Performance Review

Sigh. Some days are like this. I also signed the final copy of my annual performance review at my market (paid) job today.

The Best Valentine Ever

It sure beats my performance review last December.

Date Night at Gina Lee's Bistro

We spent our date night this week in an incredibly dorky way. Mark doesn't want to reveal what we did lest that inspire any of his competition. Instead, I will show pictures of last week's date night at Gina Lee's Bistro in Hollywood Riviera. That's the owner, manager, and Gina's husband, Scott Lee, standing in profile by the kitchen.

I like to hear the waiters recite the daily specials from memory. It's a really delightful performance. 9 times out of 10, I will order the bento box daily special. Of course I scarfed down the first crab cake before I thought about bringing out the camera. (I turned off the flash out of respect for the other diners so the picture is a bit blurry.) Clockwise from the top left: dipping sauce for the crab cakes, crab cakes, grilled salmon on greens, Korean BBQ beef, coleslaw in a lettuce cup, coconut lemongrass soup with mint leaves and a fried whitefish cutlet.

It sounds like I am in a rut, ordering the bento box so frequently. However, the contents change depending upon what Gina Lee finds at the market that day. It rarely disappoints.

If you visit the restaurant with a large group, order the catfish. You have to see this dish. It is a beautiful piece of performance art that tastes pretty good. The entire catfish is fried and arranged like a giant S on the plate. The catfish cradles a pile of Asian-influenced coleslaw. Ponzu dipping sauce provides the perfect accompaniment. The only flaw of that dish is that it is too much of a good thing. That's why you should go with a large party and eat family style.

The menu does not provide many vegetarian options. Tell Scott that you are a vegetarian and they will fix something seasonally delicious for you.

Unlike the reviewer below, I like the desserts there. We shared the Hawaiian bread pudding with mangoes and macadamia nuts. When Iris comes with us, she always saves room for the chocolate pistachio bars.

Link: Irene Virbila's review of Gina Lee's Bistro.
That's all folks.

Butterick 5816

I had planned some more substantive posts, but Iris' school performance, subsequent illness, and then my illness wiped out my last week and a half. Instead, I offer a fluffy pattern review of Butterick 5816 View B.

The pattern envelope and the Butterick website does not offer a photograph of the blouse--generally a bad sign.  They may not have even tested the pattern before publishing it.  I didn't intend to purchase a pattern to be their beta tester; I originally wanted to make view D, which wouldn't have worked for this fabric.

This has a lot of collar, even when doubled over and twisted.

The collar looks more tailored and stiff when folded over without a twist.

If you have a loooooong neck, you can wear the cowl without folding it over.

Notice that the stripes don't match on the back neck seam.  I couldn't be bothered because I wasn't sure if I would like the finished product and thought this was just a wearable muslin.

It turns out, this is a fun, easy and very pretty blouse.  I think it will be worn quite often.

The pattern pleasantly surprised me with its engineering.  The bias cowl is lozenge-shaped instead of rectangular.  That allows it to lay more gracefully.  All the pattern pieces match up exactly the way they should.  My only gripe is that the pattern is drafted with straight shoulder seams. I am not shaped like that. I took a tip from the Burda draft and curved the shoulder seams down about 1/4" toward the neck edge to hug the indentation by my clavicle.

I purchased the mystery fabric at SAS.  A flame test revealed that it was either acetate or triacetate.  It has a lovely crinkled pique finish with satin and twill woven stripes.  It can fray like crazy, so I was careful when handling it.  The cowl seams are enclosed.  The shoulder seams are flat felled.  The sleeve and side seams are serged with gray thread, and the hems are turned under twice.

[I toyed with the idea of flat-felling the dropped sleeves, which have a flat sleeve cap, but, worried that would have created too much stiffness--a danger with drop sleeve caps.  Once the serger was rethreaded to gray, I took the path of least resistance and served the side seams.]

I sewed a size Medium (12-14), which is my size according to their measurement charts.  I usually shorten pattern sleeves by 1/2", but needed to shorten this one by 2.5".  Although the long-sleeved version of this blouse is shown in the longer (body) length, I cut it out in the shorter length.  I raised the center front neckline by 2", narrowed the neckline 1/4" on each side and redrafted to a smooth neckline curve.  The neck circumference at the seam line was 28" (instead of the original 32"), which is the circumference of the XS cowl piece.

BTW, I styled it with a denim wrap skirt made with Vogue 9414.  It's OOP, but Lanetz Living has two copies of it for sale.  I first made this skirt in linen and you can see it on me here.  I also found the linen and denim for the two skirts at SAS.

People often ask me where to buy fabric.  It's difficult now that all of the full-service apparel fabric stores in the south bay have closed.  In the last decade or so, we've lost TreadleArt, Florence Fabrics and the Cotton Shop.  I can't stand the stuff they sell at Joann's as apparel fabric.  These days, I find my apparel fabrics locally at odd jobbers like SAS Fabrics and Trash for Teaching.

Both are hit and miss because they stock leftovers from area apparel manufacturers.  They have what they have and it might not be what you need at that point in time.  But, at prices ranging from $1-$6 per pound for the odd-sized flat folds, or $1-6/yard (for fabrics on rolls) I buy what I like even if I don't have an immediate use for it.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention Momen, a quilt shop with a distinctly Japanese flavor in old Torrance.  They sell Japanese-made fabrics for far less than they sell for in Japan.  The owners have great relationships with US and Japanese manufacturers and their selection and prices for top-quality  fabrics are unbeatable.  But, sadly, most of it is for quilting or home dec.

I keep a shopping list and order interfacing once a year from Fashion Sewing Supply.  I used to order thread and notions annually from Atlanta Thread and Supply, now part of WAWAK Sewing Supplies. Has anyone used WAWAK and want to share their customer service experience?

Bad Dad and I wished for a bookstore on Artesia and two opened up--one for new books and one for used ones.  The Cotton Shop and Luella's Quilt Basket closed down due to their owners' retirements, but a former Luella's employee opened up Nina's Quilt Barn.  There is an empty storefront on Artesia boulevard that would be perfect for an apparel fabric store with classrooms.  It even shares a parking lot with a sewing and vacuum shop.  Someone really needs to open up a fabric store there.  How hard do I have to wish?

Pattern review for Butterick 5816.

Rockin'

Gaia Girl and Monique named me a Rockin’ Girl Blogger. Thank you very much, but I don’t think of myself as rockin’. Mostly, I am (barely) holding it together.

Now let’s talk about the weather. I found a couple of newish sites that were not yet in my bookmarks that I want to share.

Remember when I had trouble seeing the jet stream analysis at low latitudes? Well, the Navy Research Laboratory in Monterey has put up a new page of satellite imagery with NOGAPS (numerical weather prediction) overlays. It is beautiful AND useful. You can navigate to it from their general satellite page click on “Images with NOGAPS Overlays” on the right, then scroll down near the bottom of the next page to “Jet_Stream” Atlantic.

The National Center for Environmental Prediction’s runs Ensemble Forecasts, a set of NWP runs with different initial conditions. The spaghetti plots are difficult to understand, even for meteorologists. However, check out their Tropical storm performance monitor page. Different storms are tracked in separate columns. The date and time that the models were initiated are on the left. For the latest Hurricane Dean predictions, click on the topmost 04L link.

Aren’t the “spaghetti plots” pretty? Unlike the plots I showed two days ago where each line was the forecast from a different model, the same model produced all these predicted storm track lines. The difference is in the initial conditions fed into the model. The initial conditions are produced by a method called “bred vectors”.

That brings me back to Rockin’ Girls again. Rather than name other bloggers, I want to honor some rocking women that made a difference in my life.

Firstly, there is Admiral Grace Hopper, a mathematician and the mother of modern programming languages. She invented the concept of compilers and was instrumental in developing the standards for COBOL and Fortran. It is hard to imagine numerical weather prediction without Fortran. No wonder so many streets and buildings are named after her in Monterey, home of Navy Postgraduate School, Navy Research Laboratory, and Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center.

A colleague, who served in the Navy during the era of the Tailhook scandal, told me that Fleet Numerical is the only duty you can draw in the Navy where women outnumber men. He was in heaven when he arrived. He loved the work, and the work atmosphere. The example set by Admiral Hopper has a great deal to do with the relatively large number of women in numerical weather prediction.

Secondly, I want to introduce Eugenia Kalnay, who tirelessly championed ensemble forecasting at the operational centers. This may be obvious to us today, but it wasn't an easy sell when computational power was more limited and we had to think long and hard about how we spent it. She was also instrumental in developing the mathematics for optimizing selection of the ensemble.

Lastly, I want to introduce Jenny Harrison, a mathematics professor at my alma mater, UC Berkeley. This very sad tale makes me squirm, but I think it is important to talk about it. I never took a class from her. In fact, in my entire 8 semesters at Berkeley, I never took a class taught by a female science or math professor.

Berkeley had only one tenured female professor when Jenny Harrison came up for tenure. She was denied. She was told that she was merely average and average is not good enough for Berkeley. She asked to see her tenure review file. She was stonewalled on the basis of privacy (for the tenure committee members). After much legal wrangling, her file was released to the public. It said that her production of research was average when compared to tenured Berkeley math professors. That is, she was par for the set that she wished to join.

Why, then, was she denied? It is not explicitly stated, but I think it had to do with her personality. Men and boys were really put off by her. I remember a male Freshman at my dorm who complained about her teaching technique. I asked him what he meant. He said that she never called on a male student as long as a female student was available. He would hold his hand up high and she would ignore him and pick female students time after time. Gee, he was complaining about treatment I endured every day in every class. Of course, nice girl that I was, I didn't tell him that. I merely dropped the subject.

Fast forward to the end of the semester and my male professor handed out the final exam and said, "This exam will separate the men from the boys." The other woman in the class and I looked at each other in panic. What did he mean by that remark? We were stressed out enough by the exam itself without being told that we were either invisible or not welcome there.

Fast forward another semester when another student told me that my math teaching assistant was rating the physical attractiveness of the female students in his section during office hours. He told me this because he thought I would be happy to have been rated highest. I was devastated by this and never went to office hours again.

In fact, I was ready to drop out of math altogether until a friend introduced me to Jenny Harrison in the lunch area outside the math building one day. He told her that I was good at math but thinking of discontinuing math studies. Would she talk to me? She motioned for us to sit down and eat lunch with her.

She asked me if I liked math. I told her yes. Then she asked why I wanted to stop studying math. I told her about the uncomfortable environment. She told me that, if I quit, then I had let them win. She told me to study what I wanted and not to listen to the others. (She might have had stronger words than that, but I can't recall her exact words.) I do recall her forcefulness and her total lack of deference towards men. I think it cost her dearly. She won the legal fight, but it took a heavy emotional toll.

So today, I want to honor the women who came before us. They proved that we are good enough and that we deserve a place at the table.

Links:

• Meet Admiral Grace Hopper A short biography
• Profile of Eugenia Kalnay, first woman to graduate with a PhD in Meteorology at MIT and mother of ensemble forecasting
• Fighting for Tenure: The Jenny Harrison Case Opens Pandora's Box of Issues About Tenure, Discrimination, and the Law
• An interesting slant on the Jenny Harrison Case in Stephen Smale's biography. This really creeps me out because I took an honors seminar in complex analysis with him about the time this is alleged to have happened.
  
• Ensemble Forecasting at NCEP
• Fleet Numerical
• Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) Satellite Meteorology
• Tropical storm performance monitor page Ensemble forecasts plots
• Geek Glamour in the Atlantic Monthly (I don't know what Virginia Postrel means by "Of course, the glamour is an illusion." We really are that good-looking and well-dressed.)

Notes from a RCT guinea pig

I hope you all had a wonderful mothers' day.  I opened mothers' day while madly writing responses to  questions for a CopyrightX final exam.  Bad Dad went to Trader Joe's for a food run and brought me some flowers to liven up the computer desk and chocolates for caffeine and energy.

Much has been written about MOOCs, massive open online classes, but mostly by nontechnical writers.  I think that MOOCs can be wonderful for computer programming courses.  But, they are lacking for humanities and other open-ended disciplines.  If reporters only sample the nontechnical MOOCs, then they will come away with the impression that MOOCs are just an educational fad with no real substance behind it.

Nathan Heller's long article for the New Yorker,  Laptop U, is representative of the coverage Bad Dad and I have read.  He opens with The Ancient Greek Hero, a class that Bad Dad is taking very seriously and I have all but given up on, and closes with CopyrightX, a very rigorous class I just completed.

CopyrightX is not a MOOC in the sense that it is not truly open.  Potential students apply and are selected.  I'll refer to it as a MOC, though, at 500 students, it's neither open nor massive.

We also pledge that, if selected, we will put in at least 8 hours a week of study and discussion time.  To further weed out dilettantes, the online application included several essay questions about our backgrounds and motivations for studying copyright.  I wrote about my past work in data collection and curation and my sewing and blogging hobbies.  My answers were compelling enough to land me one of the 500 internet student slots.

Heller wrote: "In picking students, [professor Terry Fisher] looked partly for a range of ages and professions: his goal is to seed knowledge of digital-age copyright law among people who will apply it creatively in their own circles and work."

 Of the 25 people in my section, three held PhDs, one two were practicing IP attorneys and a handful worked as librarians and archivists for a range of federal and state agencies or nonprofits. This was not your average (wo)man on the street cohort.  Students came from Europe, North and South America and China, but the North American and European students were most active in discussion boards and at the "live" weekly recitation sections.  I'm curious to learn how many of us took the final (which is a proxy for sticking it out in the class).

In addition to the weekly lectures by the professor, we read review articles and case law, "met" with our section for weekly discussion with our TA as a moderator and watched biweekly guest lectures.  Our TA also offered weekly office hours and sent out additional study materials throughout the weeks. If we asked a question that our TA couldn't answer, she sent it out to her fellow TAs and the professor and replies rolled in reasonably quickly.

Functionally, CopyrightX was a small college seminar, taught by a graduate teaching assistant and overseen by a rock-star professor.  The TA was super generous with her time.  The professor, though not approachable directly by students, spent considerable time preparing the class and listening to the TAs and the students through the TAs.

The internet 500 (CopyrightX group) took the class at the same time as students enrolled in the bricks and mortars Harvard Law School (HLS), studying the same units at the same pace.  In discussion section, HLS and CopyrightX students discussed the same "hypotheticals", or hypothetical cases.  During the special guest seminars, both HLS and CopyrightX students could submit questions.  Other students and TAs would upvote questions on the board, and the guests answered the top-voted questions from both groups.

The CopyrightX welcome message mentioned that we were assigned to one of four groups.  I instantly wrote my teaching assistant to ask if we were taking part in a randomized clinical trial (RCT).  (I learned about RCTs in PH207x Health in Numbers: Quantitative Methods in Clinical & Public Health Research.)

My TA asked the edX staff and a response rolled in many weeks later as the question got kicked around until it found someone who knew the methodology.  I know that you are on the edge of your seat, waiting for the methodology.  Here goes.

Each of the 500 admitted and enrolled students checked off one or more of the five available time slots.  The computer assigned 100 to each time slot, based on our availability.  The 20 TAs were assigned, four to a time slot, in a similar fashion.  Then we were randomly assigned, within each time slot, to one of four groups.

There were two "exposures" and four possible combinations.  One half read US case law only (controls) while the other read fewer US case law but more international law.  One half used the edX discussion boards only (controls) while the other half also used Nota Bene PDF annotation software to collaboratively mark up the weekly readings.  I was assigned to the "double exposure" group, which studied international copyright law and used Nota Bene.  (If you haven't tried Nota Bene, give it a whirl.  I really like it.)

Come to think of it, there is a third exposure--online or bricks and mortar.  In one section, the TA let it slip that we came to consensus on the relevant section of law and precedents faster than the HLS section.  That's when I realized that they could compare us to not just other CopyrightX students, but also possibly to the HLS students.

In early June, we will be notified of our final exam results.  Undoubtedly, the performance data between groups will provide researchers with rich material.  I hope that our participation as guinea pigs will make online education better for all.

I learned as much from my fellow students as from the TA. The accreditation doesn't matter to someone in my situation (though the librarians and archivists were taking the class as part of their jobs).  Being in a very serious cohort with breadth and depth of real world experience and with true interactivity were valuable to me.   I would pay money for such courses once they move out of clinical trial--if the RCTs prove MOC efficacy.  ;-)

That said, I initially put a blanket copyright notice at the bottom of this blog because I didn't want to give away any rights before I understood them.  Now that I am more aware, I think I will change the copyright to Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported as a baseline and then put separate notices for content that I want to protect differently.

I'll also post later about what the licenses mean and how I will apply them to my blogging, sewing, knitting, software and data activities.  Stay tuned.  Watch this footer.  ;-)

Leave a comment if you think this is interesting or I should just stick to the sewing and knitting stuff.

Addendum:

Commentator Douglas Kretzman left two excellent links.   The MOOC Moment and the End of Reform By Aaron Bady is the best discussion of what MOOCs means for education in particular and society in general I have ever read. It is truly not to be missed.

Then read this tongue in cheek but deadly serious CUCFA President Meister's Open Letter to Coursera Founder Daphne Koller.