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Code Blue

September 4, 2014 by Adam Rogers ’92 Comments Off

Lunch was supposed to be casual. Mikey Dickerson ’01 was in Chicago catching up with Dan Wagner, a friend who’d been in the trenches with him on Barack Obama’s campaign for the presidency in 2012. Wagner had since gone on to found a company, Civis Analytics; Dickerson was a site reliability engineer at Google, one of the people who make sure that the search engine never, ever breaks down.

This was October of 2013, no time for the President’s geekiest loyalists to have a little fun. Healthcare.gov, the sign-up website that was the signature element of President Obama’s signature initiative, was a technological disaster. People couldn’t sign up even if they wanted to—the site would break, or fail. Delays were interminable. Information got lost. Customer service was about as good as you’d expect from a cable TV company. The Department of Health and Human Services, responsible for the new health care system, couldn’t seem to get it working.

“So, we got this phone call yesterday,” Wagner told Dickerson. “HHS is looking for help with healthcare.gov. Can I list you as an advisor or consultant?”

“Yeah, sure. If it’s any value to you, list me,” Dickerson replied. It seemed innocuous enough. Today, he smiles at his own naïveté. “I had no idea what I was getting into,” he says. About a week later, Dickerson found himself on a 5 a.m. conference call with a van full of technologists in Washington D.C., headed over to HHS. With him in the White House motor-pool car was Todd Park, the U.S. chief technology officer. And Park, whom Dickerson didn’t know, was selling the group as a team of experts who could solve any tech problem. Dickerson realized: They’re saying I can fix healthcare.gov.

Without really meaning to, Dickerson had become an anchor of the Obama administration’s “tech surge,” a Silicon Valley-powered push to fix the bugs in the healthcare.gov system. But the system was more than just software. In D.C., Dickerson and his new team found an organization in bureaucratic and technological meltdown, unable to execute what any e-commerce start-up would consider basic prerequisites for being in business.

The crazy part is, they fixed it.

To a Connecticut native like Dickerson, good at math and computers but with no desire to attend a big university, Pomona shows itself off pretty well—especially on a campus visit in May, when Dartmouth might still have slush on the ground. It’s not that he was so avid about computer science—in those days, as a major, CS really ran out of Harvey Mudd anyway—it’s just that Dickerson was an ace. He felt like he was cheating just a little. “It seemed dumb to be spending all that money on something I was already good at,” he says. In fact, Dickerson was already coding for various companies while in school. After graduation, he ended up working in Pomona’s computer lab.

Then the 2000 presidential election came around, with its photo finish in favor of George W. Bush. “It was a trauma for me,” Dickerson says. “That razor’s edge. All that was intensely painful. Almost anything would have moved those last 200 votes.” So in 2004 Dickerson volunteered with a poll-watching group … and caught the politics bug. Four years later he was working at Google, where CEO Eric Schmidt was (and remains) a multimillion-dollar Obama supporter. During campaign season an email went to a mass-distribution list that Dickerson was on, looking for people who could manage big databases for the Obama campaign.

Hey, Dickerson thought. I manage a group that runs large databases. And that was it. He worked as a volunteer in Chicago, one of a small group of techies who, during their long nights, idly wondered if maybe they could do something useful for the campaign with better records of people’s voting history. When the 2012 campaign came around, he was still on the campaign organizers’ list. This time, though, he was no newbie—though still technically a volunteer, his experience made him a trusted veteran. Those vague ideas about leveraging voter lists went into practice, and Dickerson’s group became the analytics team, credited by some political analysts as having been the key to Obama’s re-election. Once the campaign was over, Dickerson went back to managing a site reliability engineering team at Google, but he stayed in touch with his friends—which is why Dickerson was at lunch with Wagner on October 11.

The tech team’s first stop, in Virginia on October 17, was PowerPoint Hell. Technically, it was a large IT firm working as a government contractor. “They scheduled a three-hour meeting and sent a VP with, I shit you not, a 130-slide PowerPoint presentation,” Dickerson says. Over beers in a bar on San Francisco’s Embarcadero, about a block from Google’s offices, Dickerson wears the uniform of the coder—hoodie, Google ID badge, Google T-shirt, close-cropped hair and unshaven chin. In San Francisco, that’s stealth armor. In Washington’s blue-sports-coated, khaki-pantsed hallways, he was an alien.

The group fought its way out of the meeting and took over the office of someone who was on vacation. Then they went wandering, finding teams huddled in cubicles and asking them what they were working on, which bugs they were trying to fix. But they weren’t—mostly they were waiting for instructions. In their defense, it was hard to figure out what needed fixing. Engineers weren’t really allowed to talk to clients or users, and the people who created the healthcare.gov website hadn’t even built a dashboard, a way to monitor the health and status of their own system. If you wanted to know whether healthcare.gov was functioning, the only way to find out was to try to log on. “We thought this would be a targeted assessment and we’d spend a few days there,” says Paul Smith, another member of the team. “When we realized how bad things were, we just independently decided, we’re not going home. This is what we’re doing now, for an indefinite period of time, until it gets better.”

After a couple of days, Park asked them whether it could be fixed. “Todd, they have made all the mistakes that can be made,” Dickerson told him. “We can barely find a case where, when two decisions could be made, they made the right one. But low-hanging fruit isn’t the right metaphor. We’re stepping on the fruit.” The point was, some very simple fixes would yield some very big gains. Any improvement would be a massive improvement. Google site reliability engineers have a saying—they tell each other, if we have an outage that big it’ll be on the front page of The New York Times. Is that what you want? “But here’s the thing,” says Dickerson. “Healthcare.gov had been on the front page of The New York Times for four weeks. That was the silver lining. How much more could I screw it up?”

The group of coders decided that if no one was telling anyone what to do, they would. That’s when they started getting called “the Ad Hoc Team.” The name stuck. “We had a big stick, because we were the magical guys from the White House,” Dickerson says. “After a couple of days, we instituted a war room.” Every morning at 10 a.m., every team had to send a representative to a big meeting to explain what was going right, or wrong, and why. “It was an incredibly expensive thing to do—60 people in a room while we arbitrate disputes between two of them. But we made so much progress we stopped worrying,” Dickerson says. “Having a giant studio audience is better sometimes. It’s harder to say, ‘I didn’t do that because it wasn’t on my task order.’”

In other words, Dickerson had built into the system something no one had thought of: accountability. “What Mikey really excelled at was, if there’s a priority issue that needs to be addressed, how can people address it? What do they know? What do they need to know? What’s blocking them?” says Smith. “That’s just his demeanor and the way he operates.” The meetings were so productive and making so much of a difference in site performance that the Ad Hoc Team instituted a second one, making them twice a day, seven days a week.

When they weren’t in the war room, they coded. Problems started getting solved. A stupid little flaw that required the same kind of wait to connect to the database every time went away with the change of a couple of configuration settings, and poof! An eight-second response delay dropped to a two-second delay. “And that’s still terrible,” Dickerson says. The site stopped crashing. People actually started signing up for health care.

The work took a toll, though. Except for a quick trip back to California to pick up some clothes—Dickerson had come to the East Coast with a carry-on bag and a Google computer, expecting a short visit—he was in the greater D.C. area from mid-October through Christmas. Dickerson estimated he ran 150 war-room meetings in a row.

After a couple of moves to accommodate bureaucracy, Dickerson ended up working remotely, alone, from an operations center in Columbia, Md.—three hours from D.C. in what locals sometimes call “spook valley” for its preponderance of government contractors. Since healthcare.gov’s original creators hadn’t built a ship-in-a-bottle version of the software to test updates and fixes, everything the Ad Hoc Team fixed had to get changed on the live site, and the primary maintenance window was when traffic was lightest, between 1 and 5 a.m. “It was literally 20-hour days a lot of time. ” Dickerson says. “I was hallucinating by the end, hearing things.”

With 12 days left before the deadline, Dickerson was ready to go home. He gave a speech listing the five mission-critical things remaining, and attempted to flee back to California. But the bosses panicked. The Ad Hoc guys can’t go home, they said. They gave him the service-to-your-country pitch. They begged. So Dickerson agreed to stay through to the end—with some conditions. He got to set the specific technical goals for what his team and the rest of the government coders would do. And he got to hire whomever he wanted, without arguing the point. He wanted to be able to trust the new team members, so he chose them himself. Eventually a rotating team of Google site reliability engineers started coming through to keep the project on track.

Dickerson got to dictate those terms because he was getting results. He had become indispensable. “Mikey is an incredible talent who was seemingly built in a lab to help fix healthcare.gov,” Park says. “It’s not just the fact that he’s got a sky-high tech IQ, honed over years as a star site reliability engineering leader. He’s also got tremendous EQ, enabling him to step into a tough situation, mesh well with others, and help rally them to the job at hand.”

The real bummer, of course, is that healthcare.gov, while an unprecedented attempt to link government services, private insurers and identity verification, shouldn’t have been that hard to build. “It’s basically a distributed, transactional, retail-type website, and we’ve been building those for years,” says Smith. “In the private sector, we know how to do that. We’re not forging new computer science ground here, right?”

By April of 2014, just a few days after Dickerson and I spoke, the Obama administration announced that over 7 million people had signed up for private health care through federal and state exchanges, and 3 million had signed up for Medicare. The program had made its numbers—barely, to be sure—because people, in the end, could actually use the website.

Dickerson is back at Google, but as he says, “you can never unsee the things you see in the federal government.” He has become an outspoken advocate for reform in the ways government builds technology, concentrating especially on trying to convince young technologists to go work for government. “You’re gonna eat free food and drink free soda in micro-kitchens and work on another version of what we’ll say, for argument’s sake, lets people share pictures of what they ate for breakfast, and tens of thousands of people will die of leukemia because we couldn’t get a website to work,” Dickerson says. “These are real people’s lives that will end in 2014, and you’re going to sit at your desk working on picture sharing.”

The problem isn’t competence. People who work on websites for the government are every bit as competent as the ones who work at Google or Facebook. “The mechanisms by which you do a contract with the federal government are so complex that it requires expertise in and of itself,” says Jennifer Pahlka, founder and executive director of Code for America, a group that connects software developers with local governments. “Fundamentally the process in government has evolved to meet government needs. A federal project has dozens of stakeholders, none of whom represent the user.”

That’s why Code for America focuses on local governments, Pahlka says. The feds are too hard to crack, and anyway, most people’s interactions with government are at the state and city level—think DMV, local parks, or trash pick-up. So Dickerson has started stumping for Code for America, giving speeches at their events. And he is lobbying Eric Schmidt and his other bosses at Google to develop programs that would allow—maybe even encourage—software developers there to take time to work on government projects. Consider: The feds paid $700 million for healthcare.gov, and it didn’t work. Imagine being able to bid for that contract at a tenth the price. “I don’t have to appeal to your altruism or desire to serve your country,” Dickerson says. “I can just say, ‘Do you want to make a ton of money?”

Pahlka thinks the pitch might actually work—and not just because of capitalism. “The consumer internet has influenced the way a generation feels about doing things together,” she says. “You have a generation of people who value collective intelligence and collective will—not necessarily collective political will, but the ability to actually do things together.” Software designers and engineers are already political, Pahlka and Dickerson are saying; it’s just that the web generation is ignoring the greater good. Going to work at Twitter is a political choice just as much as going to work for the Department of Veterans Affairs.

“I give the worst sales pitch,” Dickerson says. “I tell people, ‘This is what your world is going to be like: It’s a website that is a Lovecraft horror. They made every possible mistake at every possible layer. But if you succeed, you will save the lives of thousands of people.’”

The weird part: Almost everyone says yes.

————-

EDITOR’S NOTE: Shortly before this magazine went to press, Dickerson announced that he’s going to practice what he preaches, full time. He is leaving Google to join the Obama administration as administrator of the U.S. Digital Service, a newly created office overseeing government spending on information technology. And after signing on, he discovered that the lead designer on the initial staff for U.S.D.S. is another Pomona grad, Mollie Ruskin ’08.

The Code of Beauty, the Beauty of Code

September 4, 2014 by Vikram Chandra ’84 Comments Off

Class Program
{
public static void Main()
{
System.Console.WriteLine( “Hello, world!” );
}
}

Even if you’re the kind of person who tells new acquaintances at dinner parties that you hate email and e-books, you probably recognize the words above as being some kind of computer code. You may even be able to work out, more or less, what this little ‘program’ does: it writes to the console of some system the line ‘Hello, world!’

hackers-300 A geek hunched over a laptop tapping frantically at the keyboard, neon-bright lines of green code sliding up the screen—the programmer at work is now a familiar staple of popular entertainment. The clipped shorthand and digits of programming languages are familiar even to civilians, if only as runic incantations charged with world-changing power. Computing has transformed all our lives, but the processes and cultures that produce software remain largely opaque, alien, unknown. This is certainly true within my own professional community of fiction writers—whenever I tell one of my fellow authors that I supported myself through the writing of my first novel by working as a programmer and a computer consultant, I evoke a response that mixes bemusement, bafflement and a touch of awe, as if I’d just said that I could levitate. Most of the artists I know—painters, film-makers, actors, poets —seem to regard programming as an esoteric scientific discipline; they are keenly aware of its cultural mystique, envious of its potential profitability, and eager to extract metaphors, imagery and dramatic possibility from its history, but coding may as well be nuclear physics as far as relevance to their own daily practice is concerned.

Many programmers, on the other hand, regard themselves as artists. Since programmers create complex objects and care not just about function but also about beauty, they are just like painters and sculptors. The best-known assertion of this notion is the essay ‘Hackers and Painters’ by programmer and venture capitalist Paul Graham. ‘What hackers and painters have in common is that they’re both makers. Along with composers, architects and writers, what hackers and painters are trying to do is make good things.’

According to Graham, the iterative processes of programming—write, debug (discover and remove bugs, which are coding errors, mistakes), rewrite, experiment, debug, rewrite—exactly duplicate the methods of artists: ‘The way to create something beautiful is often to make subtle tweaks to something that already exists, or to combine existing ideas in a slightly new way … You should figure out programs as you’re writing them, just as writers and painters and architects do.’ Attention to detail further marks good hackers with artist-like passion:

All those unseen details [in a Leonardo da Vinci painting] combine to produce something that’s just stunning, like a thousand barely audible voices all singing in tune. Great software, likewise, requires a fanatical devotion to beauty. If you look inside good software, you find that parts no one is ever supposed to see are beautiful too.

This desire to equate art and programming has a lengthy pedigree. In 1972, the famed computer scientist Butler Lampson published an editorial titled ‘Programmers as Authors’ which began:

Creative endeavor varies greatly in the amount of overhead (i.e. money, manpower and organization) associated with a project which calls for a given amount of creative work. At one extreme is the activity of an aircraft designer, at the other that of a poet. The art of programming currently falls much closer to the former than the latter. I believe, however, that this situation is likely to change considerably in the next decade.

Lampson’s argument was that hardware would become so cheap that ‘almost everyone who uses a pencil will use a computer,’ and that these users would be able to use ‘reliable software components’ to put together complex programs. ‘As a result, millions of people will write non-trivial programs, and hundreds of thousands will try to sell them.’

hackers-250 A poet, however, might wonder why Lampson would place poetry making on the same spectrum of complexity as aircraft design, how the two disciplines—besides being ‘creative’—are in any way similar. After all, if Lampson’s intent is to point towards the future reduction of technological overhead and the democratization of programming, there are plenty of other technical and scientific fields in which the employment of pencil and paper by individuals might produce substantial results. Architecture, perhaps, or carpentry, or mathematics. One thinks of Einstein in the patent office at Bern. But even the title of Lampson’s essay hints at a desire for kinship with writers, an identification that aligns what programmers and authors do and makes them—somehow, eventually—the same.

Both writers and programmers struggle with language. The code at the beginning of this chapter is in Microsoft’s C#, one of thousands of high-level programming languages invented over the last century.

Each of these is a ‘formal language,’ a language ‘with explicit and precise rules for its syntax and semantics,’ as the Oxford Dictionary of Computing puts it. Formal languages ‘contrast with natural languages such as English whose rules, evolving as they do with use, fall short of being either a complete or a precise definition of the syntax, much less the semantics, of the language.’ So these formal dialects may be less flexible and less forgiving of ambiguity than natural languages, but coders—like poets—manipulate linguistic structures and tropes, search for expressivity and clarity. While a piece of code may pass instructions to a computer, its real audience, its readers, are the programmers who will add features and remove bugs in the days and years after the code is first created. Donald Knuth is the author of the revered magnum opus on computer algorithms and data structure, The Art of Computer Programming. Volume 3 of the Art was published in 1973; the first part of Volume 4 appeared in 2011; the next part is ‘under preparation.’ If ever there was a person who fluently spoke the native idiom of machines, it is Knuth, computing’s greatest living sage. More than anyone else, he understands the paradox that programmers write code for other humans, not for machines: ‘Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs: Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.’ In 1984, therefore, he famously formalized the notion of ‘literate programming’:

The practitioner of literate programming can be regarded as an essayist, whose main concern is with exposition and excellence of style. Such an author, with thesaurus in hand, chooses the names of variables carefully and explains what each variable means. He or she strives for a program that is comprehensible because its concepts have been introduced in an order that is best for human understanding, using a mixture of formal and informal methods that reinforce each other.

Good code, then, is marked by qualities that go beyond the purely practical; like equations in physics and mathematics, code can aspire to elegance. Knuth remarked about the code of a compiler that it was ‘plodding and excruciating to read, because it just didn’t possess any wit whatsoever. It got the job done, but its use of the computer was very disappointing.’

To get the job done—a novice may imagine that this is what code is supposed to do. Code is, after all, a series of commands issued to a dumb hunk of metal and silicon and plastic animated by electricity. What more could you want it to do, to be? Knuth answers: code must be ‘absolutely beautiful.’ He once said about a program called SOAP (Symbolic Optimal Assembly Program) that ‘reading it was like hearing a symphony, because every instruction was sort of doing two things and everything came together gracefully.’

We are now unmistakably in the realm of human perception, taste and pleasure, and therefore of aesthetics. Can code itself—as opposed to the programs that are constructed with code—be beautiful? Programmers certainly think so. Greg Wilson, the editor of Beautiful Code, an anthology of essays by programmers about ‘the most beautiful piece of code they knew,’ writes in his forward to that book:

I got my first job as a programmer in the summer of 1982. Two weeks after I started, one of the system administrators loaned me Kernighan and Plauger’s The Elements of Programming Style … and Wirth’s Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs. … [These books] were a revelation—for the first time, I saw that programs could be more than just instructions for computers. They could be as elegant as well-made kitchen cabinets, as graceful as a suspension bridge, or as eloquent as one of George Orwell’s essays.

Knuth himself is careful to limit the scope of his aesthetic claims: ‘I do think issues of style do come through and make certain programs a genuine pleasure to read. Probably not, however, to the extent that they would give me any transcendental emotions.’ But in the many discussions that programmers have about craftsmanship, elegance and beauty, there is an unmistakable tendency to assert—as Wilson does—that code is as ‘eloquent’ as literature. …

The day that millions will dash off beautiful programs—as easily as with a pencil—still remains distant. The ‘lovely gems and brilliant coups’ of coding remain hidden and largely incomprehensible to outsiders. But the beauty that programmers pursue leads to their own happiness, and—not incidentally—to the robustness of the systems they create, so the aesthetics of code impact your life more than you know.

This excerpt from Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty (Graywolf Press), by Vikram Chandra ’84, is published with permission of the author. In his first venture into nonfiction, the noted novelist roams from logic gates to the writings of 11th-century Indian philosopher Abhinavagupta, in search of connections between the worlds of art and technology.

Photos accompanying this excerpt are from the Spring 2014 Hackathon held at Pomona College and are by John Lucas.

The Atomic Art of Millikan Hall

November 6, 2013 by Daniel Gould Comments Off

milliikanatom

Aging Millikan Hall, built at the dawn of the Space Age, is being torn down and rebuilt to state-of-the-art standards over the next two years. But the iconic atomic artwork on the west facade of the building will be preserved and prominently displayed on the new building.

atomsideview Commissioned for Pomona College’s new math, physics and astronomy lab back in 1958, the bronze atom sculpture facing College Avenue was designed by noted sculptor Albert Stewart, whose work adorns civic buildings nationwide, including the U.S. Mint in San Francisco. Before his death in 1965, Stewart created counterparts for the atom for the facades of Seaver North and South, with an image of cell division for biology and an array of particles for chemistry.

Stewart got his start in the 1930s as an artist for the Depression-era Works Progress Administration. In 1939, he was named a professor of fine arts at Scripps College, and he soon figured in a group of prominent regional artists that included Sam Maloof and Millard Sheets. Stewart also designed and donated the Pegasus relief on Stover Walk, (though Steve Comba, associate director of the Pomona College Museum of Art, points out that the current piece is a recast from the original, apparently stolen back in the ’70s).

Today the atom sculpture on Millikan holds up better as art than as science. Professor of Physics and Astronomy Alma Zook ’72 calls it a “not-very-accurate representation of a lithium atom.” With our present understanding of the atomic and subatomic worlds, the three electrons circling on the atom’s fringes would be more properly depicted as a dispersed cloud, rather than the classical image of a series of orbits, like planets rotating around a sun.

Nonetheless, as Zook herself notes, the design makes for a “nice threefold symmetry.” And once the new Millikan is built, the atom artwork will be returned to its rightful place over Millikan’s doorway to College Avenue as a “historical nod to the original construction,” says Andrea Ramella, project manager for the new building.

Read more here about the Millikan project.

Entrepreneurship & Social Justice

November 6, 2013 by Mary Marvin Comments Off

In Class with Professor Jerry Irish

In today’s small group discussion for the class, Religion, Ethics and Social Practice, six college students and three residents of Pilgrim Place discuss social entrepreneurship, which combines ideas and practices from both the business and nonprofit worlds to solve problems such as poverty and inequality. The group focuses on whether social entrepreneurs, who seek to create social value rather than wealth, are compromising their values by working within the capitalist system.

Miranda: I’m really interested in exploring the debate about whether social entrepreneurships are a Band-Aid, because you’re working within a corrupted system, or are they about trying to change that system and using the tools effectively to do so.

Eleanor: I just heard a woman over at Pilgrim Place earlier this morning, who spoke about being in China. She said she asked one of the men there, who teaches Marxism at the university: ‘Do you think Marxism has a future?’ And he said back to her: ‘Do you think capitalism has a future?’ I think if there is a possibility of envisioning a future for capitalism, it has to do with something like social entrepreneurships.

Karl: I’ve found out from my younger radical community organizing days that there is a place and a need for Band-Aids; there is a need for cooperating with the system at some point, even if you’re not altogether happy with it, and there is a need for trying to find innovative ways to bring things together that seem to be diametrically opposed—like business and community organizing. I think you come to a healthy understanding of what is the best thing to do for the most common good at the time.

Christian: I don’t see it as a Band-Aid at all. I see business and profit-seeking and these sorts of drivers as extraordinarily powerful tools. Some advancements, such as electricity and drugs like penicillin, have come about because of capitalism, because we incentivize them. If you have the motivation from the get-go to do something for the social good, a social entrepreneurship can be a truly amazing tool that can be used in really cool ways. That’s the way I see it, but I come from a family that is very pro-business, very different from a lot of people in this room.

Irish: In Bangladesh, Muhammed Yunus tried a Band-Aid. He found that for $27 dollars he could relieve 42 women stool makers in Jobra of their indebtedness. But just for one week. And then the loan sharks would come right back. It was his idealism about trying to overcome the poverty gap he saw in this village that alerted him to the fact that he needed to go beyond a Band-Aid. He rallied his students and took them to talk to people in the community to see what they needed. That’s when he got the idea that maybe he could leverage the banks. When he discovered he couldn’t, he created his own bank. Do any of you see in either your placements or project proposals the seeds of something like this in the future? Are there ingredients that you could imagine one day that you would employ or work off of as a social entrepreneur?

Christian: My proposal is trying to understand the adherence to medication in Third World companies. One of the major issues is the way the pharmacological system works. Drug companies send HIV and TB medication to Third World countries as window dressing, without any analysis of what’s needed. It’s extraordinarily expensive, especially when you deal with adherence issues, which means the disease becomes resistant and then you can’t use first-line drugs. And these programs don’t even come close to offering second-line drugs.

Becca: This is about the Coronado Garden project I work on with the Draper Center. It’s an organic garden and a curriculum on food justice and environmental justice at Coronado, an alternative high school in West Covina. The teacher has expressed an interest in selling plants, which could be a way to make the whole project self-sustainable. It would also get merged into a small business class. I’m struggling with envisioning this transition.

Mia: Why do you struggle?

Becca: I think it’s the idea that we’ve been very much trying to cultivate the garden as this safe green space and connect food justice and environmental justice with greater societal injustices and connect that with students’ everyday lives, so encouraging them to use the garden as a tool for money—although it would create a self-sustained project, it feels hypocritical to me.

Miranda: I don’t think that is hypocritical because when you’re incorporating funding into a closed loop, self-sufficient system, you’re ultimately benefiting the project for the future.

Irish: You’re changing the definition of investment, that the capital gets invested in a social purpose. What you’re exhibiting are the skills that are entrepreneurial, and I don’t think some of these skills need to be understood simply in terms of a profit. This gets closer to this issue that you brought up in your reflections, a new kind of citizenship and—I hate to bring in my friend Niebuhr (laughter)—the notion of responsibility to a larger social group.

Christian: You have to play it like a community organizer and trust that people will tend to do the right thing most of the time. By allowing capitalism to inject itself into these social entrepreneurships, we worry about becoming tainted, but it leverages all you can do. If you were to talk about Bill Gates in the late ’90s, you’d say he was completely co-opted by the capitalist system, but look at the way he’s leveraged the funds he produced. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is a great example; it does really good stuff and is extraordinarily efficient, much more efficient than any other charity or nonprofit group.

Karen: I’m learning a lot from hearing the stories from the elders and the things that we’ve all experienced about having a vision for some sort of project and then having the initiative to do it. I feel I don’t have a full grasp of all of that yet, but I’m definitely learning. I really like the idea that social entrepreneurship is contagious. You start something and then the people you work with are empowered to do their own thing. I feel like I’m catching the bug here.

Changing the Equation

November 6, 2013 by Mary Marvin Comments Off

When he started thinking about college, Johnny Huynh ’14 had two goals—to leave his hometown of Claremont and to attend a large research university. That all changed after a weekend visit to Pomona, where he says he “fell in love with the College.” A first-generation college student and son of Vietnamese immigrants, Johnny balances a demanding academic schedule as an economics and mathematics double major with weekly outings to Pomona’s Organic Farm, where he can practice the gardening skills he learned from his mom.

It All Starts With Lunch
“Before I came here, I thought that having lunch with professors was just a marketing spiel—I figured they had their research and classes and wouldn’t have time to talk to students. I was really surprised. I’ve had lots of dinners and lunches with professors. I think it complements your learning, and because you know them, you’re not afraid to ask questions.”

Digging Deeper
“I was really motivated by a course on labor economics I took with Professor [Michael] Steinberger and approached him about doing summer research. The project we worked on was evaluating a specific conditional cash transfer (CCT) program in Malawi that targets schoolgirls 13 to 22 years old. CCTs are welfare programs, mostly in developing countries, that distribute cash to families to encourage more schooling and to increase test scores. The current literature finds that on average the conditional cash transfers are more effective than unconditional transfers, but what the research hasn’t looked at yet is the heterogeneity—whether some students respond differently than others.”

Changing the Equation
“What we found when we crunched recent data from the World Bank is that the subsidies are more effective at increasing attendance to the 80 percent benchmark if a student is already attending at high rates of schooling, say, 70 percent or more. Raising attendance from 10 to 80 percent is much harder, because so many children from poor families have to work. Giving that up to attend school means a lot of lost income for their families. “One of the things we’re proposing as a way to improve educational opportunities for these students is that the threshold for attendance be lowered from 80 to 50 percent. Another alternative would be to increase the cash subsidy to offset the income these girls would be giving up to be students.”

Learning to Roll With the Punches
“As a researcher, you can’t anticipate what you’re trying to find. If you’re looking through the data or building a theoretical model, the outcome might be different from what you expected, so you have to learn to change gears and roll with the punches. You’re not entirely sure what you’re going to write about because it’s new research, something no one has ever done before. It’s difficult, but it’s really, really rewarding.”

Not Just Theoretical
“Both my parents were immigrants from Vietnam, and neither of them attended high school, let alone college. They both still work for the minimum wage, and our housing is subsidized. Being on welfare affects me personally as well as theoretically, and I think it’s valuable to have a perspective that a lot of researchers don’t have, especially when it comes to public policy programs and finding out which ones work and which ones fail.”

A Message to Pomona
“Thank you, thank you, thank you. That’s the first thing I would say. That dominates everything else. I’m grateful I had the chance to come here, and that Pomona does so much to help students in need. After I graduate, I’d like to somehow help reform the social safety net, so other people can get the help they need to succeed.”

Strengthening Summer Research

Johnny Huynh ’14 was among the more than 220 Pomona College students who spent last summer conducting research on topics ranging from organic solar cells to Joseph Haydn’s keyboard sonatas. About 80 percent of the students were supported by the College’s Summer Undergraduate Research Program (SURP), which provides funding for up to 10 weeks of collaborative research in the natural sciences, social sciences, arts and humanities.

Expanding and strengthening summer research is one of the goals of Campaign Pomona: Daring Minds. Since the start of the campaign, the number of students participating in supervised summer research has grown by about 26 percent, thanks in part to 20 new endowed and expendable funds established by foundations, alumni and other donors. The funding is critical to the program, permitting students of all income levels to take part without sacrificing summer income.

Economics Professor Michael Steinberger, who worked with Huynh last summer, says the grants “help brilliant students, like Johnny, to spend the summer producing high-quality research. Instead of trying to find time to research while working another job, Johnny was able to focus entirely on our project. He learned a lot about the process of research, and I learned some new econometric techniques while working with him.”

While much of the research was conducted on campus, students also traveled across the country to work in labs at Tufts University in Boston and the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., and to conduct research in 14 countries, including Sweden, India, China and Chile.

In September, students lined Stover Walk to present the results of their research to the College community at the 26th annual SURP poster conference. For some of these students, their projects will develop into senior theses or continue on as the basis for co-authored papers with faculty and presentations at local and national conferences.

“Johnny’s supported summer research will be essential to help him get into a high-tier graduate school,” says Steinberger. “I expect our project will place in a top journal, and I’m excited for the real-world policy implications of our findings.”

Coffee with Conscience

November 6, 2013 by Brenda Bolinger Comments Off

nikki

Sociologist Nicki Lisa Cole ’02 carries around an accordion file stuffed with empty, flattened coffee bags she has collected from cafes across the U.S. over the last several years. Each item in her collection, begun when a package of coffee at Starbucks caught her eye, bears imagery or prose that hints at the ethical considerations behind the beans’ journey across the world and into your cup.

As the labels pile up, it’s a lot of information for Cole to parse. And so it is for everyday coffee-drinkers as well. With so many coffee-with-a-conscience practices operating—fair trade, direct trade, organic, shade grown, bird friendly—understanding the different approaches to ethically-sourced coffee, each with pros and cons, would seem to require pursuing dissertation-level research on the topic.

Cole did just that. She became so fascinated with the messages being sent to consumers about ethically marketed or produced coffee that the issue came to drive her doctoral research. Now a lecturer in sociology at Pomona, Cole writes blog posts (21centurynomad. com) on coffee sourcing that are broadly followed, and her expertise has been sought by The Nation, Conducive Magazine and others.

As part of her Ph.D. research, Cole queried 230 coffee drinkers, all of whom identified themselves as regular consumers of some kind of ethically-produced coffee. “Uniformly, people have a very vague, surface-level knowledge of what’s going on,” says Cole. “They tend to recognize the fair trade label, for instance, and know it stands for something good, but most have not done much research.”

With this hazy awareness, the heart of the matter can get lost. Cole wants to remind us why ethical sourcing for coffee is necessary. The reasons include historically low prices that make life a struggle for small producers, fluctuating prices because coffee is traded on the commodities market and price gouging of small producers by large transnational buyers.

So what can coffee drinkers do?

No system is perfect, but Cole says ethical coffee practices do, in fact, make some positive differences around the world. And so her one cup of coffee and one double espresso per day is always fair trade or direct trade. “While I have critiques of all the models out there, I always advocate for picking one that resonates with you and going with it, because it’s better than not,” she says.

The first step: “Ask about the coffee where you buy it: What are the sourcing practices behind this coffee?” Cole says.

The café or coffee shop owner might tell you that they import fair trade certified coffee because they value how the higher price supports community development, or that the certification standards require environmental practices such as minimized use of agrochemicals and water-conserving irrigation systems. Or, you might learn that they happily pay an even higher cost for direct trade coffee (also “relationship coffee”), purchased directly from a grower they trust, as opposed to a cooperative of producers, like in fair trade.

And if they clam up?

“If they can’t tell you what their sourcing practices are, that’s generally a bad sign. It’s probably not the place to get your coffee,” says Cole, a Pomona sociology major who earned her Ph.D. in the same field from UC Santa Barbara. “Most people in the industry who are using some sort of ethical sourcing are proud ofdoing that and want to share that with you.”

Cole points to the transparency of Portland-based Stumptown Coffee Roasters, which practices the direct-trade approach. “They claim ‘our books are open,’” Cole says. Want to learn exactly what price was paid to what producer practicing what methods? You got it.

But even if your coffee vendor provides evidence of ethical sourcing practices, how do you know which system is best? Cole says that depends on what you value. For example, fair trade certification requires a premium be paid on top of the minimum price per pound, which is then used to help workers, farmers and their families through such projects as school improvements, student scholarship provisions or the establishment and maintenance of healthcare clinics. The direct trade model does not provide for this kind of community betterment, according to Cole.

On the other hand, Cole notes, the democratic structure of fair trade cooperatives, where leadership constantly rotates, makes it difficult for buyers to nurture long-term, trusting relationships with producers. Since direct-trade buyers work directly with producers instead of cooperatives, it’s possible to cultivate close, symbiotic relationships in which both parties benefit—buyers pay a higher price for the assurance of high quality coffee, which in turn affords growers a higher level of economic stability.

Also worth considering is Fair Trade USA’s 2012 split from Fair Trade International for the explicit purpose of including large-scale plantations in the fair trade system. When the decision was made, Cole stirred up quite a bit of discussion by declaring “Fair Trade is dead” on her blog, referring to the ramifications of this decision. She still has plenty to say on the matter: “I fear that it’s very bad for small producers, squeezing them out of a market that was supposed to be a fair market.”

Fair Trade U.S.A.officials have defended the move as a way to benefit more farmers and workers, and to allow more consumers to buy Fair Trade products. Cole, though, says there is not nearly enough of a market to support current fair trade coffee production, so adding larger plantations will harm existing fair trade producers.

True to her small-is-good approach, Cole frequents the independent Last Drop Café, located in the Claremont Village just a block or two from campus. “We usually talk about coffee, and it’s been interesting learning about her opinions and insights,” says owner Mike Manning. “Her students have definitely learned a lot from her.”

One thing you might be surprised to learn about Cole, considering the depth of her knowledge and the hundreds of coffee shops she’s visited over the years: She is not a voracious coffee drinker. She is definitely a fan, but has reduced her consumption in consideration of the intense physical efforts that go into cultivating, harvesting and processing coffee beans.

Cole says choosing the higher-priced fair or direct trade coffee, but consuming less coffee overall, is one way to make a difference: “If we change our orientation to the value of goods and to respecting the labor that goes into them, paying a truly fair and just price for those goods, we would see different conditions.”

Caring in the Wild

November 6, 2013 by Daniel Gould Comments Off

Starting this June, Nikki Becich ’13 launched into a year-long journey to pursue her passion for conservation medicine. Over the summer, Becich cared for injured birds at the hospital of the National Aviary, before venturing out on a career-building trip to work and learn at wildlife centers throughout Latin America.

FINDING HER PASSION
Becich had several jobs and internships in zoo and avian medicine under her belt by the time she graduated. She knew she wanted more experience, and found a great match in the National Aviary, an indoor zoo home to more than 500 birds in Pittsburgh, Penn., and where she first volunteered in middle school.

At the Aviary, Becich worked with the center’s two veterinarians as a hospital intern. She helped them with surgeries, medications and daily caretaking, looking after birds brought in from the wild along with the zoo’s regular residents on exhibit.

Becich went into the internship with a focus on treating captive animals, particularly species that are endangered or extinct in the wild. Looking back, she says the experience inspired her to consider the bigger issue of environmental protection.

birdhold GETTING THE BIG PICTURE
Knowing she needed more hands-on training, Becich spent part of her senior year mapping out a trip to practice wildlife care at nature preserves in Central and South America. After graduation, she set off.

“I planned out the trip to apply for the Watson Fellowship, and when I didn`t get that, I decided to blow my savings and do it anyway, because it`s incredibly important for my future career to work and learn abroad,” she explains.

Becich started the first leg of her trek in September as a volunteer at an ecological center in the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador. She also is pitching in at Bioparque Amaru Zoo, developing preventative medicine protocols for a new veterinary clinic. In coming months she will intern at wildlife sanctuaries in Peru and Guatemala, helping to rehabilitate injured animals and promote local conservation projects. Becich says her connections from earlier programs were essential in helping her network and make contacts overseas.

She aims to learn first-hand how communities and organizations in the region are coping with threats like oil drilling, which, she says, can contribute to pollution and deforestation. “Meeting real people and seeing for myself what is happening has been extremely informative, but an emotional roller coaster,” Becich says, speaking from Ecuador. “What’s encouraging to see is how there is still protected forest here. We have time. We need serious action, though, and fast, if it`s going to survive.”

THE PATH FROM POMONA
A biology major, Becich mentions Professor Nina Karnovsky as an important mentor who “encouraged me to pursue my love for birds and go after work in conservation.“ She also points to the influence of her semester abroad in a tropical ecology program in Costa Rica, which shifted her focus toward environmental protection.

At Pomona, Becich explored her interests in other parts of the community. She got involved in caring for chickens at the Organic Farm, even raising a few chicks in her dorm in Harwood one year until they were ready to join the flock.

Becich is already looking ahead to her vision of combining medical practice with international research in ecology, with plans to attend veterinary school in the U.S. “I really came into my life’s passion this summer. I am so excited to be here doing what I am doing, and I am so grateful to Pomona for helping to get me there.”

Letter box

November 6, 2013 by emae2021@pomona.edu Comments Off

What’s Behind Walker Wall?

I am writing regarding the history of Walker Wall found on the College’s website. That article reports that the wall “remained unadorned until the spring of 1975, when several students painted ‘Free Angela’ on its inner surface, referring to the imprisonment of Black Panther and Communist Party activist Angela Davis after her conviction on murder conspiracy charges.”

As I recall it, Walker Wall comments started two years earlier, during the 1972-73 school year.

My recollection is that one night just before Founders Day someone spray-painted a phrase on Walker Wall near the pass-through to go toward Honnold Library. The phrase was not particularly clever or political, but it was potentially offensive, perhaps scatological. I was an R.A. for Clark V that year and knew that maintenance would not be able to do anything before alumni were on campus, but I did have access to painting supplies from Zeta Chi Sigma, my fraternity. Betsy Daub ’74, also in Zeta Chi Sigma, allowed herself to be enlisted and our quest became covering over the offending text. We used rollers and white paint to neatly block out the graffiti.

What happened next is somewhat lost to me. Somehow we wound up adding our own phrase on the white surface we had created. As I recall, we had each been considered as possible members of the Mufti crew, and in that spirit we came up with the phrase “Veni, Vidi, Vino” and signed it in some way. That comment stayed for some time and others followed. Although I knew several members of the Pomona administration fairly well, I don’t remember any discussion about the wall, and I don’t think Betsy or I was ever questioned about it.

—Jo Ruprecht ’73
Las Cruces, N.M.

Case for the Liberal Arts

President David Oxtoby’s Aug. 7 letter, directed to alumni of the College, brings up the perennial question “Is liberal arts education still relevant in today’s world?” This question requires a perennial answer: Soon after my graduation from Pomona, I found myself locked into a career in engineering, despite the fact that most of my education had been in art and the humanities. Yet that liberal education proved to be relevant in my unexpected career path. If monetary reward is the main goal, and sadly that is often the case, then one is likely to miss the practical benefits of a liberal arts education, as well as the enrichment of one’s quality of life.

“Liberal education” asks more questions than it answers. This can provide some valuable mental equipment, for answers often become obsolete with time. But if the habits acquired in looking for answers remain with you, and the habit of recognizing analogies is developed, you will have acquired a transferable ability which, unlike rigid collections of facts, can go on helping you generate answers to problems in any field.

—Chris Andrews ’50
Sequim, Wash.

All-Star Mistake?

I have to hand it to you. The “Who Did You Get?” article and trading cards in the Summer 2013 edition of PCM are, perhaps, the most offensive thing I have ever seen in the magazine since I graduated in 1972. Quite an achievement.

Please understand, I am not denigrating the achievements of those honored; their accomplishments are noteworthy and deserve praise—but not by implying (if not actually stating) that all the rest of us just don’t measure up.

Not really worthy of calling Pomona their alma mater, and pretty much beneath the College’s concern. Whether you realized it or not—and my sincere hope is that you didn’t—elevating a few graduates to “Pomona All-Star” status relegates the rest of us to just being average. Banjo hitters. Utility players. Minor leaguers. Barely above the Mendoza Line.

That is not how I like to think my college views me. And yet, there it is. At least you deigned to give us the privilege of “round[ing] up a few of [our] Pomona pals” so we can presumably trade cards. I can hardly wait.

Maybe in the Fall 2013 issue you can identify the biggest donors so far in 2013, and the amounts they’ve given. “Who’s gonna come out on top?” “How much did he/she give?” “Can you believe that [fill in the blank] isn’t on the list?” Now I’ll bet that would be a competition the College could really get behind!

—G. Emmett Rait, Jr. ’72
Irvine, Calif.

Baseball and Bytes

Your article on Don Daglow ’74 and his contributions to computer baseball could have been written, without many changes, about me—if I had just been born a few years earlier. Like Don, I loved the All-Star Baseball board game and was an English major. I wrote my first All- Star Baseball simulation using punch cards on an IBM 1620 in my sophomore year of high school in 1974—just three years too late to gain immortal fame!

I also applied at Mattel to work on Intellivision, but here our paths diverge, for alas, I was not hired. However, my All-Star Baseball game did have one last gasp of life—if you can find an ultra-rare copy of Designing Apple Games with Pizzazz (Datamost, 1985), you’ll find a whole chapter, with source code, devoted to a game called Database-ball.

—John “Max” Ruffner ’81
North Hollywood, Calif.

Fraternity Memories

The letter from Leno Zambrano ’51 in the summer issue of PCM surprised me. I knew Leno as a classmate but I had no clue he was homosexual. I have no recollection of Leno seeking membership in the KD fraternity, of which I was president in the spring of 1951. Not all the men at Pomona in those days felt the need to join a fraternity. Some of them were former members of the military and were beyond the need to join a social fraternity. I don’t know if we had any homosexuals among our KD members at that time, but if we did, they kept it to themselves. We had no policy against homosexuals, per se, in our fraternity mainly because it was never one of the factors we discussed during our consideration of prospective members.

—Ivan P. Colburn ’51
Pasadena, Calif.

I was dismayed to learn from the letter by Don Nimmo ’87 in the summer issue that the fraternity/community Zeta Chi Sigma has ceased to exist. When did this happen, and why? I joined Zeta Chi in my sophomore year—freshmen were not permitted to join frats in those days—and my membership was a significant part of the college experience for me, and not only because of playing pool or watching College Bowl every Sunday. I’ve mentioned Don’s letter to other alumni from that era and am assured that I’m not alone in wondering what happened.

—Steve Sherman ’65
Munich, Germany

Alumni and friends are invited to email letters to pcm@pomona.edu or to send them by mail to Pomona College Magazine, 550 North College Ave., Claremont, CA 91711. Letters are selected for publication based on relevance and interest to our readers and may be edited for length, style and clarity.

The Launch

November 6, 2013 by Mark Kendall Comments Off

The magazine you hold was born 50 years ago this fall as Pomona Today, when the sharp new publication replaced an alumni newsletter. And while the name has long since changed to Pomona College Magazine, it seems about half of our readers still know it by the old moniker. (Call us whatever you want—just keep reading.)

pomonatoday The pages of the first issue are laden with an early-’60s sense of purpose: men in suits and ties assembled around a cyclotron, a professor exploring the “Frontiers of Science,” a photo showing light—and, no doubt, knowledge—aglow through the glass doors of the newly-built Seaver Laboratory. A Space Age feeling pervades: All that’s missing is a make-your- own Gemini capsule cutout.

Heavy play is given to then-New York Times editorial page editor John Oakes’ commencement address, “Smashing the Cliché,” in which he tells students, “man will soon be searching, not by proxy but in person, the pathways of the stars … in your lifetime you will witness man’s arrival on new planets, his penetration of the outer void, his unfolding of the mysteries of the universe.”

In “The Case for the Liberal Arts College,” Professor W.T. Jones notes that “The fundamental fact of modern life is the acceleration of change—economic change, social change, political change, cultural change. … Indeed, in the physical sciences, the rate of change is so great that theories which are “true” when a freshman enters college are likely to be exploded by the time he graduates.”

My favorite bit of writing from that issue, though, is a short caption accompanying a photo of two pensive-looking classmates that simply reads: “Students in a complicated world.”

Fifty years later, the world grows more complicated and the change keeps coming. But PCM is still here, in print and online. Our circulation has yet to reach new planets; there is no home delivery to the “outer void.” Strangely, the birth of each new issue still feels as heady and fraught as an early-’60s rocket launch. And when it’s over, we editors come crashing back down to Earth, and get to work on the next one.

On Board

November 6, 2013 by Sneha Abraham Comments Off

On Board

Three new trustees have been elected to Pomona’s governing board.

janet-benton-200 Janet Inskeep Benton ’79 received her M.B.A. from Harvard Business School before working in product management in the beverage division at General Foods Corp. from 1984-88 and then staying home and raising her children.

Benton also served for 12 years on the board of the Chappaqua Central School District, a high-performing K-12 public school district with six schools and 4,000 students. A resident of Armonk, N.Y., Benton is the founder and trustee of Frog Rock Foundation, which supports not-forprofit organizations serving economically disadvantaged children and youth in Westchester County. Additionally, she serves on the boards of several local not-for-profit organizations: Children’s Village, supporting vulnerable children and families through residential and community outreach programs; Jacob Burns Film Center, presenting independent, documentary and world cinema and offering 21st-century visual literacy educational programs to students; and Neighbor’s Link Network, which oversees affiliate organizations working to help integrate immigrants into local communities.

Stephen Loeb ’79 P’09, P’13 joined Alaska Distributors Co., an asset management company—formerly a wholesale distributor and broker of wine, beer, spirits and non-alcohol beverages—in 1984 and has served as the president since 1998 and CEO since 2003. Prior to that, he was a corporate banking officer and then assistant vice president with Wells Fargo and Co. An economics major at Pomona, Loeb went on to earn his M.B.A. from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and was a finalist for the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year in 2003 and 2004.

He serves on the boards of the Museum of Glass, the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle, KCTS Television (PBS), The Rainer Club Heritage Fund, and the Temple deHirsch Sinai and Jewish Family Service Investment Committees.

He is treasurer of the Loeb Family Charitable Foundation and president of the Stephen and Dianne Loeb Family Foundation. His most recent business-related board work is on the Washington Roundtable and Enterprise Washington. Formerly the College’s Parents Fund co-chair along with his wife, Diane, Loeb is currently Pomona’s national chair for annual giving. He and his wife have two daughters who graduated from Pomona.

Peter Sasaki ’91 is a managing member of CGS Associate, LLC, a New York City-based boutique financial consulting and research firm, and a shareholder and investor at Centara Capital Group Inc., a financial services firm in San Diego, where he manages capital markets and structuring for a real estate derivatives business and advises private wealth management programs. Previously, he was founder, managing member and CIO at Logos Capital Management, LLC; a market analyst and derivative-trading specialist with Moore Capital Management Inc., a propriety trader with J.P. Morgan & Co.; and founder of Sasaki Group Ltd., an investment partnership specializing in leveraged equity, foreign exchange and interest rate speculation. Sasaki was a philosophy major at Pomona and has an M.B.A. from the Leonard N. Stern School of Business at New York University. He serves on the Head of School’s Advisory Council at the Hopkins School in New Haven, Conn., and is an instrument-rated private airplane pilot.

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