Johnny Lee Rising Star

Carnegie Mellon Today, Fall 2009

On the flight back from a conference in California, Johnny Lee, a PhD candidate in Human Computer Interaction, and Jason Hong, an HCI professor, are talking about the Nintendo Wii. They both feel that the system has huge potential outside of just video games- Hong is even thinking of designing a class around it, and wants Lee to help. As the plane cruises 30,000 feet over the Midwest, Hong lays down an irresistible challenge: you design an interface, I'll buy a Wii for the office.

Unfortunately for Hong (and the office), Lee has to spend the next few months working on his thesis. But when he finally finishes a few months later, he decides it's time for a fun project. In a few weekends he turns the Wii remote into a simple motion capture device, a digital whiteboard, and a virtual reality headset. Then he posts some videos explaining how to build them on YouTube.

“Any interesting project with the Wii will get some attention,” Lee says, but he had no idea how much. One post became YouTube's number one rated video. The curator of the prestigious TED talks invited him to give a presentation. His devices started popping up everywhere- fourth graders built them for science projects, university professors were using his digital whiteboards in their classrooms, the VR headset was turned into a flight simulator.

Lee, now a researcher at Microsoft, says that by giving away the concepts and making the materials cheap he was able to reach many more people. “Otherwise it would probably be just another failed startup,” he says. Far from a failed startup, Lee was recently named one of the top 35 innovators under the age of 35 by the influential Technology Review, joining past winners like the founders of Google, Paypal, and Netscape.

Pulp 24-7 Samples, 2003-2004

Tuesday, January 27
In high school band circles, there are dozens of jokes about flutists. "How do you get two flutes to play in unison? Shoot one." Or, "What do you get when you gather all the flutists in the band together? Too many flutists." Apparently flutes are just better when they're on their own. And they're best when played by someone like internationally renowned flutist Timothy Hutchins. Hutchins is currently the principal flute of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, and before that, he was the principal flute of the Montreal Symphony, where he received international acclaim as a concerto soloist. He's even played Ibert's flute concerto at Carnegie Hall. Tonight he performs accompanied by his wife, pianist Janet Creaser Hutchins, as part of the Y Music Society series, and you can bet that when he's finished nobody will ask him, "How do you know if there's a flute player at your door? You don't, they can't find the right key and don't know when to come in." Ha ha. 8 p.m. $35. Jewish Community Center, Squirrel Hill. 412.392.4900

Monday, February 2
In 1968, shortly after Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed, elementary school teacher Jane Elliott performed a groundbreaking experiment. She asked her class of fourth-graders in all-white Riceville, Iowa what they thought about black people. They responded saying things like, "They're dirty," "They riot, they steal," and "You can't trust them, my dad says they better not try to move in next door to us." Determined to counter her students' prejudices, she divided the class into two groups and told the children that brown-eyed people were superior to blue-eyed people. She took away blue-eyed students' privileges and told the class that blue-eyed people were lazy and stupid. She didn't tell the students how to treat each other but within minutes she watched blue-eyed students become timid and brown-eyed students taunting the blue-eyed. That day Elliott learned that racism is taught, but it can also be untaught. Now a consultant who works with schools and corporations confronting discrimination in their organizations, Elliott presents a lecture entitled, Anatomy of a Prejudice. Free. 7 p.m. Winchester Thurston School, Shadyside. 412.578.7500

Friday, December 26
This year for Christmas, I asked Santa to please, please let the New York Nationals beat the Harlem Globetrotters. The New York Nationals are the Globetrotters' new opponent since the Washington Generals closed their camp in 1995, after half a decade of miserable defeats. Now I know that rooting against the Globetrotters is like rooting for the Grinch to steal Christmas or for Frosty to melt, but after getting downright embarrassed every day for years, even bad teams are in for a little Christmas magic- and maybe by that logic the Steelers will win their season closer, too. At tonight's game we'll see if the Nationals' holiday wish comes true, or, at the very least, enjoy the gift of watching some awe-inspiring basketball wizardry. 7 pm. Mellon Arena, Uptown. 412.323.1919

Monday, December 29
The cliche goes that one person's trash is another person's treasure. Whoever said that first apparently did not have a relative who worked at a thrift store. After spending some time with someone who brings home what they couldn't give away for free and tries to pass them off as gifts on unsuspecting family members, you get the sense that sometimes one person's junk really is another person's junk. The key is to make sure that it becomes another person's junk. You have the opportunity to do that with this year's unwanted Christmas presents at Zombo's Bad Gift Exchange Extravaganza. Bring them and get a dollar off the door and the opportunity to trade for someone else's thoughtless gift. Live music by the Legion of Incredibly Strange Superheroes, Mr. and Mr$. Funky, the Bowling Allies, and DJ Zombo really turns that bad gift into a treasure. 7:30 pm. $5. Club Cafe, South Side. 412.431.4950

Thursday, January 22
Terry is a struggling actor, living in Staten Island with two other struggling actors, Matt and Alex, who have been lovers for over four years. But lately Matt has been on tour in a musical and Alex has been cheating on him with Buck, a mall manager who got Alex his current gig as a ma mall Santa. Terry desperately wants to preserve the peace and stability he had before Matt left. Such is the basic premise behind the play, The Crumple Zone. Now if you're thinking, "Wait, a zany romantic comedy about roommates with nearly opposite personalities, set in a New York City borough?" or, "Hey, didn't that used to be a sitcom? I don't remember them being gay," you're not too far off. A theater critic for the New York Times says that the play "might have been written by [Neil] Simon if he were gay and 40 years younger." Cloven Hoof Productions kicks off the 2004 season with this Buddy Thomas comedy. Through January 31. The Penn Theater, Bloomfield. 412.761.3947

University Adopts Sweatshop Code of Conduct

Focus, Carnegie Mellon’s monthly newspaper for faculty and staff

On March 27, nearly 200 students attended “Starving for the Swoosh”, an interactive multimedia presentation on working conditions in factories overseas. The two presenters, Leslie Kretzu and Jim Keady, had spent the month of August 2000 living in a factory worker’s slum in Tangerang, Indonesia on $1.25 a day, the typical wage paid to a Nike worker in a shoe factory. In their presentation they talked about the workers they lived with who worked up to 15 hours a day, 6-7 days a week, sometimes working two 24 hour shifts in the same week to make quotas, abusive managers, dangerous working conditions, and pay that may or may not be enough to meet their basic needs. Keady, is a former soccer coach at St. John’s University who was forced to resign for refusing to wear Nike soccer equipment. He says that during a month living on $1.25 in Indonesia he lost over 25 pounds, and was unable to lift even a water bottle without his hands shaking violently. “I was literally starving, and my body was fighting it,” he says.

In the past five years sweatshops have become a major issue on college campuses. Students at the University of North Carolina, University of Michigan, Duke, Georgetown, and dozens of other universities around the country have staged protests and sit-ins in attempts to get university administrations to adopt Codes of Conduct- legal documents that regulate the behavior of the manufacturers of a schools licensed apparel. Recently, students and administrators at Carnegie Mellon have started dealing with the issue, and in April the President’s Council will make a decision about whether or not to approve Carnegie Mellon’s own Code of Conduct.

Work began on the Code of Conduct in Spring 2000 when administrators in the trademark licensing office, who had become aware of the anti-sweatshop movement on other campuses, formed a task force to draft a Code for Carnegie Mellon. The original task force included administration, two faculty representatives, two undergraduate and two graduate students. According to John Soluri, Assistant Professor of History and a member of the task force, they spent the next year reviewing Codes of Conduct from other schools, educating themselves on the issues and potential problems with implementing codes. He says, “It was quite a bit of revising and redrafting to arrive at a code that we were satisfied with.”

One of the biggest decisions the task force had to make was to choose a monitoring group. A Code of Conduct outlines very specifically the labor, environmental, and health practices that the manufacturers of a university’s apparel must follow. Monitoring groups travel to the factories where products are made to ensure that the manufacturers are adhering to the practices outlined in the Code of Conduct. At the time the task force was making their decision there were two major monitoring groups, the Fair Labor Association (FLA) and the Workers Rights Consortium (WRC). The FLA was established by the Clinton administration and was comprised of representatives from various labor and human rights groups as well as representatives from corporations in the apparel industry, like Nike. The FLA has drawn criticism from many people in the student movement who believe because the FLA has representatives from corporations on their board and, because they get part of their funding from corporations, that they are not a truly independent monitor. The WRC was formed by United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS), a coalition of student-based groups across the United States, as an alternative to the FLA. The WRC does not include corporate representatives, but some critics believe that it is too small and to be effective. In the end the task force decided to join both the FLA and the WRC. The task force finished a code in the spring of 2001, and it was sent to be reviewed by the administration and the university’s legal staff.

Also in the spring of 2001 two of the students from the task force, Shivdev Rao, a senior BHA student, and Brad McCombs a graduate MFA student, started a student group that was a member of USAS, called People for Worker’s Rights (PWR). “The student group was formed to bring more attention to the subject of the Code of Conduct and to deal with other issues relating to sweatshops,” says McCombs.

Last semester, student and faculty members of the task force who were waiting for the University to approve or reject the Code of Conduct began to feel that progress on the Code had stalled, and PWR began to take action.

According to Matt Toups begin_of_the_skype_highlighting     end_of_the_skype_highlighting begin_of_the_skype_highlighting     end_of_the_skype_highlighting, co-leader of PWR, “One of the challenges this year has been to figure out exactly what was happening with the Code, and how to move progress on the Code from the outside.”

They wrote several letters to all levels of the administration but received little response. The group circulated a petition last semester asking the University to adopt the Code and collected over 250 signatures, and met with President Cohen and other members of the administration.

“Could it have been done faster- that’s not clear,” said Neal Binstock, assistant vice president for business services, who served as an administrative liaison to the task force. “Drafting a code is not a small or easy process.”

According to Binstock, the code had to go through a legal review, and changing each word of the code could potentially change the meaning of the document. He believes that the extra time was necessary. “We had to present the best possible code of conduct to represent Carnegie Mellon University.”

This semester the trademark licensing office sent a revised version of the Code back to the members of the original task force who are still at Carnegie Mellon. On March 18 the task force made some small changes to the Code, which will then be sent to the April 12 meeting of the President’s Council where it is expected to be approved. Once the Code is approved, language will be drafted into Carnegie Mellon licensing contracts insisting that the 95 licensees that make products with the Carnegie Mellon logo on it, as well as any new ones must endorse this code in the manufacturing of their products.

According to Binstock, “Our objective was to have a code of conduct acceptable to all of the people involved, and I believe that’s what we have achieved.”

Members of the task force feel that the move to adopt a code of conduct, although it has been a slow process, has been successful, although there is more work to be done once the code is adopted. Soluri says, “I think it would be misleading to say that students have driven the move to adopt a code, but I have not a doubt that students will have to drive the enforcement of the code by making fellow students, staff, and faculty aware that we need to buy our consumer good from companies that respect workers’ basic rights.”

Sidebar: Living on $1.25 Per Day

On March 27, nearly 200 students and faculty filled McConomy auditorium to attend “Starving for the Swoosh,” an interactive multimedia presentation on working conditions in factories overseas. The two presenters, Leslie Kretzu and Jim Keady, spent the month of August 2000 living in a factory worker’s slum in Tangerang, Indonesia, on $1.25 a day, the typical wage paid to a Nike worker in a shoe factory.

Kretzu and Keady talked about the workers they lived with who worked up to 15 hours a day, six or seven days a week, sometimes putting in two 24-hour shifts in the same week to make quotas. The presentation touched upon abusive managers, dangerous working conditions, and pay that many times is not enough to meet workers’ basic needs.

Keady is a former soccer coach at St. John’s University who was forced to resign for refusing to wear Nike soccer equipment. He says that during the month living on $1.25 a month in Indonesia he lost over 25 pounds, and was unable to lift even a water bottle without his hands shaking violently. “I was literally starving, and my body was fighting it,” he says.

The presentation was sponsored by People for Workers Rights (PWR), a student group that deals with sweatshops and other issues relating to workers’ rights. The group was formed in February of last year, originally as a way to bring more attention to the code of conduct, but the group has since begun to deal with other issues as well. This year the group has organized a “sweat free T-shirt” fundraiser, in which the group sold union made T-shirts which they silk-screened themselves. Also, they’ve been working with other groups at University of Pittsburgh and Duquesne and with local union members in a campaign to get the Pittsburgh Pirates to adopt a code of conduct for its merchandise, similar to the codes of conduct that many universities have begun to adopt.

This year the group has also been organizing its own trip to visit factories in Honduras next spring.

We want to see their culture,” says Matt Toups, a sophomore physics major and co-leader of PWR, “and to see first hand how our consumption affects their lives.”

The Eclectic and Eccentric WRCT fm

Pop City, November 19, 2008
http://popcitymedia.com/features/wrct1112.aspx

Tune into WRCT 88.3 FM on a Saturday morning this fall and you'll hear Saturday Light Brigade, an acclaimed radio program for families that features acoustic music and interactive puzzles and games for children. Listen to the same station later that night and you'll hear Too Evil to Have a Human Name, three hours of metal- growling vocalists, squealing guitars, and pounding bass drums in bands with names like Obituary and Cattle Decapitation.

In between there’s Radio 9, throwback to the radio shows of the 50's and 60's, followed by indie rock on Something Fell. Oh, and Radio Free Radio, an experimental music program hosted by Steve Boyle, which one caller described this way: "I tune in on a Saturday night as I'm driving down to the bar, and all I hear is noise. It wasn't a song, there wasn't even a beat, just all kinds of weird feedback and voices clipped out of movies and stuff, and it went on for like 20 minutes. What the hell is that?"

Clearly, not everyone will be a fan of every show. If you turn on the radio and you know you want to hear just jazz, or just R&B, or classical there are plenty of other stations. But, if you want to hear something, well... different? Turn on WRCT.

Underground Radio
WRCT, Carnegie Mellon's student radio station (the "RCT" stands for "Radio Carnegie Tech"), began as the project of a group of engineering students in 1949. At first they used the electrical wiring in a few academic buildings to broadcast a weak AM signal. They switched to FM at 88.3 in the mid-70's, but it still didn't reach much further than the edge of CMU’s campus. The station has grown quite a bit since then. With a new transmitter, the station is as powerful as it's ever been- covering the entire city and well into Allegheny County in most directions. Or, thanks to the Internet, it's now possible to hear WRCT anywhere in the world via streaming audio on the station's web site.

As the station expanded to serve the larger community, it opened its doors to participation from outside the university. "Community members are at least as valuable to the station as students," says Sal Farina, the current General Manager and a PhD student at CMU. Every position is volunteer ("Even at the top," he laments) and he estimates that about half of the station's DJ's, producers, engineers, and staff are not connected to the school. To get involved, simply call the station or e-mail the training director (Alex Smith at training@wrct.org).

Which means that in addition to awkward freshmen DJ's who are just learning the ropes, WRCT's programming includes veteran DJ's with years of experience on the air. Like Kevin Amos, host of African American issues and music shows Ebony Spectrum and One to One, who recently celebrated his 30th year in local radio. Or Zombo, who,now in his eighth year at the station, hosts his show with a fake Hungarian accent and plenty of energy (picture the Count from Sesame Street after say, nine cups of coffee). Zombo's Record Party, like many shows on WRCT doesn't really fit into any one genre- the playlist for a recent show included Groucho Marx, Devo, Johnny Cash, experimental music collective Negativland, a polka, a dozen other songs that have probably never been on the radio before, and an interview with a nervous Pop City writer who had wandered into the studio.

Studios Underground Too
The studios are located in the basement of Carnegie Mellon's University Center, where band stickers, album covers, and posters of concerts sponsored by the station in years past cover nearly every inch of wall. It's a comfortable space, and at any given time someone is probably sleeping on the couch in the front room. There are two soundproof recording booths- a smaller one for the DJ's and a larger one for recording live local bands on shows like Advanced Calculus and (the somewhat less creatively named) Live Band Show.

But the station's real treasure is in a room off to the side- nearly 70,000 records and CD's known as the record library. Most were donated by individuals or sent by independent record companies, and each one has a card taped to the front with a brief review written by a WRCT DJ and a list of suggested tracks. "So many stations have purged their vinyl," says Larry Berger, host of Saturday Light Brigade, who points out that many of the records were never released on CD and aren't available in electronic formats. "WRCT has been protective, and shown a lot of foresight." Berger knows about longevity and foresight in radio. Saturday Light Brigade, which he has hosted since 1978, is one of the longest running public radio programs in the United States. In 2003, the show, which is broadcast from a studio in the Children's Museum to somewhere between 40 and 60 thousand local families, switched stations from to WRCT after nearly 25 years on WYEP.

"The station is really delighting people, and taking risks, which I believe are appropriate," says Berger. "Sometimes listeners will tune in and be delighted in a way they didn't even know radio could delight them."

Hidden Jewel
WRCT broadcasts not just music, but also ideas that might not get on the radio anywhere else. For example, every weekday morning at 8 a.m., WRCT broadcasts Democracy Now, a nationally syndicated news program hosted by Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzales. The station is also home to Rustbelt Radio, a weekly show produced by a grassroots collective of volunteers who report on issues overlooked by the local mainstream media.

"As far as I know, we're the only major station in Pittsburgh to broadcast shows not in English," says Alex Smith, a former GM and current training director at WRCT. Wednesday evenings the station features Barrio Latino, which covers topics of interest to Pittsburgh's growing Latin American community in Spanish, and Thursdays there's the Brazil Hour, which alternates between English and Portuguese.

"WRCT has really emerged as a champion of diverse and eclectic local radio," says Berger. He says there are only a handful of stations around the country that are "so eclectic and broadly serving the wider community... I think that WRCT is a hidden jewel in Pittsburgh. I really do."

Da Vinci Award

Carnegie Mellon Today, Winter 2008

In his 41 years as a history professor at Carnegie Mellon, Joel Tarr has never had a parking permit. He lives a short ten-minute walk from campus (“Eight minutes if I walk fast”), just off of Forbes Ave. Walking home one night in 1991, a car ran through the intersection in front of Margaret Morrison while he was crossing. Tarr woke up in an emergency room, but luckily without serious injuries. Fifteen years later, when a student was struck by a car and killed at an intersection just up the street from where he was hit, he wondered if there was a way to make crossings safer.

Every semester Tarr teaches two classes in which students research a policy problem for a government or non-profit client. Following the fatal accident, he had both classes focus on pedestrian safety in Pittsburgh. They pored through historical records, surveyed students and faculty, and worked with doctors at UMPC's Children's Hospital to produce a report identifying hazardous intersections. Tarr later testified before Pittsburgh city council in support of a Safe Streets Initiative, which included many of the report's recommendations, such as walk signals that show when a light will change.

The project was typical of the work he has done throughout his career- applying history to a technological issue and working with experts in a broad range of fields. It seems appropriate then that Tarr, who holds appointments in the Heinz School, the History department, and the Engineering and Public Policy department, recently received an award named after history's most famous renaissance man- the Leonardo da Vinci award, given by the Society for the History of Technology. The Society has 1500 members in 35 countries, and the da Vinci award is its highest honor.

Watershed Moment

Carnegie Mellon Today, Winter, 2008

Julia Schwarz, Chris Harrison, and Bryan Pendleton were getting ready to eat the first meal of a three-day vacation paddling down the Allegheny River. Lounging on their homemade wooden raft, the three of them, all students in the Human Computer Interaction program, had just unpacked their tuna sandwiches, when the sky opened, unleashing a torrential downpour. As they dove for shelter under the tarp, the lightning started.

“It was right next to us,” says Schwarz. “Sometimes it felt as if the sound came before the lightning- it was ear-splitting.” Meanwhile, the raft, a platform of wooden planks supported by four plastic barrels, had been pushed into a faster section of river, near the shore, and was hurtling towards an overhanging tree- backwards. If the tree snagged the raft, there was good chance the current would push the raft over, knocking them into the river during a lightning storm. As Harrison and Pendleton paddled furiously, Schwarz managed to maneuver to the front and push the tree over them. Throughout the ordeal Harrison was joking and smiling. “I had to laugh to ease the tension,” he says.

The voyage was his idea- to have an adventure like the rafters who shipped timber down rivers centuries ago. He convinced Pendleton, another PhD student, to join him early on, but recruiting a third person was trickier. Harrison says he asked a half dozen people before Julia Schwarz- an undergrad from Washington studying at CMU over the summer- overheard him talking about the trip in the HCI lab. She heard, “rafting, trip, multi-day, building” and was hooked. They spent the next two and a half weeks constructing the raft in Pendleton's garage. The finished vessel was named in honor of his wife, Joy, and her decision to let him participate- The Joy Willing. After borrowing life-jackets, tents, and oars from the CMU Explorers club, they were ready to go.

Apart from the early storm, most of the trip was peaceful, but hardly boring. They constantly had to navigate around islands, rocks, and other obstacles. During quieter moments they saw turtles, otters, and bald eagles. When it got hot, they would swim in the river, checking the underside of the raft for damage. At night they camped on the shores of islands, eating smores and staring up at the Milky Way.

On the third day, the crew, and The Joy Willing, landed safely, thirty-five miles from their launch. They created a Web site, www.alleghenyrafters.com, hoping to inspire others to use the river. Maybe, says Schwarz, the trip could become a popular spring break for students. “Rafters gone wild!” Harrison jokes.

Orchid Blooms

Carnegie Mellon Today, Fall 2008

When Ralph Ashworth first tried pitching his mystery novel, The Killer of Orchids, to agents and editors 15 years ago, he didn’t have much luck. Sure, they liked the writing and they were intrigued by the plot, in which Jeff Redwing, a gay computer genius, investigates the murder of a Carnegie Mellon alumnus. But at the time Ashworth didn’t think readers would be ready for a gay detective, so when he submitted the manuscript he removed any reference to the hero’s romantic life.

“Editors would tell me, ‘We like the story, but something is missing,’” says Ashworth. “And I would think, ‘Well, you’re right…’” So he put the novel aside, took a job as a supervisor at a Borders bookstore, and concentrated on other writing projects.

Last year, he decided it was time to rewrite The Killer of Orchids, with Redwing as a gay man once again. Coincidentally, at around the same time, Borders announced a fiction-writing contest open to all 30,000 employees. The winning book would be published, sold in over 1,000 bookstores, and featured in the Borders newsletter, which is sent to 28 million people.

“Normally it’s a struggle to get one copy in bookstores,” says Ashworth. “This would have the full brunt of Borders’ promotional powers behind it.”

The deadline was six months sooner than he planned to have the book finished, but the opportunity was too good to pass up. Even though it was the holiday season and he was working at Borders six days a week, sometimes 10 hours or more each day, he pushed himself to keep writing, whenever he had time to spare. Exhausted, he managed to submit the book by the deadline.

A few months later he got the call. Out of over 200 submissions that Borders received, The Killer of Orchids was chosen as the winner.