton-university/week-1-visualizing-33-million-phone-calls-in-new-york-city.ipynb

Write

• Post an experience report on Zulip. And, feel free to save it somewhere, e.g. in a comment on this issue. Write down a "cognitive walkthrough", or moment-by-moment notes about what you are aware of, unaware of, feeling, thinking, doing, any "pain points" (this is user experience/user interface research and design jargon). Pick a task, set of tasks, algorithm (read: instructions; something that happens repeatedly in life, society, daily life, systems you interact with at some regularity). You get to define what counts, in addition to how and where you allocate your attention for this task.
• Prompt ChatGPT and Claude and ask it to revise your experience report in light of this prescriptivist stance toward English usage & style. Do you like it more or less? Do you want to keep some of the edits or not at all? Feel free to edit the experience report alongside reflections on whether you benefited from ChatGPT/Claude's edits:

Ten Principles for Writing clearly
1. Distinguish real grammatical rules from folklore.
2. Use subjects to name the characters in your story.
3. Use verbs to name their important actions.
4. Open your sentences with familiar units of information.
5. Get to the main verb quickly:
• Avoid long introductory phrases and clauses. • Avoid long abstract subjects.
• Avoid interrupting the subject-verb connection.
6. Push new, complex units of information to the end of the sentence.
7. Begin sentences that form a unit with consistent subjects/topics.
8. Be concise:
• Cut meaningless and repeated words and obvious implications.
• Put the meaning of phrases into one or two words.
• Prefer affirmative sentences to negative ones.
9. Control sprawl:
• Don’t tack more than one subordinate clause onto another.
• Extend a sentence with resumptive, summative, and free modifiers.
• Extend a sentence with coordinate structures after verbs.
10. Above all, write to others as you would have others write to you.

These are drawn from Style, Lessons in Clarity and Grace (https://www.pearson.com/en-us/subject-catalog/p/style-lessons-in-clarity-and-grace/P200000002140/9780137536603).