Chris Brooks Newsletter 010
Welcome to February. We are on the road again, taking about 10 days for a loop up to GA and NC, then cruising back down to SC and northeast FL for some camping. My interim CTO tenure at Payscale is over, making it a two-month stint with a successful transition to the new permanent CTO. Enjoyed my time there but happy to move on.
1. 🚘 Where I’ve been traveling
Most of January was spent in Florida, though we did have a nice stint camping around the central part of the state. We visited Crystal Springs on the gulf coast (awesome!), Clermont outside of Orlando (meh), Sebastian Inlet on the Atlantic coast (awesome!), and Moss Park just east of Orlando (pretty good). The highlight was a 10 day stay with friend Karen in an AirBnB in Palm Bay right on Turkey Creek. We were on the water paddling every day.
2. 📖 What I’ve been reading
My business / self-help book was Talent by Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross.
- The target audience for this book is senior managers / executives, probably also venture capitalists and angel investors.
- Somebody made a LLM chatbot about the book! Head to Konjer | Talent and ask some questions. Browse the Konjer collection of books they’ve harvested. I asked the Atomic Habits bot “What does 1% better mean?”
- 1% better means making a small improvement in any given area. It could be something like learning one new word per day, running an extra mile, or reading one additional book every month. Making a 1% improvement is often an attainable goal that can lead to significant results over time.
- Read also this Practice Different article, inspired by Talent, that does a deep dive into Steph Curry’s practice regime.
Also:
- Last fall I purchased three used paperback / hardback books from AbeBooks. I finished this golf non-fiction trifecta (To the Linksland, Paper Tiger) with Shane Ryan’s The Cup They Couldn’t Lose, a story about the 2021 Ryder Cup in Whistling Straits. Decent book with a focus on modern Ryder Cup history, especially the Tony Jacklin era of European competitiveness.
- I finally finished book two of the Wax & Wayne Mistborn series Shadows of Self and am enjoying the series enough that I’ve started the third and final book The Bands of Mourning.
- This is a good time to share my recommendation for Standard Ebooks, the best selection of free, painstakingly edited, and beautifully formatted books you’ll find. If you are wondering where to start, consider browsing the set of books from Encyclopædia Britannica’s Great Books of the Western World. Perhaps you’ll find a classic you’ve been longing to read on that list. For me that’s likely The Great Gatsby.
3. 🍿 What I’ve been watching
Two movies:
- Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Fall Off , a decent documentary about the skater. There’s no easy button for glory like he’s obtained.
- King Richard was very good, made all-the-better because I knew very little about the childhoods of Serena and Venus. Highly recommended.
Mucho TV:
- 1883 – The first prequel to the Yellowstone series (which we haven’t watched) was very good, made so by the brilliant (radiant?) performance of Isabel May. Star in the making.
- 1923 – The next Yellowstone prequel, this is starting to feel a bit more like a western soap opera to us. We’ll stick with it, mainly to follow the Africa storyline.
- The White Lotus – Julie and I binged both seasons with Karen and loved it (so did everyone else apparently). Tourism in Sicily likely to take off this coming summer.
- The Last of Us – yet another zombie TV series, it has some high points. Third episode in particular is a big twist on the genre.
Finally, most folks have just a passing understand of professional golf. We see Tiger Woods, Rory McIlroy, and the hundreds of millions of dollars thrown at the top stars of the game. For a different view into the reality of most players trying to make a living on the tour, watch The Grind by The Firepit Collective. Coming this month on Netflix is Full Swing, a pro golf series by the creators of Formula 1: Drive to Survive.
4. 🎶 What I’ve been listening too
The highlight of the month was finishing Bono’s memoir Surrender, a touching story made all the better by Bono’s reading. Other than attending the 30th anniversary The Joshua Tree tour up in Seattle, I mostly checked out of listening much to U2 starting in the late 90s (probably starting with the Pop album). Listening to the memoir was both a trip down memory lane (I was an early fan starting around 1984) and a chance to discover more about what happend in the 21st century to U2 and Bono.
As a result I’ve been listening to a lot of U2 (with only periodic returns to Taylor Swift). In case you are wondering their best three albums, in order, are The Joshua Tree, Achtung Baby, and The Unforgettable Fire.
5. 🎲 What I’ve been playing
- Still playing Crossing the Line: Aachen 1944 with Allen in VASSAL.
- Doug and I are in the middle of the Operation Southwind scenario of Panzers Last Stand, a game in the Battalion Command Series
- My guilty pleasure is now The Monster Train.
- Jacob and I played Carnegie on BoardGameArena and absolutely loved it. We need to schedule another go soon.
6. 🎢 My 2023 Theme
For the past few years I’ve established a yearly theme. My theme for this year is Mornings.
The Year of Mornings won out for me as I reflect on my daily routine. I think I mostly have good daily habits but I’ve been feeling disappointed in lack of morning routine structure. While I don’t want to commit to specific resolutions, I’ll definitely be making some small tweaks to how I conduct myself in the early morning.
7. 🤖 LLM Chat Bots and Teaching Higher Ed
Let’s close out with a relevant and recent experience I had with chat bots and GPT–3 language models. I teach undergraduate computer science and information systems, so this work is relevant to me in many ways: it is relevant to what I teach as well as how I teach it.
I loved reading Thomas Rid’s Five Days in Class with ChatGPT and how tools like this can potentially transform (in a very good way) human learning. I haven’t yet embraced regular interaction with chat bots while doing research or problem solving, but my habits are starting to change. I like using YouChat, which is likely a good preview of what Microsoft’s experience will be like.
Last year I made a feed-forward note to myself to check in with my midterm exam questions for the project management class I’m currently teaching. This midterm is happening this weekend (I teach fully online / async and the students have a 3-day window in which to take the exam), and I was concerned about how the knowledge based questions might be answered by a chat bot. I’ve had to do my fair share of failing student work (and reporting for academic integrity) for copying answers from web sites. I think the temptation is just too high right now, and the answers may be indistinguishable from human answers (Turing test!).
So… I fed each of my questions into YouChat and was fairly astonished at the answers. Here’s an example:
Question: Reflect on what you have learned about Getting Things Done (GTD) and the Scrum methodology. Describe three overlapping concepts or practices that relate or link GTD to Scrum.
Answer: There are several overlapping concepts and practices between Getting Things Done (GTD) and Scrum methodology.The first is the idea of breaking down high-level goals and tasks into smaller, more manageable chunks. This is the core principle behind GTD and the Scrum methodology both rely heavily on breaking down tasks into smaller ones in order to increase the efficiency of the process and make them more manageable.
The second overlapping concept is that of prioritization. Both GTD and Scrum emphasize the importance of prioritizing tasks in order to focus attention and resources on the most important tasks and objectives first.
The third concept is the idea of regular review and reflection. Both GTD and Scrum encourage teams to regularly review their progress and reflect on their goals and objectives in order to ensure that they are on track and that any changes or adjustments are made in a timely manner.
Agile Project Management: Best Practices and Methodologies
https://www.altexsoft.com/whitepapers/agile-project-management-best-practices-and-methodologies/
The 4 Values and 12 Principles of the Agile Manifesto
https://www.smartsheet.com/comprehensive-guide-values-principles-agile-manifesto
Agile Methodology and its Framework (Scrum, Lean, Kanban, XP …
https://www.toolsqa.com/agile/agile-methodology/
This is certainly a “good enough” answer to the question, maybe even a very good answer. Maybe my questions just suck? 🤷♂️
My first reaction was to just cancel the midterm and final exam, but I had already published the syllabus and that’s too big a change to make 3–4 weeks into a 10 week term.
I’ve started seeing academics writing about how to make pedagogical changes in light of this emergence. One of the better articles was Ryan Watkins’ Update Your Course Syllabus for chatGPT. One idea is to go fully meta with the ChatBot challenge, and do something like this:
a. Ask students to individually identify a major question or challenge in your field or discipline that chatGPT could write about.
b. Have students use chatGPT to write a response to their question or challenge.
c. Ask students to reflect on chatGPT’s output (e.g., what is correct, incorrect, what they don’t know if it is correct or incorrect, what should they look up elsewhere to verify, what should they ask chatGPT next).
d. Using _Track Changes_ in MS Word or _Suggesting_ in Google Docs, have students improve the output of chatGPT (e.g., correcting errors or misinformation, expanding on shallow content).
e. Have students submit their prompt and the improved chatGPT response with their added content highlighted.
I like this idea and might try it next year when access to the tools are ubiquitous, but all of the major players get overloaded frequently and you might have to wait in line for a few hours before getting access again.
In the end, I pivoted to very personal reflection questions, hoping to gain insight into how the covered material has impacted the student.
Until next month!
-Chris