Category: life

30th Anniversary of the June Democracy Movement in South Korea

by skyrien

Democratic consolidation: The process by which a new democracy matures, in a way that means it is unlikely to revert to authoritarianism without an external shock. – Wikipedia

Today marks the 30th anniversary of democracy protests in South Korea–known as the 6월 민주항쟁 (the June Democracy Movement)–that led to democratic consolidation in the South Korea. While so crucial to the identity of Korea today, and even having learned about it in school, its significance wasn’t in my consciousness until much later as an adult when I had gained a greater appreciation of the human fight for progress (which continues today!) across centuries, especially recent decades.

(Aside: Much of that recent appreciation came via a Democratic Development MOOC on Coursera, taught by Stanford professor Larry Diamond. The movement in Korea itself is part of the greater context of a democratization wave (1960s-1980s) across Asia, worth learning for those w/o contemporary Asian history context)

As I started the appreciate the historical relevance that happened in the span of my family’s lifetimes, the need to be proactive in dealing with today’s challenges is also clear, as the fight for democracy continues across this world.

The background of the Korean protests are fascinating and worth reading into (I won’t go into them here), but despite much uncertainty, they ended peacefully, with concessions from the then-authoritarian government to rewrite the Constitution and established the Sixth Republic of Korea, leading to the following promises being implemented:

  • Direct participation in upcoming presidential election for all citizens over age 20
  • Freedom of candidacy and fair competition
  • Amnesty for Kim Dae-jung and other political prisoners
  • Protection of human dignity and promotion of basic human rights
  • Freedom of the press and abolishment of the restrictive Basic Press Law (see: Media of South Korea)
  • Educational autonomy and local self-government
  • The creation of a new political climate for dialogue and compromise
  • Commitment to enact bold social reforms to build a clean, honest, and more just society.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Korean_presidential_election,_1987

I had just turned 2 at the time, so I have no recollection of the actual protests, but my parents do remind me that it was only months before we moved to the U.S. in late 1987. By the time we moved back in 1995, it had only been a few years since the events, but indeed, at least what I observed and felt like a functioning democracy.

Through the eyes of history, these events are seen as the Asian component of the Third Wave of Democracy, which also includes similar movements in Philippines and Taiwan. As most of the world knows, these transitions from an authoritarian rule to democracy are often messy, with the principle characters being young people (students) against the various proxies of authoritarian regimes.

And not all of these movements succeed or remain peaceful, as sadly, we we’ve seen recently in the Middle East after the much anticipated Arab Spring, and when things go wrong, horrible things can happen like the ongoing tragedy in Syria.

And with major disruptions in stability, the temptation of authoritarianism when facing crises real, or amplified by the political climate is ever present. One notable rollback of liberal democratic norms has been in the Philippines, which despite their history of democracy, we are seeing with the current administration, a steep decline in the rule of law, and a sharp rise in populism, supporting a distinct shift toward an authoritarianism. For someone like me, who focuses on trends, this is not encouraging, and across the world, we’ve seen with a rise in those willing to fan the flames of populist resentment. Not in Korea though, and with the newly elected center-left president, Korea’s execution of democracy moves forward.

Still, advocates for democratic development can take hope in the one more recent event in South Korea: the overwhelmingly peaceful civil protests that ultimately led to the impeachment of President Park (a constitutional process that hasn’t even (yet) happened in the U.S.). With this and the subsequent peaceful transition of power to an opposition party president, it is clear that despite the chaos, it was a test and a win for the rule of law, democracy as a principle, and the people at large.

I actually remember when I was younger, seeing a US official address a crowd of students in Korea. Referring to the idea of “national stability” — he said something along the lines of, “In Korea, if you had an impeachment, the country would tear itself apart.” Glad to see that wasn’t true.

Politics aside, kudos to Korea for demonstrating how democracy is done! It is something the country should be incredibly proud of. What had been still on formation while growing up, as of today, I’d say that it is one of the few true democracies in East Asia, along with Japan and Taiwan.

Looking back at the last 30 years, I think it’s important to remember the active role the citizenry must play in fighting for and preserving democratic norms and values. The global push and pull of nationalism and internationalism has never been so readily apparent, and in this joined mission, we must realize that the universal principles and norms of liberal democracy must be fought for and the battles, and heroes, remembered.

The specific date of the anniversary does celebrate one particular incident — a democracy movement protester that was killed by a police tear gas grenade. That event is considered crucial to bringing public awareness to the authoritarian regime’s violent crackdown of the protests and is considered a pivotal moment in public sentiment. From that shift, ultimately, the government conceded to the demands of protesters seeking democratic reforms.

Today, Korea remembers this day to remind itself of how freedom from authoritarianism must be won, and to remember those who fought in that struggle.

Awesome Game: Screeps!

by skyrien

I’m here to briefly rave about this game I’ve been playing called Screeps. This real-time MMO AI programming strategy game has managed to get me to spend the last 4 hours writing and tinkering with my own game AI, code, which is deploayed into a substantial persistent universe populated with every other player in semi-competition. A brilliant concept, made by these dudes in Russia.

It’s the best experience I’ve ever had playing around with JavaScript (which, I’ve actually been wanting to work with again for my next project… the last one having been a simple WinJS app back in the WIndows 8 days…). and like software development, a highly satisfying experience when things just work, and an agonizingly annoying one when things don’t work. But whatever your JavaScript skills are today, this game will make you better. (The “CPU” and “memory” quota limitations imposed by the game encourages efficient code.)

Out of my time with this game, I hope to practice development patterns for autonomous agents and to start working with swarm AI behaviors. And of course, as a side benefit, practice JavaScript, which I’ll be using with node.js in a future project! At some point, I hope to apply some of what i learn here in practice in the real world, possibly as we develop drones for defensive purposes.

Now, onto the game…

Simple interface, but insane freedom

The game itself features a simple 2D GUI that can be run in a window or from the Screeps website, where it renders in a browser. You can actually view the world without being a member, but to participate in the persistent universe, there is a paid subscription of around $8 / month (I haven’t decided if I’m going to continue after the first month). It’s cheap though, and as long as it provides me entertainment, I’ll continue to play. The game in the browser scales incredibly well – I even managed to get it loaded on my phone, though the touchscreen didn’t lend to a good experience.

Since you don’t control the units via the GUI, but rather, through code, the bulk of your time is going to be spend in the IDE, tinkering around with your unit and colony behaviors via Javascript code. Finally putting my Game AI programming concepts to use!

I’m pretty proud of my little colony so far; it’s like managing my own colony of ants. Brings back old memories of playing SimAnt as a kid.

The competitive aspect is perhaps the coolest part; very evident even within our own group of “novice” players that there those which are more engaged than others. While their code isn’t visible to you, being an open world MMO RTS, you can see every other player and room. For a few of the more advanced empires, I’ve been trying to reverse engineer useful behavior algorithms to see how to create a general purpose empire expansion code base. AI programming indeed!

Procedurally-generated rooms, mostly. Some substantially better than others. Each symbol denotes a different player’s territory. Because We’re in the “green” novice zone, the massive empires looming just outside can’t touch us. Yet…

I’ve always loved learning with an objective, and the framework of this game is an excellent way to focus on logic. The survival element encourages experimentation, and though I’m still early in the game, I decided to break the peace and send out a few of my “defender” units. You’re competing with every other player in real-time–basically your code vs. theirs, so I figured that I’d want to hone my little empire’s abilities to eventually advance beyond it’s “novice” borders. I went into the nearest player’s base and annihilated their walls, workers, resource storage, and “spawn” (which is where new units are created). This leaves the control point to slowly decay, until my own colony units area able to take over.

Attack!

Such slaughter is the cold work of empire building, though, it looks like, to survive, I’m going to need to know how to fight and grow beyond my own box.

AS for the scale of the game’s persistent univserse, so far, it is massive. The below screenshot is just a tiny segment of the scroll-able space, so it’s a huge amount of virtual territory, though of course, it would have to be, since it includes every other player in this single instance. I can’t tell how much further it will scale though, since right now, the game seems to crawl at around 5-10 seconds / tick. They’ve shared their infrastructure details, which is actually a fascinating read, though, perhaps, they could do something to speed the game up, maybe 2-3x.

My “empire” is but a tiny colony among a massive ocean of empires. Better get coding..

Great game. I will post more about it as I play further! 🙂

 

Volunteering at the Seattle Aquarium

by skyrien

In this age of digital distractions and social media time-sinks (or black holes, in my case) one of the tragic effects seems to be that volunteering is on the decline. Thinking about this as a community challenge, there lies responsibility in both the citizen to take interest and on organizations to embrace and encourage a vibrant volunteer community as a meaningful part of their operations. We should be more aware of these trends and do better to create volunteer opportunities that have impact and pays back with involvement that goes beyond providing free labor, but also deeper engagement with the community and appreciation for the subject matter.

Graphic by Nikelle Snader//Data from Bureau of Labor Statistics

Aside from the slight uptick during the Great Recession, it seems that the trend of declining volunteerism continues for the American population. It’s sad that the current rate is so low, that barely one in four people regularly participate in a volunteer activity. Part of this is our wealth-focused culture that perceives it as “unpaid labor”, or as tedious tasks not worthy of pay, or to be done in retirement looking for ‘something to do’. I got a few of these speaking with well-to-do friends living pseudo-competitive lives.

Volunteering is more than just free labor, it’s crucially valuable working philosophy that must be a part of any civic society, and is certainly fulfilling in its involvement with people and subject. When you are working for a cause dear to you and that cause doesn’t involve a paycheck, some other intrinsic motivation must be involved. For me, it’s usually an intellectual or experiential pursuit, one of passion and ‘purpose’ — the kind of thing one would do even without being paid for it. Along the way, you meet people who likewise are more genuinely aligned in those values, and you work together by participating and to furthering your community, by freely giving yourself to cause you believe in. I consider this a good use of my human capital, and a far better way to help further a cause than throwing in a few dollars.

Behavioral economist and Duke researcher Dan Arely spoke about some interesting findings from his studies into human behavior; in that there is more than one market for labor participation, particularly around the effect of money on motivation. In his study, he found that there exists a ‘monetary market’, and a ‘social market’ — the latter being the things we invest into because they’re personally important to us, rather than using a paid compensation as a proxy for our personal value. The findings were that even a tiny amount of compensation changes the nature of that worker-work relationship. The takeaway from this is that volunteer programs must understand this dynamic of motivation and work to meet the individuals’ and community’s intrinsic motivations to maintain an vibrant volunteer community.

In these polarized times, anything to build more civic cohesion is a win to me and volunteerism can be a great piece of that.

Volunteering at the Seattle Aquarium (2014-2015)

One of my favorite spots to start my volunteering day!

I recently had the opportunity to be an interpretive volunteer at the Seattle Aquarium. The aquarium had a well-established volunteer program provide the majority of working hands during any given business day. I don’t know exact figures, but I recall hearing numbers of around 75% (of people? physical labor hours?) involved in operations were some sort of volunteer. My involvement was about 200 hours between 2014-2015, or 4 hours a week on Saturday afternoons.

In absolute numbers, the community was huge, with over a thousand active volunteers at any given year, with a highly educated/science-capable staff that provided much of the structure for a mix of learning and service work to provide ‘interpretive services’ to the aquarium’s visitors. It’s pretty impressive how much operational responsibility rested on volunteers at any given time, particularly those interacting with the public. This is a non-trivial contribution of value on part of a generally educated and scientifically capable lay-community, “representing a donated value of over $2.3 million toward our mission: Inspiring Conservation of Our Marine Environment” (Seattle Aquarium: Volunteer).

A typical Saturday afternoon at the tidepools. The most hands on part of the aquarium, half was encouraging the kids to explore, while the other half was ensuring they don’t do something insane. *Rarely* were these the same children. Parents take note–raise your kids right!

The volunteers themselves were a fairly diverse group — a wide range of ages and academic backgrounds were represented, though the group skewed somewhat female and usually with some academic or professional orientation toward biological sciences. Generally, the average adult volunteer struck me as smart, conservation-minded, proactive learners, who loved the sciences and wanted to be involved in the community. There also was a high school volunteer program active during the summers–I would have loved to be involved in such a program in high school, though the typical cohort included some more of the “mom signed me up” variety.

The aquarium staff had developed an effective learning curriculum that allowed anyone, from a total novice to a amateur marine biologist, to still learn so much more about the local ecosystem and to share in the ongoing events and research. I met a lot of really awesome people through my two years there and always felt that near direct access to research and researchers was available (at least, to the clever aspirant).

Behind the scenes look at volunteer enrichment, a pre-day session reviewing happenings in marine science, stuff going on at the aquarium, and sharing ideas on how to better reach out to the public.

I loved the work on two fronts — the ability to personally involve myself on a subject of interest with staff and research, and to share it with others via peers (other volunteers) and via outreach the external community at-large. There’s so much to the incredible marine ecosystem that is Puget Sound and the Salish Sea, our little corner linked to the Pacific Ocean; from the salmon runs from the rivers to the 100+ resident orcas whales of Puget Sound, to be able to participate even remotely in the community was incredibly fulfilling.

To then be able to share with the greater public was a particularly unique experience, as I don’t often work and interact directly with people in that capacity (at least not in large numbers, hundreds / day). Paid or not, aquarium patrons certainly looked to volunteers as responsible individuals who could help them in their overall experience, and that’s what were were there for, though sometimes, it also included managing some unruly behavior, from both kids and their parents.

Not the preferred way of experiencing the tide pools…

Given that the Aquarium is right on the Seattle Waterfront, during the summer, it attracts huge crowds, sometimes entire school-fulls on field trips (learning mayhem?) and can become a challenge for staff and volunteers to manage, but in it all, the most fulfilling aspect for me of interpretive work was encouraging others in their curiosity and pushing them along in their willingness to learn.

Introducing… Cupcake! Our Giant Pacific Octopus!

 

Octopus feeding — always a busy time!

Captain Barnacles of the Octonauts, dropping in at the aquarium.

A photo posted by Alexander (@skyrien) on

Spotted lagoon jellies, some of the coolest jellyfish in the Pacific!

A video posted by Alexander (@skyrien) on

Volunteering at the aquarium never really felt like work; (though maybe because I was only putting in 4 hours / week); for the most part, my time there felt much more like play; as in, not a unpaid shift at a job, but a free backstage access pass to a place that I enjoy! Some of the work did become tedious; but I came to love particular aspects of my shifts at the aquarium; personally, playing with feeding kelp to sea urchins and exploring plankton tow findings under a microscope filled many fun hours for me. That I got to share it with my volunteer peers, staff, and the public others was a side bonus!

I lived in Seattle for seven years, it’s a shame I didn’t start investing my time into the awesome volunteering opportunities until the last two. And it doesn’t have to be at the aquarium; even for me, at the one year mark, I was debating moving onto Life Sciences volunteering or to another domain entirely. For me, the point though, is to develop that pillar of civic life; of freely contributing to my community with what services I can best provide.

On top of that, Puget Sound is one of the most spectacular marine environments available to us in the United States; having already loved Seattle, my experience at the aquarium taught me so many things about the region’s ecosystems; from the importance of water management, to salmon run protection (to get a sense of people that were present there, one girl I met was already an expert at salmon fishery management… and she was only 19!), and I got to actually meet people like me, with similar interests to build on.

So yes, totally fulfilling, both for one’s own experience of being able to freely give one’s time and abilities and also as as contribution to engage my community and participate in this act of civic citizenship. I highly encourage everyone to pursue volunteering as one of the pillars of involvement in civic society.

One of my favorite spots; at the rotating exhibit, with the microscope (for examining plankton tow findings)

 

Another super cute creature, this one would remind me of a rabbit as it hopped around on its fins

 

The glorious hooded nudibranch! I would have never have known these supercool creatures existed if I hadn’t volunteered here

 

Another one of my favorite aquarium spots, the “Dome”. Apparently there are still fish there from when it was built (the sturgeon probably). It’s certainly was a nice cozy place to chill (or search for eels, as I often did). No cell phone reception though.

 

We also got access to the behind-the-scenes workings of an aquarium, and had the opportunity to learn about the systems for maintaining the exhibits. I hadn’t really thought of the massive infrastructure needed for an aquarium, but it’s certainly far more than a few swimming pools

 

The Twelfth Man and Santa himself also are fans of the Aquarium

 

Feeding octopus is hard work… but rewarding! They’re freakishly intelligent animals!

 

My hair grew a lot during my time here…