Thursday, July 12, 2007
Sunday, July 8, 2007
Friday, June 15, 2007
Solution #1 (Step 6)
Step 6 -- Rotate corner pieces
Hold the cube so that an incorrectly rotated corner piece is in the UFR position. If it needs to be rotated clockwise, apply F D F' D' F D F' D'. If it needs to be rotated counter-clockwise, apply D F D' F' D F D' F'. Now (and this is extremely important) turn the U face only, so that the next incorrectly rotated corner piece is in the UFR position. Apply one of the above moves, depending on which way it needs rotating. Repeat if more than two corner pieces are incorrectly rotated.
After all pieces are rotated, simply turn the U face and complete the cube.
This step may be confusing, simply because after just one corner piece is rotated the cube is in quite serious disarray. Just make certain that you move only the U face and it should work out fine. I'll give one example to show exactly what will happen, for a simple example: the UFR piece needs rotating clockwise, and the UBR piece needs rotating counter-clockwise. Do these moves and the cube will be complete F D F' D' F D F' D' U D F D' F' D F D' F' U'.
Hold the cube so that an incorrectly rotated corner piece is in the UFR position. If it needs to be rotated clockwise, apply F D F' D' F D F' D'. If it needs to be rotated counter-clockwise, apply D F D' F' D F D' F'. Now (and this is extremely important) turn the U face only, so that the next incorrectly rotated corner piece is in the UFR position. Apply one of the above moves, depending on which way it needs rotating. Repeat if more than two corner pieces are incorrectly rotated.
After all pieces are rotated, simply turn the U face and complete the cube.
This step may be confusing, simply because after just one corner piece is rotated the cube is in quite serious disarray. Just make certain that you move only the U face and it should work out fine. I'll give one example to show exactly what will happen, for a simple example: the UFR piece needs rotating clockwise, and the UBR piece needs rotating counter-clockwise. Do these moves and the cube will be complete F D F' D' F D F' D' U D F D' F' D F D' F' U'.
Note that there are only certain combinations of incorrectly rotated pieces. If your cube gets to a position where there is a situation other than one of these, then it has probably been taken apart by small green aliens, so I would recommend disassembling it and starting over.
- One piece needs rotating clockwise, one piece needs rotating counter-clockwise, other two are correct.
- Three pieces all need rotating clockwise, other one is correct.
- Three pieces all need rotating counter-clockwise, other one is correct.
- Two pieces need rotating clockwise, two pieces need rotating counter-clockwise.
I was going to write "all corner pieces are correct" here, but I guess that would be obvious.
Solution #1 (Step 5)
Step 5 -- Position U face corner pieces
Now we must move the corner pieces into the right places.
There are 3 possibilities:
- All 4 corner pieces are in the right place, although not necessarily rotated correctly. Do nothing.
- 1 corner piece is in the right place. Hold the cube so that it is in the UFR position. If the remaining three corner pieces need to be rotated clockwise, apply L' U R U' L U R' U'. If they need to be rotated counter-clockwise, apply U R U' L' U R' U' L.
- 0 corner pieces are in the right place. If they all need to go to opposite corners, apply R' B2 F R F' R' F R F' R' F R F' R' B2 R. If they need to go to adjacent corners, hold the cube so that UFR and UFL pieces need swapping, and so do the UBR and UBL pieces. Apply B L U L' U' L U L' U' L U L' U' B'.
Okay, now all of the corner pieces should be in the right place. We're almost there!
Solution #1 (Step 4)
Step 4 -- Rotate U face edge pieces
You now have a green cross on the U face, but...these edge pieces may not be in the correct order. This step involves rotating them so that the can be lined up with their respective colors.
- If all 4 pieces are correct (the entire cube is correct except for four corner pieces on the top layer), then do nothing.
- If 1 piece is correct, then rotate the whole cube so that this piece is in the UL position (make sure green is still on the top). If the remaining 3 edge pieces need to be rotated clockwise, apply R2 D' U2 R' L F2 R L' D R2. If the pieces need to be rotated counter-clockwise, apply R2 D' R' L F2 R L' U2 D R2.
- If 2 "adjacent" edge pieces (by "adjacent" here I mean pairs such as UF and UL, or UB and UL, and not UF and UB, or UR and UL), then rotate the U face so that only 1 edge piece is correct, and follow that rule.
- If 2 opposite (i.e. not adjacent!) edge pieces are correct, then apply U or U' and follow the rule for 0 edge pieces correct.
If 0 edge pieces are correct, turn the U face so that: for the UF piece (which can be any piece), the F side of that piece is the same color as the R face center. Now apply R2 D2 B2 D L2 F2 L2 F2 L2 F2 D' B2 D2 R2.
The four U face edge pieces should now be in the correct place. The cube should be all correct now except for the four corner pieces on the U face.
Solution #1 (Step 3)
Step 3 -- Form cross on last layer
The first two layers should now be completely correct. From now on, turn the cube upside-down, so that the first face (white, in my example) is the D face. It will remain this way until the cube is complete. The reason for this is just to make the manipulations a bit easier to perform.
On my cube, green is opposite to white, so I will refer to the green face as being the new U face for our purposes. We must now try to form a green cross, out of the green center, and the four edge pieces that surround it.
There are 4 possibilities:
The first two layers should now be completely correct. From now on, turn the cube upside-down, so that the first face (white, in my example) is the D face. It will remain this way until the cube is complete. The reason for this is just to make the manipulations a bit easier to perform.
On my cube, green is opposite to white, so I will refer to the green face as being the new U face for our purposes. We must now try to form a green cross, out of the green center, and the four edge pieces that surround it.
There are 4 possibilities:
- All four pieces are correct, and you have green cross on the U face. Do nothing.
- Two adjacent edge pieces are correct. For example, the UF and UR piece have green on the top, forming a sort of L shape, with the center. The UL and UB pieces do not have green on the top. In this situation, hold the cube so that the UF and UR pieces have green on the top (as in the example earlier in this paragraph), and apply B U L U' L' B'.
- Two opposite edge pieces are correct, and the other two aren't. Let's say UR and UL are correct (this should make a green line down the middle of the U face). Apply B L U L' U' B'.
- No edge pieces have green on the top. Hold the cube any way (still keeping the green center on the top) and apply B L U L' U' B' F U R U' R' F' (for those of you who want to memorize the moves, you should realize that this is the same as doing the move in the third part of this section, then rotating the cube 180 degrees, and then applying the move in the second part of this section).
You should now have the bottom two layers all correct, as before, and a green cross (or whatever the color on your cube whose center is opposite to white is) on the top face.
IMPORTANT: If the bottom two faces are perfectly correct, and you have 1 or 3 edge pieces that show green on the top, then your cube is messed up. Somebody (maybe you!) took it apart (or changed the stickers around) at some point in time. Might as well take it all apart right now, reassemble it correctly and start again.
Solution #1 (Step 2)
Step 2 -- Do the middle layer edge pieces
Okay, so the U face is done...Now we have to get the edge pieces of the middle layer in place, that is the FR, FL, BR, BL pieces.
There are four possibilities:
Okay, so the U face is done...Now we have to get the edge pieces of the middle layer in place, that is the FR, FL, BR, BL pieces.
There are four possibilities:
- Edge piece is in the correct place and oriented correctly -- do nothing.
- Edge piece is in correct place, but oriented incorrectly. In this case, you have to replace it with another piece temporarily. Choose an edge piece that is on the D face, and move it to the position of the aforementioned edge piece using the move described in the following list item.
- Edge piece is in an incorrect place in the middle layer. In most cases, you can just skip this edge piece for now, as it will move to the D face when you put the correct edge piece in that place. If you have two edge pieces in the middle layer that are in each other's correct places, then you will need to break the cycle by replacing one of those edge pieces with one of the D face edge pieces.
- Edge piece is on the D face. This is good. Let's say you want to move the yellow-red edge piece into place on the middle layer. (Your cube may not have yellow and red as adjacent pieces, so you may have to substitute different colors). Check which side of the yellow-red piece is actually on the D face. Say yellow is on the D face. Rotate the D face so that the yellow-red piece is opposite from the yellow center. (If the yellow center is on the F face, then the yellow-red piece is the DB piece, got it?). Now, hold the cube so that white is the U face, and the yellow center is on the F face. Which side of the yellow-red piece is the red face on? If the red center is on the L face, then apply F' D' F D L D L'. If the red center is on the R face, then apply F D F' D' R' D' R. One way to think about this move, if you're trying to memorize it, is that you are removing the corner piece on the U side right above the edge piece you're trying to replace, and then putting it back in from the other direction, with the side effect of moving the edge piece into the correct place.
This will have to be repeated at least 4 times in order to get all of the 4 middle layer edge pieces into place.
Solution #1 (Step 1)
Step 1 -- Do the first face
I was thinking of omitting this step; if you've come so far as to seek help for doing the Rubik's cube, then you've probably been able to do one side. But I've included the details in for completeness.
The first step involves choosing a color, and getting all the pieces of that color to form a complete face. These must also be in the correct relative location.
First, we will do the edges. Let's say we pick white as the side to complete first (many people choose white as it is the easiest color to pick out). Turn the cube so that the white center piece is on the U face. Note that the centers are attached, so that they are always in the same position with respect to one another, unlike a cube of even degree (i.e. 2 x 2 x 2 or 4 x 4 x 4).
First, we put the edge pieces (those with 2 colors) in the right place. There are several possibilities. Note that when moving pieces around you should have the piece that you are working on the F face.
I was thinking of omitting this step; if you've come so far as to seek help for doing the Rubik's cube, then you've probably been able to do one side. But I've included the details in for completeness.
The first step involves choosing a color, and getting all the pieces of that color to form a complete face. These must also be in the correct relative location.
First, we will do the edges. Let's say we pick white as the side to complete first (many people choose white as it is the easiest color to pick out). Turn the cube so that the white center piece is on the U face. Note that the centers are attached, so that they are always in the same position with respect to one another, unlike a cube of even degree (i.e. 2 x 2 x 2 or 4 x 4 x 4).
First, we put the edge pieces (those with 2 colors) in the right place. There are several possibilities. Note that when moving pieces around you should have the piece that you are working on the F face.
- White/Other color (OC) piece is on the D face. Rotate the D face so that it is directly underneath the place where it needs to go (on the U face). If the white side of the piece is on the D face, apply F2, and it will be correct. If the white side of the piece is not on the D face, apply D R F' R'.
- White/OC piece is on the center slice (i.e. middle portion of the cube) . Apply F or F' to get the piece on the D face, and then perform above moves.
- White/OC piece is in correct position, but incorrectly rotated. Apply F2 and do the above moves as necessary.
Second, we do the corners. There are six main possibilities for each of the four corner pieces:
- Corner piece in correct place. Do nothing.
- Corner piece is in the correct place, but incorrectly rotated, so that the piece needs rotating clockwise. Hold the cube so that this piece is in the URF location, and apply F D F' D' F D F'.
- Corner piece is in the correct place, but incorrectly rotated, so that the piece needs rotating counter-clockwise. Hold the cube so that this piece is in the URF location, and apply R' D' R D R' D' R.
- Corner piece on D face. Rotate D face so that the corner piece you want to move into position is directly underneath its intended location. If the corner piece has white (or whatever color you chose) on the bottom, and the destination of the piece is URF (i.e. the upper right hand corner on the front of the cube), apply R' D2 R D R' D' R.
- Corner piece on D face, and white side of the corner is on the left hand side, assuming that the piece is going to the URF location. Apply F D F'.
- Corner piece on D face, and white side of the corner is on the right hand side, assuming that the piece is going to the URF location. Apply R' D' R.
You should be finished the white face by now. This step is fairly intuitive, so it shouldn't have been too much of a problem.
Sunday, June 10, 2007
Solution #1 (Step 0)
Step 0 -- Notation
Before we get started, we must work out a method for describing the various moves that will be made. There are six faces, with the following notations:
Upper, or top face = U
Down, or bottom face = D
Left face = L
Right face = R
Front face = F
Back face = B
We can turn each face either clockwise or counter-clockwise, with respect to the center (i.e. a move that may be clockwise to you, when looking at the cube, may not be clockwise for that face, in relation to the middle of the cube). The names for the different kind of moves (I'll use the U face as an example) are:
A 90-degree turn clockwise on a face is denoted by U.
A 90-degree turn counter-clockwise on a face is denoted by U' ("U prime") (Also note this is the same as U, done three times).
A 180-degree turn either clockwise or counter-clockwise on a face, is denoted by U2 ("U squared") and is the same as two clockwise turns, or two counter-clockwise turns.
We can refer to individual pieces by a two-letter (for edges) or three-letter (for corners) combination. For example, the piece in the upper right front corner is called URF, and the edge piece to the down and left of the cube is called DL. Also, these notations refer to the piece that is in that place at that time, not the piece that should go there.
Clockwise and counter-clockwise are also used to describe orientations of corner pieces. For the URF piece, for example, rotating it clockwise would result in the U side of the piece on the R face, the R side on the F face, and the F side on the U face. Similarly, for a counter-clockwise rotation, the U side of the piece would end up on the F face, the F side on the R face and the R side on the U face.
Also, note that during any sequence of moves the position of the center pieces with respect to one another is unchanged.
Before we get started, we must work out a method for describing the various moves that will be made. There are six faces, with the following notations:
Upper, or top face = U
Down, or bottom face = D
Left face = L
Right face = R
Front face = F
Back face = B
We can turn each face either clockwise or counter-clockwise, with respect to the center (i.e. a move that may be clockwise to you, when looking at the cube, may not be clockwise for that face, in relation to the middle of the cube). The names for the different kind of moves (I'll use the U face as an example) are:
A 90-degree turn clockwise on a face is denoted by U.
A 90-degree turn counter-clockwise on a face is denoted by U' ("U prime") (Also note this is the same as U, done three times).
A 180-degree turn either clockwise or counter-clockwise on a face, is denoted by U2 ("U squared") and is the same as two clockwise turns, or two counter-clockwise turns.
We can refer to individual pieces by a two-letter (for edges) or three-letter (for corners) combination. For example, the piece in the upper right front corner is called URF, and the edge piece to the down and left of the cube is called DL. Also, these notations refer to the piece that is in that place at that time, not the piece that should go there.
Clockwise and counter-clockwise are also used to describe orientations of corner pieces. For the URF piece, for example, rotating it clockwise would result in the U side of the piece on the R face, the R side on the F face, and the F side on the U face. Similarly, for a counter-clockwise rotation, the U side of the piece would end up on the F face, the F side on the R face and the R side on the U face.
Also, note that during any sequence of moves the position of the center pieces with respect to one another is unchanged.
How to Solve the Rubik's Cube
So you have a Rubik's Cube, and you've played with it and stared at it and taken it apart...need I go on any further? The following are two complete, fool-proof solutions to solving the cube from absolutely any legal position. Credit goes not to me, but to David Singmaster, who wrote a book in 1980, Notes on Rubik's Magic Cube, which explains pretty much all of what you need to know, plus more. Singmaster wrote about all of these moves except the move for Step 2, which I discovered independently (along with many other people, no doubt).
I've updated this page to include a second solution to the cube. I learned this solution from the Handbook of Cubik Math by Alexander H. Frey, Jr. and David Singmaster. I would strongly recommend getting this book; there are all sorts of interesting problems and exercises to do. This solution is a bit more free-form than the first solution, as there are less moves to memorize. However, it probably requires a little more intuition about cubing on your part to be able to use it effectively. I'm not really sure which of the two solutions would be better to learn first. I prefer the second method, because it is definitely simpler.
I should point out that these are both beginner-level solutions. They are easy to learn (in particular Solution #2). If you want to be able to solve the cube in 20 seconds, this is not the page for you: check out the speed cubing links later on in the page. The faster solutions generally require considerably more memorization and practice. If this is your first time solving the cube, I think you've come to the right place.
I've updated this page to include a second solution to the cube. I learned this solution from the Handbook of Cubik Math by Alexander H. Frey, Jr. and David Singmaster. I would strongly recommend getting this book; there are all sorts of interesting problems and exercises to do. This solution is a bit more free-form than the first solution, as there are less moves to memorize. However, it probably requires a little more intuition about cubing on your part to be able to use it effectively. I'm not really sure which of the two solutions would be better to learn first. I prefer the second method, because it is definitely simpler.
I should point out that these are both beginner-level solutions. They are easy to learn (in particular Solution #2). If you want to be able to solve the cube in 20 seconds, this is not the page for you: check out the speed cubing links later on in the page. The faster solutions generally require considerably more memorization and practice. If this is your first time solving the cube, I think you've come to the right place.
Friday, June 8, 2007
Remarks of Bill Gates
(Text as prepared for delivery)
President Bok, former President Rudenstine, incoming President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty, parents, and especially, the graduates:
I’ve been waiting more than 30 years to say this: “Dad, I always told you I’d come back and get my degree.”
I want to thank Harvard for this timely honor. I’ll be changing my job next year … and it will be nice to finally have a college degree on my resume.
I applaud the graduates today for taking a much more direct route to your degrees. For my part, I’m just happy that the Crimson has called me “Harvard’s most successful dropout.” I guess that makes me valedictorian of my own special class … I did the best of everyone who failed.
But I also want to be recognized as the guy who got Steve Ballmer to drop out of business school. I’m a bad influence. That’s why I was invited to speak at your graduation. If I had spoken at your orientation, fewer of you might be here today.
Harvard was just a phenomenal experience for me. Academic life was fascinating. I used to sit in on lots of classes I hadn’t even signed up for. And dorm life was terrific. I lived up at Radcliffe, in Currier House. There were always lots of people in my dorm room late at night discussing things, because everyone knew I didn’t worry about getting up in the morning. That’s how I came to be the leader of the anti-social group. We clung to each other as a way of validating our rejection of all those social people.
Radcliffe was a great place to live. There were more women up there, and most of the guys were science-math types. That combination offered me the best odds, if you know what I mean. This is where I learned the sad lesson that improving your odds doesn’t guarantee success.
One of my biggest memories of Harvard came in January 1975, when I made a call from Currier House to a company in Albuquerque that had begun making the world’s first personal computers. I offered to sell them software.
I worried that they would realize I was just a student in a dorm and hang up on me. Instead they said: “We’re not quite ready, come see us in a month,” which was a good thing, because we hadn’t written the software yet. From that moment, I worked day and night on this little extra credit project that marked the end of my college education and the beginning of a remarkable journey with Microsoft.
What I remember above all about Harvard was being in the midst of so much energy and intelligence. It could be exhilarating, intimidating, sometimes even discouraging, but always challenging. It was an amazing privilege – and though I left early, I was transformed by my years at Harvard, the friendships I made, and the ideas I worked on.
But taking a serious look back … I do have one big regret.
I left Harvard with no real awareness of the awful inequities in the world – the appalling disparities of health, and wealth, and opportunity that condemn millions of people to lives of despair.
I learned a lot here at Harvard about new ideas in economics and politics. I got great exposure to the advances being made in the sciences.
But humanity’s greatest advances are not in its discoveries – but in how those discoveries are applied to reduce inequity. Whether through democracy, strong public education, quality health care, or broad economic opportunity – reducing inequity is the highest human achievement.
I left campus knowing little about the millions of young people cheated out of educational opportunities here in this country. And I knew nothing about the millions of people living in unspeakable poverty and disease in developing countries.
It took me decades to find out.
You graduates came to Harvard at a different time. You know more about the world’s inequities than the classes that came before. In your years here, I hope you’ve had a chance to think about how – in this age of accelerating technology – we can finally take on these inequities, and we can solve them.
Imagine, just for the sake of discussion, that you had a few hours a week and a few dollars a month to donate to a cause – and you wanted to spend that time and money where it would have the greatest impact in saving and improving lives. Where would you spend it?
For Melinda and for me, the challenge is the same: how can we do the most good for the greatest number with the resources we have.
During our discussions on this question, Melinda and I read an article about the millions of children who were dying every year in poor countries from diseases that we had long ago made harmless in this country. Measles, malaria, pneumonia, hepatitis B, yellow fever. One disease I had never even heard of, rotavirus, was killing half a million kids each year – none of them in the United States.
We were shocked. We had just assumed that if millions of children were dying and they could be saved, the world would make it a priority to discover and deliver the medicines to save them. But it did not. For under a dollar, there were interventions that could save lives that just weren’t being delivered.
If you believe that every life has equal value, it’s revolting to learn that some lives are seen as worth saving and others are not. We said to ourselves: “This can’t be true. But if it is true, it deserves to be the priority of our giving.”
So we began our work in the same way anyone here would begin it. We asked: “How could the world let these children die?”
The answer is simple, and harsh. The market did not reward saving the lives of these children, and governments did not subsidize it. So the children died because their mothers and their fathers had no power in the market and no voice in the system.
But you and I have both.
We can make market forces work better for the poor if we can develop a more creative capitalism – if we can stretch the reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit, or at least make a living, serving people who are suffering from the worst inequities. We also can press governments around the world to spend taxpayer money in ways that better reflect the values of the people who pay the taxes.
If we can find approaches that meet the needs of the poor in ways that generate profits for business and votes for politicians, we will have found a sustainable way to reduce inequity in the world. This task is open-ended. It can never be finished. But a conscious effort to answer this challenge will change the world.
I am optimistic that we can do this, but I talk to skeptics who claim there is no hope. They say: “Inequity has been with us since the beginning, and will be with us till the end – because people just … don’t … care.” I completely disagree.
I believe we have more caring than we know what to do with.
All of us here in this Yard, at one time or another, have seen human tragedies that broke our hearts, and yet we did nothing – not because we didn’t care, but because we didn’t know what to do. If we had known how to help, we would have acted.
The barrier to change is not too little caring; it is too much complexity.
To turn caring into action, we need to see a problem, see a solution, and see the impact. But complexity blocks all three steps.
Even with the advent of the Internet and 24-hour news, it is still a complex enterprise to get people to truly see the problems. When an airplane crashes, officials immediately call a press conference. They promise to investigate, determine the cause, and prevent similar crashes in the future.
But if the officials were brutally honest, they would say: “Of all the people in the world who died today from preventable causes, one half of one percent of them were on this plane. We’re determined to do everything possible to solve the problem that took the lives of the one half of one percent.”
The bigger problem is not the plane crash, but the millions of preventable deaths.
We don’t read much about these deaths. The media covers what’s new – and millions of people dying is nothing new. So it stays in the background, where it’s easier to ignore. But even when we do see it or read about it, it’s difficult to keep our eyes on the problem. It’s hard to look at suffering if the situation is so complex that we don’t know how to help. And so we look away.
If we can really see a problem, which is the first step, we come to the second step: cutting through the complexity to find a solution.
Finding solutions is essential if we want to make the most of our caring. If we have clear and proven answers anytime an organization or individual asks “How can I help?,” then we can get action – and we can make sure that none of the caring in the world is wasted. But complexity makes it hard to mark a path of action for everyone who cares — and that makes it hard for their caring to matter.
Cutting through complexity to find a solution runs through four predictable stages: determine a goal, find the highest-leverage approach, discover the ideal technology for that approach, and in the meantime, make the smartest application of the technology that you already have — whether it’s something sophisticated, like a drug, or something simpler, like a bednet.
The AIDS epidemic offers an example. The broad goal, of course, is to end the disease. The highest-leverage approach is prevention. The ideal technology would be a vaccine that gives lifetime immunity with a single dose. So governments, drug companies, and foundations fund vaccine research. But their work is likely to take more than a decade, so in the meantime, we have to work with what we have in hand – and the best prevention approach we have now is getting people to avoid risky behavior.
Pursuing that goal starts the four-step cycle again. This is the pattern. The crucial thing is to never stop thinking and working – and never do what we did with malaria and tuberculosis in the 20th century – which is to surrender to complexity and quit.
The final step – after seeing the problem and finding an approach – is to measure the impact of your work and share your successes and failures so that others learn from your efforts.
You have to have the statistics, of course. You have to be able to show that a program is vaccinating millions more children. You have to be able to show a decline in the number of children dying from these diseases. This is essential not just to improve the program, but also to help draw more investment from business and government.
But if you want to inspire people to participate, you have to show more than numbers; you have to convey the human impact of the work – so people can feel what saving a life means to the families affected.
I remember going to Davos some years back and sitting on a global health panel that was discussing ways to save millions of lives. Millions! Think of the thrill of saving just one person’s life – then multiply that by millions. … Yet this was the most boring panel I’ve ever been on – ever. So boring even I couldn’t bear it.
What made that experience especially striking was that I had just come from an event where we were introducing version 13 of some piece of software, and we had people jumping and shouting with excitement. I love getting people excited about software – but why can’t we generate even more excitement for saving lives?
You can’t get people excited unless you can help them see and feel the impact. And how you do that – is a complex question.
Still, I’m optimistic. Yes, inequity has been with us forever, but the new tools we have to cut through complexity have not been with us forever. They are new – they can help us make the most of our caring – and that’s why the future can be different from the past.
The defining and ongoing innovations of this age – biotechnology, the computer, the Internet – give us a chance we’ve never had before to end extreme poverty and end death from preventable disease.
Sixty years ago, George Marshall came to this commencement and announced a plan to assist the nations of post-war Europe. He said: “I think one difficulty is that the problem is one of such enormous complexity that the very mass of facts presented to the public by press and radio make it exceedingly difficult for the man in the street to reach a clear appraisement of the situation. It is virtually impossible at this distance to grasp at all the real significance of the situation.”
Thirty years after Marshall made his address, as my class graduated without me, technology was emerging that would make the world smaller, more open, more visible, less distant.
The emergence of low-cost personal computers gave rise to a powerful network that has transformed opportunities for learning and communicating.
The magical thing about this network is not just that it collapses distance and makes everyone your neighbor. It also dramatically increases the number of brilliant minds we can have working together on the same problem – and that scales up the rate of innovation to a staggering degree.
At the same time, for every person in the world who has access to this technology, five people don’t. That means many creative minds are left out of this discussion -- smart people with practical intelligence and relevant experience who don’t have the technology to hone their talents or contribute their ideas to the world.
We need as many people as possible to have access to this technology, because these advances are triggering a revolution in what human beings can do for one another. They are making it possible not just for national governments, but for universities, corporations, smaller organizations, and even individuals to see problems, see approaches, and measure the impact of their efforts to address the hunger, poverty, and desperation George Marshall spoke of 60 years ago.
Members of the Harvard Family: Here in the Yard is one of the great collections of intellectual talent in the world.
What for?
There is no question that the faculty, the alumni, the students, and the benefactors of Harvard have used their power to improve the lives of people here and around the world. But can we do more? Can Harvard dedicate its intellect to improving the lives of people who will never even hear its name?
Let me make a request of the deans and the professors – the intellectual leaders here at Harvard: As you hire new faculty, award tenure, review curriculum, and determine degree requirements, please ask yourselves:
Should our best minds be dedicated to solving our biggest problems?
Should Harvard encourage its faculty to take on the world’s worst inequities? Should Harvard students learn about the depth of global poverty … the prevalence of world hunger … the scarcity of clean water …the girls kept out of school … the children who die from diseases we can cure?
Should the world’s most privileged people learn about the lives of the world’s least privileged?
These are not rhetorical questions – you will answer with your policies.
My mother, who was filled with pride the day I was admitted here – never stopped pressing me to do more for others. A few days before my wedding, she hosted a bridal event, at which she read aloud a letter about marriage that she had written to Melinda. My mother was very ill with cancer at the time, but she saw one more opportunity to deliver her message, and at the close of the letter she said: “From those to whom much is given, much is expected.”
When you consider what those of us here in this Yard have been given – in talent, privilege, and opportunity – there is almost no limit to what the world has a right to expect from us.
In line with the promise of this age, I want to exhort each of the graduates here to take on an issue – a complex problem, a deep inequity, and become a specialist on it. If you make it the focus of your career, that would be phenomenal. But you don’t have to do that to make an impact. For a few hours every week, you can use the growing power of the Internet to get informed, find others with the same interests, see the barriers, and find ways to cut through them.
Don’t let complexity stop you. Be activists. Take on the big inequities. It will be one of the great experiences of your lives.
You graduates are coming of age in an amazing time. As you leave Harvard, you have technology that members of my class never had. You have awareness of global inequity, which we did not have. And with that awareness, you likely also have an informed conscience that will torment you if you abandon these people whose lives you could change with very little effort. You have more than we had; you must start sooner, and carry on longer.
Knowing what you know, how could you not?
And I hope you will come back here to Harvard 30 years from now and reflect on what you have done with your talent and your energy. I hope you will judge yourselves not on your professional accomplishments alone, but also on how well you have addressed the world’s deepest inequities … on how well you treated people a world away who have nothing in common with you but their humanity.
Good luck.
President Bok, former President Rudenstine, incoming President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty, parents, and especially, the graduates:
I’ve been waiting more than 30 years to say this: “Dad, I always told you I’d come back and get my degree.”
I want to thank Harvard for this timely honor. I’ll be changing my job next year … and it will be nice to finally have a college degree on my resume.
I applaud the graduates today for taking a much more direct route to your degrees. For my part, I’m just happy that the Crimson has called me “Harvard’s most successful dropout.” I guess that makes me valedictorian of my own special class … I did the best of everyone who failed.
But I also want to be recognized as the guy who got Steve Ballmer to drop out of business school. I’m a bad influence. That’s why I was invited to speak at your graduation. If I had spoken at your orientation, fewer of you might be here today.
Harvard was just a phenomenal experience for me. Academic life was fascinating. I used to sit in on lots of classes I hadn’t even signed up for. And dorm life was terrific. I lived up at Radcliffe, in Currier House. There were always lots of people in my dorm room late at night discussing things, because everyone knew I didn’t worry about getting up in the morning. That’s how I came to be the leader of the anti-social group. We clung to each other as a way of validating our rejection of all those social people.
Radcliffe was a great place to live. There were more women up there, and most of the guys were science-math types. That combination offered me the best odds, if you know what I mean. This is where I learned the sad lesson that improving your odds doesn’t guarantee success.
One of my biggest memories of Harvard came in January 1975, when I made a call from Currier House to a company in Albuquerque that had begun making the world’s first personal computers. I offered to sell them software.
I worried that they would realize I was just a student in a dorm and hang up on me. Instead they said: “We’re not quite ready, come see us in a month,” which was a good thing, because we hadn’t written the software yet. From that moment, I worked day and night on this little extra credit project that marked the end of my college education and the beginning of a remarkable journey with Microsoft.
What I remember above all about Harvard was being in the midst of so much energy and intelligence. It could be exhilarating, intimidating, sometimes even discouraging, but always challenging. It was an amazing privilege – and though I left early, I was transformed by my years at Harvard, the friendships I made, and the ideas I worked on.
But taking a serious look back … I do have one big regret.
I left Harvard with no real awareness of the awful inequities in the world – the appalling disparities of health, and wealth, and opportunity that condemn millions of people to lives of despair.
I learned a lot here at Harvard about new ideas in economics and politics. I got great exposure to the advances being made in the sciences.
But humanity’s greatest advances are not in its discoveries – but in how those discoveries are applied to reduce inequity. Whether through democracy, strong public education, quality health care, or broad economic opportunity – reducing inequity is the highest human achievement.
I left campus knowing little about the millions of young people cheated out of educational opportunities here in this country. And I knew nothing about the millions of people living in unspeakable poverty and disease in developing countries.
It took me decades to find out.
You graduates came to Harvard at a different time. You know more about the world’s inequities than the classes that came before. In your years here, I hope you’ve had a chance to think about how – in this age of accelerating technology – we can finally take on these inequities, and we can solve them.
Imagine, just for the sake of discussion, that you had a few hours a week and a few dollars a month to donate to a cause – and you wanted to spend that time and money where it would have the greatest impact in saving and improving lives. Where would you spend it?
For Melinda and for me, the challenge is the same: how can we do the most good for the greatest number with the resources we have.
During our discussions on this question, Melinda and I read an article about the millions of children who were dying every year in poor countries from diseases that we had long ago made harmless in this country. Measles, malaria, pneumonia, hepatitis B, yellow fever. One disease I had never even heard of, rotavirus, was killing half a million kids each year – none of them in the United States.
We were shocked. We had just assumed that if millions of children were dying and they could be saved, the world would make it a priority to discover and deliver the medicines to save them. But it did not. For under a dollar, there were interventions that could save lives that just weren’t being delivered.
If you believe that every life has equal value, it’s revolting to learn that some lives are seen as worth saving and others are not. We said to ourselves: “This can’t be true. But if it is true, it deserves to be the priority of our giving.”
So we began our work in the same way anyone here would begin it. We asked: “How could the world let these children die?”
The answer is simple, and harsh. The market did not reward saving the lives of these children, and governments did not subsidize it. So the children died because their mothers and their fathers had no power in the market and no voice in the system.
But you and I have both.
We can make market forces work better for the poor if we can develop a more creative capitalism – if we can stretch the reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit, or at least make a living, serving people who are suffering from the worst inequities. We also can press governments around the world to spend taxpayer money in ways that better reflect the values of the people who pay the taxes.
If we can find approaches that meet the needs of the poor in ways that generate profits for business and votes for politicians, we will have found a sustainable way to reduce inequity in the world. This task is open-ended. It can never be finished. But a conscious effort to answer this challenge will change the world.
I am optimistic that we can do this, but I talk to skeptics who claim there is no hope. They say: “Inequity has been with us since the beginning, and will be with us till the end – because people just … don’t … care.” I completely disagree.
I believe we have more caring than we know what to do with.
All of us here in this Yard, at one time or another, have seen human tragedies that broke our hearts, and yet we did nothing – not because we didn’t care, but because we didn’t know what to do. If we had known how to help, we would have acted.
The barrier to change is not too little caring; it is too much complexity.
To turn caring into action, we need to see a problem, see a solution, and see the impact. But complexity blocks all three steps.
Even with the advent of the Internet and 24-hour news, it is still a complex enterprise to get people to truly see the problems. When an airplane crashes, officials immediately call a press conference. They promise to investigate, determine the cause, and prevent similar crashes in the future.
But if the officials were brutally honest, they would say: “Of all the people in the world who died today from preventable causes, one half of one percent of them were on this plane. We’re determined to do everything possible to solve the problem that took the lives of the one half of one percent.”
The bigger problem is not the plane crash, but the millions of preventable deaths.
We don’t read much about these deaths. The media covers what’s new – and millions of people dying is nothing new. So it stays in the background, where it’s easier to ignore. But even when we do see it or read about it, it’s difficult to keep our eyes on the problem. It’s hard to look at suffering if the situation is so complex that we don’t know how to help. And so we look away.
If we can really see a problem, which is the first step, we come to the second step: cutting through the complexity to find a solution.
Finding solutions is essential if we want to make the most of our caring. If we have clear and proven answers anytime an organization or individual asks “How can I help?,” then we can get action – and we can make sure that none of the caring in the world is wasted. But complexity makes it hard to mark a path of action for everyone who cares — and that makes it hard for their caring to matter.
Cutting through complexity to find a solution runs through four predictable stages: determine a goal, find the highest-leverage approach, discover the ideal technology for that approach, and in the meantime, make the smartest application of the technology that you already have — whether it’s something sophisticated, like a drug, or something simpler, like a bednet.
The AIDS epidemic offers an example. The broad goal, of course, is to end the disease. The highest-leverage approach is prevention. The ideal technology would be a vaccine that gives lifetime immunity with a single dose. So governments, drug companies, and foundations fund vaccine research. But their work is likely to take more than a decade, so in the meantime, we have to work with what we have in hand – and the best prevention approach we have now is getting people to avoid risky behavior.
Pursuing that goal starts the four-step cycle again. This is the pattern. The crucial thing is to never stop thinking and working – and never do what we did with malaria and tuberculosis in the 20th century – which is to surrender to complexity and quit.
The final step – after seeing the problem and finding an approach – is to measure the impact of your work and share your successes and failures so that others learn from your efforts.
You have to have the statistics, of course. You have to be able to show that a program is vaccinating millions more children. You have to be able to show a decline in the number of children dying from these diseases. This is essential not just to improve the program, but also to help draw more investment from business and government.
But if you want to inspire people to participate, you have to show more than numbers; you have to convey the human impact of the work – so people can feel what saving a life means to the families affected.
I remember going to Davos some years back and sitting on a global health panel that was discussing ways to save millions of lives. Millions! Think of the thrill of saving just one person’s life – then multiply that by millions. … Yet this was the most boring panel I’ve ever been on – ever. So boring even I couldn’t bear it.
What made that experience especially striking was that I had just come from an event where we were introducing version 13 of some piece of software, and we had people jumping and shouting with excitement. I love getting people excited about software – but why can’t we generate even more excitement for saving lives?
You can’t get people excited unless you can help them see and feel the impact. And how you do that – is a complex question.
Still, I’m optimistic. Yes, inequity has been with us forever, but the new tools we have to cut through complexity have not been with us forever. They are new – they can help us make the most of our caring – and that’s why the future can be different from the past.
The defining and ongoing innovations of this age – biotechnology, the computer, the Internet – give us a chance we’ve never had before to end extreme poverty and end death from preventable disease.
Sixty years ago, George Marshall came to this commencement and announced a plan to assist the nations of post-war Europe. He said: “I think one difficulty is that the problem is one of such enormous complexity that the very mass of facts presented to the public by press and radio make it exceedingly difficult for the man in the street to reach a clear appraisement of the situation. It is virtually impossible at this distance to grasp at all the real significance of the situation.”
Thirty years after Marshall made his address, as my class graduated without me, technology was emerging that would make the world smaller, more open, more visible, less distant.
The emergence of low-cost personal computers gave rise to a powerful network that has transformed opportunities for learning and communicating.
The magical thing about this network is not just that it collapses distance and makes everyone your neighbor. It also dramatically increases the number of brilliant minds we can have working together on the same problem – and that scales up the rate of innovation to a staggering degree.
At the same time, for every person in the world who has access to this technology, five people don’t. That means many creative minds are left out of this discussion -- smart people with practical intelligence and relevant experience who don’t have the technology to hone their talents or contribute their ideas to the world.
We need as many people as possible to have access to this technology, because these advances are triggering a revolution in what human beings can do for one another. They are making it possible not just for national governments, but for universities, corporations, smaller organizations, and even individuals to see problems, see approaches, and measure the impact of their efforts to address the hunger, poverty, and desperation George Marshall spoke of 60 years ago.
Members of the Harvard Family: Here in the Yard is one of the great collections of intellectual talent in the world.
What for?
There is no question that the faculty, the alumni, the students, and the benefactors of Harvard have used their power to improve the lives of people here and around the world. But can we do more? Can Harvard dedicate its intellect to improving the lives of people who will never even hear its name?
Let me make a request of the deans and the professors – the intellectual leaders here at Harvard: As you hire new faculty, award tenure, review curriculum, and determine degree requirements, please ask yourselves:
Should our best minds be dedicated to solving our biggest problems?
Should Harvard encourage its faculty to take on the world’s worst inequities? Should Harvard students learn about the depth of global poverty … the prevalence of world hunger … the scarcity of clean water …the girls kept out of school … the children who die from diseases we can cure?
Should the world’s most privileged people learn about the lives of the world’s least privileged?
These are not rhetorical questions – you will answer with your policies.
My mother, who was filled with pride the day I was admitted here – never stopped pressing me to do more for others. A few days before my wedding, she hosted a bridal event, at which she read aloud a letter about marriage that she had written to Melinda. My mother was very ill with cancer at the time, but she saw one more opportunity to deliver her message, and at the close of the letter she said: “From those to whom much is given, much is expected.”
When you consider what those of us here in this Yard have been given – in talent, privilege, and opportunity – there is almost no limit to what the world has a right to expect from us.
In line with the promise of this age, I want to exhort each of the graduates here to take on an issue – a complex problem, a deep inequity, and become a specialist on it. If you make it the focus of your career, that would be phenomenal. But you don’t have to do that to make an impact. For a few hours every week, you can use the growing power of the Internet to get informed, find others with the same interests, see the barriers, and find ways to cut through them.
Don’t let complexity stop you. Be activists. Take on the big inequities. It will be one of the great experiences of your lives.
You graduates are coming of age in an amazing time. As you leave Harvard, you have technology that members of my class never had. You have awareness of global inequity, which we did not have. And with that awareness, you likely also have an informed conscience that will torment you if you abandon these people whose lives you could change with very little effort. You have more than we had; you must start sooner, and carry on longer.
Knowing what you know, how could you not?
And I hope you will come back here to Harvard 30 years from now and reflect on what you have done with your talent and your energy. I hope you will judge yourselves not on your professional accomplishments alone, but also on how well you have addressed the world’s deepest inequities … on how well you treated people a world away who have nothing in common with you but their humanity.
Good luck.
Thursday, May 3, 2007
Friday, April 27, 2007
Welcome !
Thank you for landing on this portal. The focus of this portal is going to be around bringing you high quality resources around XNA, in the form of tutorials, articles, samples, starter kits etc.
XNA Game Studio Express is available to download from: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/directx/aa937795.aspx
The best place to start with XNA is by reading What is the XNA Framework on the official XNA Blog.Moving onto what this portal will offer and how this will differ from the 100 other sites that are inevitably going to mushroom around XNA, the focus of this space is to provide a very strong foundation on which to base your XNA programming adventures. We won't just be looking at how to modify 1 or 2 lines of code in the starter kits. We will be talking about the foundations of the technology, get a deep understanding of the underpinnings of XNA.
In short, this will be the next best thing to taking a Computer Science course in Graphics using XNA, only that you won't have a deadline to submit homework and won't have to shell out $3000.
Without any further ado, here is the core "syllabus":
1. Introduction to XNA [What is XNA, Value Proposition, XBOX 360 Architecture, Market Size etc.]
2. Timing in XNA [How to get a FPS (Frames per Second) counter]
3. XInput [How to use your 360 controller in your game]
4. 2D Graphics and Animation using XNA
5. Introduction to 3D [Math & Concepts]
6. Introduction to 3D [XNA 3D Rendering Pipeline]
7. Drawing 3D in XNA [Primitives]
8. Drawing 3D in XNA [More Primitives & Buffers]
9. Shaders [Introduction (No fixed function pipeline support in the XBOX360)]
10. Vertex Shaders
11. Pixel Shaders
12. Effects
13. Color
14. Lights
15. Textures
16. Meshes
17. Advanced Meshes
18. 3D Animation [Bone]
19. 3D Animation [Skinned]
20. Advanced Features [TBD]
Obviously, the above is not cast in stone and we will treat the above as a working guideline - a lot of what we do in subsequent sessions will directly be based on your feedback.
This is a long journey that begins assuming no knowledge of Graphics development and culminates in a level of sophistication required to author an engine [where the knowledge required is pretty significant!] At all stages however, the content at each step will build on the previous ones and hopefully, you should never feel "lost" or "adrift".
Anyway, we are getting ahead of ourselves here. So, having shared my "vision" for this portal, I hope that together, we are able to fulfill this mission and have fun doing so.
XNA Game Studio Express is available to download from: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/directx/aa937795.aspx
The best place to start with XNA is by reading What is the XNA Framework on the official XNA Blog.Moving onto what this portal will offer and how this will differ from the 100 other sites that are inevitably going to mushroom around XNA, the focus of this space is to provide a very strong foundation on which to base your XNA programming adventures. We won't just be looking at how to modify 1 or 2 lines of code in the starter kits. We will be talking about the foundations of the technology, get a deep understanding of the underpinnings of XNA.
In short, this will be the next best thing to taking a Computer Science course in Graphics using XNA, only that you won't have a deadline to submit homework and won't have to shell out $3000.
Without any further ado, here is the core "syllabus":
1. Introduction to XNA [What is XNA, Value Proposition, XBOX 360 Architecture, Market Size etc.]
2. Timing in XNA [How to get a FPS (Frames per Second) counter]
3. XInput [How to use your 360 controller in your game]
4. 2D Graphics and Animation using XNA
5. Introduction to 3D [Math & Concepts]
6. Introduction to 3D [XNA 3D Rendering Pipeline]
7. Drawing 3D in XNA [Primitives]
8. Drawing 3D in XNA [More Primitives & Buffers]
9. Shaders [Introduction (No fixed function pipeline support in the XBOX360)]
10. Vertex Shaders
11. Pixel Shaders
12. Effects
13. Color
14. Lights
15. Textures
16. Meshes
17. Advanced Meshes
18. 3D Animation [Bone]
19. 3D Animation [Skinned]
20. Advanced Features [TBD]
Obviously, the above is not cast in stone and we will treat the above as a working guideline - a lot of what we do in subsequent sessions will directly be based on your feedback.
This is a long journey that begins assuming no knowledge of Graphics development and culminates in a level of sophistication required to author an engine [where the knowledge required is pretty significant!] At all stages however, the content at each step will build on the previous ones and hopefully, you should never feel "lost" or "adrift".
Anyway, we are getting ahead of ourselves here. So, having shared my "vision" for this portal, I hope that together, we are able to fulfill this mission and have fun doing so.
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