Kick Start Your Day

TinkerFund: Kick-start Caltech Crowdfunding

Crowdfunding has rapidly become a mainstream method used by individuals and groups to raise money for various projects and ventures. Increasingly, organizations that chiefly raise monies for charitable purposes have also been turning to crowdfunding as an additional funding source. Multiple higher-education institutions have done this by integrating crowdfunding as a staple of their fundraising...

Start Your Engines

I n surgery, to underscore safety processes, we love to make comparisons with other industries like flying. Recently, I found myself making a similar comparison to car racing. I was privileged to spend a weekend in a race car run by a professional race team. This crew ran an incredibly well-oiled machine, not only literally but also metaphorically. They raced at 24 Hours of Daytona, keeping a c...

Your day-by-day guide to ASCO

How Was Your Day?

We describe a ‘How was your day?’ (HWYD) Companion whose purpose is to establish a comforting and supportive relationship with a user via a conversation on a variety of work-related topics. The system has several fairly novel features aimed at increasing the naturalness of the interaction: a rapid ‘short loop’ response primed by the results of acoustic emotion analysis, and an ‘interruption man...

Bring Your Self to Work Day—Every Day

But at other moments, the classroom is so lifeless or painful or confused—and I am so powerless to do anything about it—that my claim to be a teacher seems a transparent sham. Then the enemy is everywhere: in those students from some alien planet, in that subject I thought I knew, and in the personal pathology that keeps me earning my living this way. What a fool I was to imagine that I had mas...