While my days of being in engineering school are in the paleolithic era, I do remember a fondness for cheat sheets, especially when it came time to cram for exams. I was recently reminded of this while watching a movie about NASA’s mission control doings during the Apollo era. On the screen flashed the following handwritten cheat sheet, to be used when one of the spacecraft computers was showing a particular alarm code. I believe it was compiled by Jack Garman.

This struck me as fortuitous — as some of you might remember, when the Eagle lunar module from Apollo 11 was making its descent to the surface of the moon, it had set off a 1202 error code. The engineers had experienced this code in previous simulations, and within seconds were able to tell Armstrong and Aldrin to just ignore it and carry on: the code indicated that the computer was being overwhelmed with inputs. Given that computer had the processing power of today’s coffee pots (1 MHz processor with 150 kb of RAM), it wasn’t a show-shopper.

But it also struck me as somewhat amusing too. Here is NASA, spending billions of dollars inventing all this technology, and the success and failure of the first moon landing came down to some engineer putting this one-pager together that saved the day. Garman had memorized these error codes and was able to quickly respond to the flight controllers that the landing could continue.

If you want to read more about the circumstances around the moon landing, check out what I wrote about in 2009. There are some links to interesting web pages that show simulators for the guidance computers and also a real-time video and audio of the entire mission.

If you want to see some good examples of the cheat sheet genre, Peter Nikilow has collected hundreds of them on his Pinterest account. If you have your own favorites, put a link in the comments and say what makes it so.

Nineteen years ago, I taught a high school computer networking class for ten boys. It was my first time in a classroom, which had a live network and Internet connection using a bunch of Windows 95 computers, hard wired via Ethernet. We had some fun times with the class, which lasted all year, and I am still in touch with many of the students today. I can’t imagine trying to teach a class like that via Zoom, but that isn’t why I am writing about the experience.

One of the more memorable moments was when some of the kids posted my picture on HotOrNot.com, a new website that just celebrated its 20th anniversary and got some mention in Mashable here. I would urge you to read the entire story, even if you are in a stable relationship and don’t have any use for dating or matching sites. The story notes the many places where HotOrNot was ahead of its time, and lay the foundation for many of the web technologies we have come to know and love today. For example, the site connected online and offline social interaction in new and useful ways. Now we take this kind of connection for granted. Some other ground-breaking things:

• Gamified ratings of each participant’s photo, now enshrined in Likes and up-votes across all the social media platforms.
• Word-of-mouth traction: traffic doubled every few hours in its first weeks. In the piece there is this charming story about how UC Berkeley engineers figured out the extra traffic was coming from one of their servers that had been connected without approval on the campus network.
• They very quickly put in place a subscription model and became cash-positive by using auto-renewing subscriptions. That was a rarity then but now is so commonplace that you would be hard-pressed to find a website that doesn’t do this.
• Outlandish promotional billboards. They put up one with the two founders mostly naked, strategically covered by their laptops with low scores. The founders were nerds, after all. This is way before Oracle and numerous other tech companies used similar tactics, not to mention every airport ad ever used by a tech vendor. Remember airport ads?
• Something not seen currently were a series of anti-bullying measures, include great take-down response time if someone complained about their photo. It has taken many tech companies far too long to figure this out.
• A real tagline: keeping the site “fun, clean and real.” Unlike other taglines (don’t be evil, say), they actually meant it and ran their company accordingly.
• Eliminate needless clicks: when it was first conceived, there was a “click to submit” button. That was eliminated.
• Virtual goods purchased through real money, typically with Western currencies that could retain their buying power if they lived in other parts of the world. Now we have Bitcoin.Not sure that is progress.
• Mutual opt-in messaging, a precursor to many what many subscription and dating  sites do, and the model behind Twitter’s DMs.
• Inclusive dating to the same-sex world. While not as inclusive as today’s alphabet soup of non-binary genders, it was still innovative in moving beyond hetero norms.
• Speaking of gender, HoN also had several female managers way before it became a cause. Again, this has taken way too long to implement.

I am not a big fan of conspiracy theories. As my wife has suggested, this practical reason makes more sense to me: the number of folks that have to be in on the secret have to be a very large number. It is far easier to just explain the “theory” as baloney.

Let’s talk about one of the biggest conspiracies sweeping the world right now, QAnon. Its adherents are a very scary bunch. It has gotten so popular that now they have hijacked what were normally causes for good, such as using  the #SaveTheChildren hashtag (as explained by the NY Times) to organize and recruit new members. They are so popular that a software development conference with a similar name has received registrations from people who can’t code. Last summer the FBI identified QAnon as a potential domestic terrorism threat, linking the group to the Tree of Life shooter.

“QAnon is a baseless internet conspiracy theory whose followers believe that a cabal of Satan-worshipping Democrats, Hollywood celebrities and billionaires runs the world while engaging in pedophilia, human trafficking and the harvesting of a supposedly life-extending chemical from the blood of abused children,” wrote The Guardian in a post earlier this summer. If you recall the whole PizzaGate fiasco a few years ago, that was their heretofore most infamous moment. (You can find references to that on your own.)

I will give you a lay of their landscape, and assure you that my hyperlinks go to legit sources that hopefully won’t amplify their messages of hate. And they have nothing to do with the delightful musical referenced in this image here.

Their membership, from various accounts, appears to be catching on. There are dozens of Republican congressional and local races with avowed QAnon supporters, including a couple running in safe districts that will most likely get elected. That is pretty depressing. One reason for their popularity is social media, which makes it easy for potential members to find like-minded individuals in their area to connect with. Facebook banned many QAnon groups in mid-August. When Twitter took similar action in July, it limited reposting features for approximately 150,000 accounts and banned more than 7,000 accounts outright.

But here’s the problem: banning this reprehensible speech isn’t the best solution. Unlike the “shouting fire in a crowded theater” (not that any theater right now is even close to crowded), these groups aren’t so easily silenced or adjudicated in a courtroom. The problem with an outright ban is that this almost always encourages the QAnon supporters to find other places to post their garbage and attract new followers. What is needed is to leave the original post (usually a video) and attach a piece debunking their claims. What Twitter did was to also downrank the Tweet and preventing any reposting. “This creates one location that can be used to offer debunking content, both as a pre-roll on the video and in the recommended next videos,” says Renee Diresta here. She goes into more detail in a Wired piece where she documents the path that many conspiracy adherents take, calling them Cult 2.0. She writes, “The social platforms are still behaving as if they don’t understand the dynamics at play.”.

Sadly, our cancel culture has made the problem worse. We need to operate with a more granular mindset if we want to prevent these hate groups from spreading. It is too bad that Facebook can’t seem to figure this out.

As most of you know by now, I live in St. Louis. This is midway between two major rival state schools, in Columbia (Mizzou) and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The two schools have markedly different Covid testing policies this semester. I will get to that in a moment, but first, take a look at this dashboard developed by the College Crisis Initiative:

You can see the focus in my metropolitan area of each school and the various policies that have been adopted, ranging from full in-person classes to all-online instruction and various in-between choices. There is a lot of variation among the colleges and universities just on this small portion of the map. This reflects the variation of policies about the pandemic. In my region, we have different policies for mask wearing: a county just south of the city went from masks highly recommended to required to revoking the requirement, all within 24 hours. Such is the toxic mixture of politics and public health, with emphasis quite literally on toxic.

It is certainly a confusing time to be attending college. Mizzou is using a hybrid model: some in-person classes and some online. Each school’s dean makes their own decision. Students are required to report positive tests to the campus health department.

Illinois has gone whole-school testing. They aim to test everyone (including staff and faculty) twice a week, whether or not they show symptoms. They are doing thousands of free tests daily, using a new saliva-based protocol that was developed internally (Yale and the NBA are also doing something similar), with results available in minutes. Students receive results on an app on their phones, which allow them access to classrooms if they test negative. Interestingly, most of their classes are being held online, even though students are living on campus. All this planning didn’t help: students still went to parties and got infected.

Some schools, such as Notre Dame, began their semesters with plans for all in-person but got spikes in infections and then paused these classes to do more testing. The cause appeared to be a combination of large on-campus gatherings of non-mask wearers and two off-campus parties attended by biz school students. I guess the students took to their mirroring of adult life very faithfully.

To show you what shouldn’t be done is the example of Albion College in Michigan. Ironically, it has academic programs to train contact trackers to be hired by health agencies. Last month Zack Whittaker at TechCrunch wrote about a new Covid tracking app from Aura that is being deployed at the college. The app is mandatory for all students and tracks their real-time locations.

If you think you have already heard about Aura, there is another product with this name that is a mood tracker for the Apple Watch. There is also the Oura ring which is another health and activity monitor. But the Albion Aura app is a problem. Like at Urbana, students need to use the app to gain entry to classrooms. If students uninstall the app or don’t share their location with the app, they could be suspended. Its first release contained rookie security errors, one of which was found by one of the college’s compsci students. There is a long list of FAQs on the college website.  I was more confused reading the entries and I can’t imagine what students and parents at Albion might think.

Clearly, we are all feeling our way through these trying times. And the Mizzou link above will take you to a SciAm piece that compares strategies at other schools. If you have a college student in your family, do share your own reactions here about your own perspective.