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November 4, 2008

Jordan Gunderson
jordy
Jordy Blog
» Guilt Trip “I Voted” Stickers

I was listening to the Nightside Project on KSL when one of the radio hosts (I don’t know his name) said he hates it when he sees people wearing the “I voted” stickers. He listed a number of reasons, but the one I got a kick out of was basically that the people who don’t know it’s election day are the last ones you want to remind to show up at the polls. Funny, but true.

So anyway, I came up with these sometimes humorous “I voted” sticker parodies as pleasant way to guilt trip sheeple who show up at the polls without doing any homework:

In case it wasn’t blazingly obvious, my overall point is that voting is NOT your civic duty. Voting smart is your civic duty. Voting smart takes a lot of time, thought, and research. Voting just for the sake of voting is quick, effortless, and counter-productive; it skews the numbers away from dedicated citizens who really did do their homework.

Hopefully these tongue-in-cheek “I voted” stickers are fun way to remind people to do some serious research before hitting the polls. Feel free to forward them to friends and family, or anyone you feel may be just flying by the seat of their pants! :)

And no; watching Oprah, SNL, and Fox News does not count as research.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for Voting Smart!

UPDATE

Some others I have thought of:

I (unwittingly) voted for more of the same (change vote)
I voted for a socialist in mainstream clothing (major-party vote)
I voted because it was on my way (convenient vote)
I voted exactly how the MSM wanted me to vote (sheeple vote)
I voted and all I got was this lousy sticker (freebie vote)
I voted without ever having read the constitution (public ed vote)
I voted how the source code made me (Diebold vote)
I voted to reinforce the illusion of liberty (depressing vote)
I voted for the guy who worships like me (blind faith vote)
I voted because I’m better than you (ego vote)
I voted because it makes me feel good (insecure vote)
I voted because some people don’t have maps (hot chick vote)
I voted based on one issue only (one-dimensional vote)
I voted for all the candidates (Florida vote)
I voted despite being dead for 50 years (electoral shenanigans vote)

Please post your own funny or poignant “I Voted” stickers in the comments!

by Jordy at 5:10 PM under election day , humor , nerdiness , parody , politics , research , voting (Comments)
June 26, 2008

Hans Fugal
no nic
The Fugue :
» Doctoral Prospectus

So, I know some of you out there have been just dying to know what it is I am actually doing here in grad school. What does "research" even mean in Computer Science?

Well, research is (informally) that activity which isn't classwork. Or maybe, that activity which leads to papers and dissertations. It isn't reading stuff in the library or even on the internet (though those activities are part of research). It is primarily thinking. We do form hypotheses and test them. Our hypotheses are that this algorithm we dreamed up will do what we think it will, and the test is writing a program to do it. Perhaps that is the biggest difference between research in CS and say web programming. In web programming and many other standard programming tasks, you have a task and you write a program to perform that task. You know it can be done, it just needs to be done. There's lots of fun to be had along the way in how it is done, the software engineering, but there's no mystery to the actual task.

Now, "devise algorithm and test it" isn't the only flavor of CS research. There's also the theoretical guys who never write a line of code. They're essentially mathemeticians in disguise. There's the usability folks who design interfaces and do user tests. They're half-psychologist mutants in disguise. There are many different flavors of research that fall under the CS umbrella. I have just described the one that happens to be what I'm doing.

So enough babble. You want to know what I'm doing. I want to tell you. So I made a little web page to do just that. There you can download my prospectus which is the document that tells my committee what I plan to do. The steering project proposal/contract, if you will.

And from here on out you can call me the Registration Detective, or just Detective for short. But please don't call me Reggie.

by Hans Fugal at 6:29 PM under phd , proposal , prospectus , research , school