The Statement magazine: the hacker's revolution

#include <iostream> using namespace std; int main() { bool onStatementCover = 1; if (onStatementCover == 1) { cout << “The Hacker’s Revolution” << endl; } return 0; }

statement THE MICHIGAN DAILY JAN UARY 22 , 2014

2B Wednesday, January 22, 2014 // The Statement

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list | B

uzzfeed, but better

Five Smartphone Features to Look For in the Next Decade Think your smartphone has everything you may ever need?

Think again. The 2020s have more to offer.

1. Bend over backward

How convenient would it be to just fold your phone like a piece of paper, to tuck it away in your wallet or stop it from bulging in your pocket? The new Organic Light-Emitting Diode technology might just make that a reality.

2.

Come alive, already We’ve got Retina display (thank you, Apple) and 3D images (LG,

Samsung and Motorola have got that covered), but what about holograms? In a few years, expect that smartphone-animated personal trainer or yoga instructor to come to life.

3.

Mission: make humans lazy If you’re yet to get hold of Google’s new Google Glass

prototype, then wait a few years — your smartphone might do the same. Instead of having to web search information about your surroundings, future phones may use its camera to feed you that information automatically.

4.

Charge it up!

We’ve all got issues with our smartphone battery. What if your

phone not only lasted all day, but even had enough battery to charge up any other small device you might own?

5.

Indoor-P.S. It’s the next step to G.P.S. It’s about time you were able to

find your lost friend inside a mall. The newly formed In-Location Alliance is working on creating a feature that will do just that.

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@thestatementmag COVER BY NICK CRUZ & RUBY WALLAU

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statement

Magazine Editor: Carlina Duan Deputy Editors: Max Radwin

Photo Editor: Ruby Wallau Illustrator: Megan Mulholland

Amrutha Sivakumar Editor in Chief: Design Editor: Nick Cruz

Peter Shahin

Managing Editor: Katie Burke Copy Editors: Mark Ossolinski Meaghan Thompson

ann arbor affairs: four shades lighter by amrutha sivakumar I met him at a Michigan soccer game. I was the awkward freshman who was trying to imbibe as much school spirit as I could in the five days of Welcome Week. He was the sophomore who just had to help me and my roommate learn all the Ultras’ chants.

Love at first sight? I would like to think so, but who am I kidding.

I was Indian and he wasn’t. And that meant that there was no way I could ever be with him.

It wasn’t until the next semester that I saw him again. Though we were both Michigan Daily staff writers, his world of sports journalism never crossed with the bubble of student government reporting that I’d immersed myself into. But there he was at the next paperwide bonding event. One moment led to another, and the next thing I knew, I was sitting across from him at dinner making small talk for what would be the first of many dates to come.

The days flew by, and I was falling for a guy who was more kindhearted, talented, funny and attractive than I could have ever imagined. While I think his biracial upbringing made it easier for him to see us as a couple, I couldn’t help but linger over the fact that we were so fundamentally different to begin with.

It hit me the hardest when we stood in front of a mirror together for the first time. He was hugging me in my 12-by-19 South Quad room, and I turned around to face the reality that was our relationship. He was standing — a whole head above me — and grinning wider than I had ever seen before.

The entire time, I was incredulous.

There was no way this could be right. We looked absurd!

For the first time I realized that I had subconsciously worked race into my criteria for relationships. I

THE

ILLUSTRATION BY MEGAN MULHOLLAND

was a descendent of a long, neverending line of arranged marriages.

I had spent hours in sleepovers with my girlfriends talking about what part of India our ideal boyfriends would be from.

I always imagined my dream man to be exactly like me. While I was born in Chicago and was raised as an American for a time, I went to high school in India and did most of my growing up there.

India was where I had had my first love and my first heartbreak. India is where I developed a sense of who I was and what I wanted.

I grew up viewing interracial relationships as an abnormality. At first, I started to see my own relationship with the same skepticism that I had viewed other differentrace couples. Yet all that changed over time. When I let myself believe that it was OK to date someone with a skin tone four shades lighter than mine, I started to realize how wrong I had gotten it all.

There’s something so raw and exhilarating in telling someone

about yourself and realizing that they want to become a part of your world. The person I was dating wanted to learn more about Indian cultures and religions just a month into our relationship than most of the Indians I knew bothered to learn in their entire life. I’d been so hesitant to make myself feel something for someone of a different culture because I didn’t think we could connect. Instead, I fell harder than I ever thought I could.

Maybe it’s easier to be with someone that speaks the same mother tongue as you and celebrates the same religious holidays.

Maybe there’s a reason why intercaste relationships are all the rage back home right now.

But for now, I’m with someone who watched a cheesy Bollywood movie with me only three dates into our relationship and replies to me when I intersperse Hindi words in my sentences. Did I mention that he’s a Hispanic Jew? I really am the luckiest girl in the world.

rules TMD’

s weekly survival guide

No. 528:

No. 529:

No. 530:

Oversized hoodies and baggy sweatpants may hide your Freshman 15 in the frozen tundra, but watch out: It’ll be spring before you know it.

Printed pants aren’t such a bad idea at the Winter career fair — there are only 2,000 others wearing a black suit.

Hurrah, Restaurant Week is over! It’s time to bid adieu to those 30-dollar dinner sales.

Wednesday, January 22, 2014 // The Statement 3B

“

the thought bubble

on the record

“Unfortunately, so many times, people of color hear the term ‘people of color’ from other white people that (PoCs) think white people created it instead of understanding that we self-named ourselves.”

– LORETTA ROSS, reproductive rights activist, in a talk about feminism.

“We have heard the University use the phrase ‘We are listening’ since 1970, and I am tired of waiting for a response. We are tired of waiting for a response.”

– SHAYLA SCALES, Business Senior, during the BSU protests for inclusion on MLK Day

“This is one of the main reasons I think it’s worthwhile to study the classics — not because it would be more time-effective, but because there is a distinct pleasure in studying a body of literature where you must accept some limitations from the start.”

PHOTO BY RUBY WALLAU

“What’s always gotten me along is seeing that the most interesting people I ever knew, never knew what they wanted to do with their life. You’ll find something eventually. But never always quite what you planned.”

– GIANCARLO BUONOMO, Senior Arts Editor, on the value of studying the classics.

– MELINDA ‘MANDY’ KRUG, School of Information Alum

trending #SNL #NFLPlayoffs #MicroscopicPhotography

SNL.COM

It’s safe to say that Saturday was a pretty big night for this variety show. Rapper Drake hosted and performed for the show, and actress Sasheer Zamata made her debut — a casting made in heaven.

AP PHOTO/ Matt Sayles

Award show season is pushing through at full blow. “American Hustle” — which leaded Oscar nominations earlier in the week — won the most outstanding performance by a cast at this 20th annual show.

#StellarAwards #SAGAwards #TylerOakley #HappyBdayBeliebers #Lebroning

AP PHOTO/Kyle Korver

Sick of planking? Inspired by Miami Heat’s Lebron James, Lebroning is the action of throwing yourself to the floow after a light brush; followed by an angry facial expression claiming that it’s not your fault you’re hurt.

The YouTube personality received immense criticism over Twitter after bashing 1D singer Liam Payne for supporting the homophobic family values shared through reality TV show “Duck Dynasty.”

YOUTUBE.COM

4B 2 Wednesday, January 22, 2014 // The Statement

Wednesday, January 22, 2014 // The Statement

CODING THE FUTURE: THE RISE OF THE HACKATHON

by Ian Dillingham, Senior News Editor

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On the surface, the idea is simple. Teams of four compete to design, build and demonstrate the best piece of technology in just 36 hours. The event begins Friday night and ends Sunday morning, culminating in an expo in which teams showcase their creations to judges who award cash and other prizes.

The infusion of Detroit entrepreneurialism was evident in every corner of the event, as participants were treated to panoramic views of the city from seven or eight stories above the streets. For those visiting the city for the first time, the event provided a unique immersion into the city’s culture, though their attention rarely drifted from their projects once the clock began.

Though most teams choose to focus on mobile applications, websites and social media devices, the parameters are purposefully open-ended — anything goes. The winner of last year’s event designed a trash can that sorted recyclable materials based on the noise they made when tossed into the device.

Since its conception less than two years ago, MHacks has exploded into the largest college hackathon in the country — the word “hack,” in this case, refers to participants’ need to “hack together” ideas in a short period of time rather than the common association with “computer hackers.”

While the rules are simple, the event has come to represent much more than a group of computer nerds spending their holiday weekend staring at lines of code. Instead, the event represents a challenge to the very nature of education and, in turn,

interactive marketing displays. One common theme he noted among many participants was that the current education system wasn’t providing something they needed.

“The school system works really well for some people, just not for me,” he said.

The Hacker Culture The first MHacks came about after the founding members, along with about 30 other students from the University, traveled to the University of Pennsylvania for another prominent hackathon, PennApps. With most members having never attended such an event, students from the University took home a quarter of the prizes, according to Erdmann.

“We were all wearing these matching orange shirts and stood out like a sore thumb,” Erdmann said. “Michigan hadn’t traveled as much to hackathons in the past and … we just took the whole hacking community by storm.”

Since then, MHacks has grown into the largest college hackathon in the nation, with students traveling from as far away as Europe to participate.

As hackathons around the nation gain popularity, they have begun to develop a culture that extends beyond the bounds of the weekend events. Directors of the MHacks event have received many emails from college students across the nation who want to host similar events at their own institutions, Hurd said.

One of the most interesting trends for Hurd is whether students look for smaller, local events or if they remain willing to travel to the five largest events each year: MHacks, PennApps, HackMIT, Y-Hack at Yale University and hackTECH at the California Institute of Technology.

Regardless of the location, one major obstacle for this emerging culture is the need to enhance public perceptions, which often view hackers as people who use computer skills to break into secure databases for their own gains.

“A lot of the focus of the current hackathon culture is dissuading the public from this stereotype that is associated with hacker culture,” Hurd said.

That stereotype, Hurd said, is one of an 18- to 21-year-old male, usually a computer engineer, who spends countless hours staring at their computer.

“We’re trying to show that anyone can be a hacker,” Hurd said. “It’s about having the skills to learn quickly, problem solve and put your creativity to use.”

LEFT: MHacks directors LSA junior Adrian Lupusoru, Engineering junior Dylan Hurd and Engineering junior Jonathan Poczatek. (Ruby Wallau/ DAILY) CENTER: 16-year-old Send Grid representative Will Smidlein and Louisiana Tech Alumn Jaren Glover work together on Saturday. (Ruby Wallau/DAILY) RIGHT: University of Maryland sophomore Eric Mintzer works on his project using Oculus Rift software. (Adam Glanzman/DAILY) ould e-mail be made more efficient, freeing users from the hours they spend at their computers? Why do people need to carry wallets when so much information can be stored on a phone? How could a trash can be improved to promote recycling initiatives?

For many students enduring the rigors of a traditional education system, learning entails just a one-way flow of information from teacher to pupil. With the exception of sporadic laboratory requirements or experimental courses, students are confined to the classroom experience — where theory often trumps practicality and real-world applications are added as footnotes to the end of lectures.

Those students with questions or ideas must take the initiative to investigate certain topics independently, outside the confines of syllabi and lecture halls. However, true intellectual exploration can be challenging when those same students must manage the typical college hurdles — exams, essays, extracurriculars and a range of personal and social commitments.

How much time can students possibly dedicate to independent learning while still enrolled at the University?

For one group on campus, the answer is 36 hours.

This past weekend, about 1,200 students from over 60 universities around the world gathered in Detroit for the third installment of MHacks — a non-stop, three-day computer programming competition and expo hosted by MPowered Entrepreneurship and Michigan Hackers.

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challenges students to create, innovate and develop technologies for the real world.

Redefining Education Contrary to public perceptions, MHacks is not an exclusive meeting of the best programmers on campus.

Granted, the best computer programmers attend every year in waves, but the coordinators said the event is intended to introduce students to the world of computer programming — no experience necessary.

This has been a common theme to MHacks ever since four students at the University decided to hold the first event in the Palmer Commons in 2012. LSA and Engineering junior Thomas Erdmann is the last member of the original group still at the University. Although he stepped down from his lead role for this year’s event, he remains active in the hackathon culture.

“We marketed MHacks from the beginning as open to all skill levels,” Erdmann said. “I know people who had never written a line of code in their life before MHacks last time around and now they’re building websites.”

The pressure to build on a 36-hour deadline combined with the collective knowledge of teammates and other participants makes the environment conducive to quick learning, Erdmann said.

“It really pushes you to figure out a way to get your idea

built,” Erdmann said. “If you don’t have the technical knowhow, you’ll figure out how to get it.”

Engineering junior Dylan Hurd, one of the event’s three directors this year, said MHacks is designed to provide education at all levels, so that participants can learn new skills regardless of prior computer science knowledge. This is accomplished, in part, through presentations and demonstrations from sponsors, including Apple and GitHub, which expose participants to new tools they can use to design their projects.

“We try to make MHacks a learning experience for everyone involved,” Hurd said. “Someone who’s a computer science major may have straight As in their program, but may have never built an iOS app before, so they can come in and learn something entirely new to them and come out with a working product.”

The cornerstone of the MHacks model is its focus on projectbased group learning. Unlike traditional classroom-based education, participants must possess the ability to solve problems in real time, a skill many employers in the field value.

“It gives you a lot of experience that the closed environment of a classroom doesn’t. Obviously the classroom has its benefits, but if you can’t apply what you know in the real world, it’s just not as useful,” Hurd said.

While both Hurd and Erdmann expressed doubts that MHacks could be used to reform education, the hackathon movement is beginning to assert its influence over colleges nationwide. Michigan Hackers hosts more frequent hacking

events — usually six hours or less — on campus, allowing students to experience the hackathon environment more frequently than twice a year.

Many participants at the event expressed their desire to see better implementation of collaborative, project-based opportunities in education.

Eric Mintzer, a business student from the University of Maryland attending his first hackathon, said the education provided at the event was different from anything he had experienced in school.

“I look at (hackathons) as an alternative to education but I think it’s something that colleges should support,” Mintzer said. “It’s not the best way for everyone (to learn) but the people here are very self-driven and self-educated, meaning they want to teach themselves and that’s the way many people here learn best.”

Mintzer and his team used their time at the event to prototype a virtual reality device that would allow the user to observe financial graphs and layouts in a virtual universe. The project combined several pre-existing technologies, as well as one of the many APIs — application programming interfaces — provided to participants, allowing them to develop products that integrate with existing systems or infrastructure.

While Mintzer continues to attend classes (at the urging of his parents), he considers himself a programmer at heart and is using his experience to launch a startup company that develops

The Gender Gap For all the successes of the culture, however, one obvious downfall of MHacks — and hacker culture — is the current gender gap. Business and LSA junior Lucy Zhao, one of the MHacks coordinators, said she’d estimate only 10 to 20 percent of the participants of most hackathons are female.

“Clearly there is a big gender gap,” Zhao said. “I think there’s a lot of reasons — girls are sometimes not encouraged in technical fields … but I also think it’s part of the hackathon environment.”

Zhao noted that, since participants essentially live together for three days, the environment can sometimes take on a “broish” feel. Additionally, some female participants expressed a hesitation to join male teams once at the hackathon, which discouraged them from registering, Zhao said.

Given the disparity, Zhao said the organizers made a special effort to expand the participant demographics this year by reaching out to female groups at the University and around the nation. She also said some sponsors took special measures — such as requesting to fund female buses to the event — in order to promote involvement in the industry.

“There’s tons of talented female hackers, so I don’t think necessarily that they don’t feel they can contribute,” Zhao said.

See HACKATHONS, Page 8B

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Wednesday, January 22, 2014 // The Statement

Red Bull and Quidditch: the MHacks experience

by Giacomo Bologna

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Carnegie Mellon sophomore Gregory Rose and DePaul junior Matt Kula test Oculus Quidditch, a virtual reality Quidditch game at MHacks at the Qube in Detroit on Saturday. (Ruby Wallau/DAILY)

ike Ross, a Quicken Loans security guard, stood watch in the elevator lobby of the seventh floor of the Qube building in Detroit on Saturday afternoon. Ross had heard of hackathons before the weekend, he said, but this was his first time interacting with one.

Ross stood tall, watching a constant trickle of hackers and organizers go from side rooms to the main hall elevator. He wasn’t a hacker, but he stood in one of the best places to watch the event.

Saturday afternoon was the halftime of MHacks — the midpoint — the make-orbreak time, when more than 1,000 hackers got an idea of whether they’d be ready to present at Sunday’s wrap-up celebration or have to accept that their ambitions were too big.

“I wish I could say energetic,” Ross said of the atmosphere, and pointed to the “dozen people crashed on the floor,” in the main hall.

The kids that haven’t burnt out are zeroed in on their computer screens.

“They work, work, work and crash,” Ross said.

He wasn’t kidding. Walking through the main hall occupied by a few hundred hackers meant stepping over pillows, suitcases, sleeping bags and sleeping college kids.

If you haven’t heard of MHacks, here’s what you need to know: There’s 36 hours to write a program or make an innovation, hundreds of students and an abundance of caffeine. It’s part competition, part collaborative learning and part party.

The main hall of the seventh floor embodied the hackathon spirit. It might have been a large office space for an online retail mortgage lender, but there was no beige or gray.

Brightly colored columns punctuated the rows of tables taken over by hackers and the walls were covered with white boards where

teams argued over scrawled ideas or bored hackers sketched out their school’s logo.

And there, creativity did come, but often at the expense of sleep, hygiene and fashion — sweatpants and pajamas make for more efficient hacking.

But on Saturday afternoon, when competitors rested their heads on crossed arms and drooled on the table, the creativity was at a lull.

The real start of MHacks came before the Friday kickoff. Competitors aren’t allowed to present projects they’ve previously worked on and they’re encouraged to come up with fresh ideas. The real start of MHacks came in the past couple weeks when those fresh ideas began to percolate.

A few days before Friday, Matt Kula, a computer science major from DePaul University, was Facebook chatting with his team, one DePaul student and two from the University of Michigan.

“It was a joke, honestly. But they took it seriously,” Kula said on Saturday of the idea he had proposed.

“That was a great idea,” Engineering sophomore James Kotzian said, surprised. “I thought it was a sweet idea.”

The team went along with it and by Saturday afternoon, they had built a functioning three-dimensional Quidditch simulator.

“You can get motion sickness pretty easy doing some barrel rolls,” Kula said. “It’s crazy.”

To play the game, the Quidditch player puts on a pair of 3D goggles hooked up to the computer and straddles a stick with a Wii remote taped to its end, twisting and leaning to fly their broomstick in a recreation of the stadium made famous by the “Harry Potter” book series.

Kula said it was a good thing his teammates didn’t pick up on his original sarcasm.

“We really expected to take this much longer,” he said. “Anything we do now is kinda a plus.”

The group acknowledged that there are some pretty competitive hackers at these events, but most students, including them, come to learn and try new things. DePaul doesn’t have the large hacking scene that the University does, Kula said, meaning hackathons can be a time of immersive learning.

Nonetheless, the team knows they’ve built something good.

“I still wanna win, but ... ” Kula said, trailing off. There’s more than just winning and losing, he explained. There’s resumé building and there’s interacting with other hackers from across the country.

His team, for instance, was formed after Kula met some University student at the MHacks hackathon in November.

Plus, there were plenty of ways to blow off steam. A break room adjacent to the main hall had a Pacman arcade game, ICEE machine and foosball table — among other amenities.

A block away, however, a team from the State University of New York at Stony Brook was powering through programming an annoying alarm clock for your phone, although their surroundings weren’t as ideal: two floors of an unfinished office building hastily fitted for the event.

Concrete floors, bare walls and temporary fluorescent lights gave off an industrial vibe at best. And this vibe was amplified when compared to the Qube’s eighth floor, which had views of Windsor’s skyline across the river and ice skating at Campus Martius Park. But at least both locations were only a quick walk away from Lafayette Coney Island, home of the world’s most heavenly Coney dog.

Nonetheless, the Stony Brook team con-

tinued coding the app, which was designed for people who have trouble waking up early in the morning, or, colloquially speaking, college students.

Team member Ted Saintvil called it the “dreaded eight o’clock class,” and the three New York students pointed at the fourth member of their team whose head was slumped down on the desk in sleep.

This team, too, noted that there were some people who take the competition very seriously, but those people are the exception, not the rule.

“You come here to do what you want to,” Kenneth Ramos said. “I come for the experience.”

Besides, Ramos said, the biggest competition was for when new rounds of food were distributed. “You ever see a Walmart on Black Friday?” Ramos said.

But regardless if you’re a first-time hacker or a seasoned pro looking for recognition, nobody gets much sleep.

“What is that — sleep?” Ramos joked.

None of Ramos’s team had more than four hours of sleep, and even that’s considered a good night’s sleep at hackathons.

Kula, despite having the luxury of carpeting in his building, only laid down for two hours.

“I don’t sleep at these things,” he said.

“Too much going on for me to sleep.”

In the end, sleep-deprived or not, the teams all had memorable experiences. Some came away with full, functioning products they had planned for all along. Others … not so much. While Stony Brook didn’t place in the top eight, Kula’s team and their Quidditch simulator placed second overall. Both teams, though, left the event as better programmers. And that’s what it’s really all about.

Wednesday, January 22, 2014 // The Statement

7B

Personal Statement: mustache girl

by Carlina Duan At first, it plunked. An intelligent red, the shade of dahlias in March, swooping down on cheap carpet. Then, it crashed. “Nosebleed! Nosebleed!” Nick shouted from the back row, “Mustache Girl’s got a nosebleed!” All my classmates turned to look.

My throat stung.

The blood wasn’t shy. It slushed out — splashing down my desk, skating across my half-open geometry textbook, spanking the pages with a vicious crimson. My face swelled in guilt, but it wasn’t because of the blood. Mustache Girl, Nick cawed, his voice like a vegetable peeler, cutting me into sharp curls of shame.

Mr. Grady stood up slowly in his white sneakers as I flung my way across the path of desks. The bathroom was out the hallway, past six classrooms, near a water fountain spewing liquid of questionable yellow. As I scrambled out the door, I heard Nick, followed by a chorus of disgusted laughter: “She got blood all over his shoes!”

In seventh grade, I got nosebleeds frequently. I got used to the blood flailing down my throat, the familiar hum of metallic red. Cotton balls I’d wet beneath the sink, then shove up my nostril. The nurses, who’d tell me to pinch tight my nose and tilt my head up. Fluorescent lights of the middle school ceiling. The bright red blooms on my hands, inked with blood.

In seventh grade, I got used to the name. Nick and Ben would call me Mustache Girl on the sly.

At first, it didn’t shake me up too much. I had friends. I had a pink lunchbox from the GAP. I had a violin case with a tiny, glittery keychain in the shape of a cat, which my Dad had gotten me from a business trip to Tokyo. In early winter mornings at the bus stop, before the sun composed its dear and simple light, the cat would flash a hazy pink against bitter snow. In seventh grade, I had a fondness for pears, and courage, and cats.

I also had a mustache.

ILLUSTRATION BY MEGAN MULHOLLAND

“As a Chinese-American woman, how do I rebel? Define?

Refashion? Undress the word and world that’s been given to me?”

Rather, I had black hair, and dark eyes, and loud hips. I had bad vision, and a callus on my middle finger from writing with the same purple gel pen. I had undergone puberty as a Chinese girl, and what resulted were the soft, black hairs that had dusted my upper-lip, my legs, my arms — bashful, shaming black.

In the mirror each morning, I’d glare at my reflection. I’d pucker, and pout. In geometry class, I’d gaze at the back of Ben’s buzzed head. I’d eat dumplings at dinner and wonder why they weren’t cheese sandwiches. At my allwhite cafeteria table, I’d watch Lindsey’s arm, swept by a patch of blonde hair. My own arm: mowed and blazed with black.

After I became Mustache Girl to Nick and Ben, my lip became my own small criminal. I punished the hair solemnly with my hands. I grew out my fingernails to try and yank it out. In secret, I tried using scissors, but wimped

out. I Googled hundreds of pages: “The Female Mustache,” “3 Secret Weapons for Fighting Your Lady-Mustache,” “Girl mustache pluck,” “Girl mustache removal,” “So, what do I do about her mustache?!”

In school, suddenly, I wouldn’t show my mouth. The mirror exaggerated my face into a bold, black roar. I wasn’t feminine — I was hairy. I wasn’t cool — I was black-haired.

Raised by a woman who opposed wax and razors, I bought a self-bleach kit and bleached my upper-lip hair with white cream, meticulously setting a timer on my mom’s phone to make sure I didn’t overdo the time. In the mirror, I balked. The cream was cold, thick and smelled of rubber boots. When the timer went off, I washed my face twice. My hair turned amber at the roots, whiteblonde at the ends. Transparent.

Almost gone.

In middle school, it was almost

about proof: showing a room filled with other tiny, livid bodies that I could be just as tiny and just as livid, too. It was almost about becoming like Jane, like Nora, like all my white girl friends who poured tubes of sparkly pink gloss over their mouths before class.

Until it wasn’t.

I envied their slim gold, but knew I’d never have that kind of blonde luck. Black hair was in my blood, my own body’s dumb magic.

On the exterior, it’s an easy story, filled with easy headlines: Middle school is hard. Growing up can be mean. Kids dump lunches in red lockers. Hormones flock. Chinese girl sprouts peach fuzz above her lip and worries about it in the bathroom. Courage, cream. Growth spurts, ache.

It’d be almost too easy for me to raise my fist in the air, and triumphantly gaze at my stubby middle-school self and the distance I’ve trekked since then. To

crack up about it now. To ignore the strips of wax at my apartment, sealed in a green box. To act like I let it all — the naming, the shame, the hair — grow out of me.

Poet Shira Erlichman writes, “It is important to snatch back from the air the words others attempt to dress us in. To create our own deliciously expansive, wild, deliberate dresses.” Ben and Nick called me Mustache Girl for a year. I let them. Then, eighth grade hit, and all of a sudden, I was Carlina again.

As a Chinese-American woman, how do I rebel? Define?

Re-fashion? Undress the word and world that’s been given to me? How do I “snatch back?”

At times, it’s hard for me to feel empowered by hair, by blackness.

It’s easy for me to feel engulfed by shame. Still, there’s a type of strength and hilarity to looking back. How much power and shyness we find in the project of naming. In giving ourselves up to the shapes others carve out for us. How hard it is to carve space for ourselves. Yet how urgent, and how brave.

I’m never sure how to remind myself that I’m a woman who knows what’s best for myself, and a part of knowing what’s best is naming myself — not around the angles of others’ mouths, but around my own curves and muscle and black hair. In middle school, there was shame in being called out for not knowing. There was strange duty and pressure to fit into a homogeneous idea of beauty, of girlhood. But today, there’s a sureness to understanding that I am complex, unwinding and not reducible to one name, or, for that matter, one cubed version of beauty. More importantly, there’s pride to understanding that homogeneity is not how I strive to splash through life. Difference is funky, and there’s color involved. There’s name-calling.

And name-shaping. There’s independence, which feels humble. It doesn’t feel small.

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Wednesday, January 22, 2014 // The Statement

HACKATHONS From Page 5B “Sometimes it’s just that no one reached out to them or they just didn’t feel welcomed.”

Creation Process This weekend’s event seemed to revolve around a theme of creation, a theme which has echoed that of past hackathons.

Engineering senior David Brown, who was attending his first hackathon, said the collaborative and creative culture present at the event opened up new possibilities in his program design.

“It’s trying to redefine the (public) concept of hacking as a creation process,” Brown said.

Brown and his team, drawing upon experience from research conducted at the University, used the event as an opportunity to develop technology that could help individuals disabled by spinal cord injuries or neuronal diseases, such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.

Individuals with these diseases have various levels of motor impairment that often make communication difficult.

Though electronic equipment can help alleviate the effect of the conditions, it is often bulky and requires a significant power source. In an effort to make such devices more portable, Brown’s team was building a brain-computer interface using special glasses, known as Google Glass, that would register the patient’s eye activity and respond accordingly.

“They can use it to communicate through a computer when they otherwise would have no other means of communicating,” Brown said.

Although he could work on his project for the same amount of time in small increments, Brown said the uninterrupted 36-hour work period was the best feature of the hackathon.

“To have everything so self-contained so you don’t have to worry about anything at all,” he said. “To be able to delve for that long into a project and focus on one thing I think really makes things possible that wouldn’t otherwise be possible.”

Detroit: it’s not Silicon Valley … yet.

This year’s event reached a new level of significance — and publicity — after coordinators made the decision to relocate the event to downtown Detroit.

Both of the prior two events were held in Ann Arbor, the first in Palmer Commons and the second in the Big House.

Though the move to Detroit was seen as necessary to providing the space and resources to accommodate 1,200 participants, the event’s directors acknowledged their desire to use the event as a vehicle for introducing participants to the city — with the hopes of affecting positive long-term change.

The Quicken Loans operations center, known as the Qube, served as the venue for the event after a series of discussions between event coordinators and Dan Gilbert, chairman and founder of Quicken Loans and Rock Ventures. Gilbert’s companies actively promote Detroit revitalization efforts, including events such as the hackathon, through a subsidiary organization called Opportunity Detroit.

“Bringing MHacks to Detroit was a no-brainer for our organization,” John Marcicky, community relations manager for Rock Ventures, said in a statement. “There is no better event than this to show 1,200 of some of the top tech students in the world that the city is in the middle of a tech revolution that is attracting some of the world’s brightest minds.”

Given the success of holding the event at Michigan Stadium, some may have questioned the organizers’ decision to

School of Kineosiology graduate student Xiaoya Ma works to combine brain-computer interface with Google Glass technology at MHacks in Detroit on Saturday. (Ruby Wallau/DAILY) relocate the event away from Ann Arbor. However, Hurd said the rule of thumb for MHacks is to never try to hold the same event twice.

“We try to create a unique experience every time,” Hurd said. “We like to bring something new to every event — something students have never seen before.”

In the discussion of possible locations, the organizers saw an opportunity for the event to strike a positive impact in Detroit, which many believe is undergoing a technological resurgence with the growth of the city’s startups in recent years.

“Hackers have come here and they like what they’ve seen — they are excited about the city,” Hurd said. “I am confident that we can contribute to the revitalization of the city in some way.”

While benefiting the city, the location change also moved participants closer to many of the sponsors who view the event as a recruiting tool. Technology companies leverage the events as a 36-hour interview process, allowing them to observe how potential employees work in real-world environments.

Sponsors come to recruit, promote products and help hackers through seminars and presentations. As a new addition to this year’s event, participants were also connected with engineers from companies around the world through social media, allowing the students to ask questions and receive instruction in real time as they faced complications with their projects.

“It was amazing to see the response of sponsors and how excited they were to connect with students,” Hurd said.

Benjamin San Souci, a third-year student from McGill University in Montreal attending his third hackathon, said he learned early on that hackathon projects are often judged on their looks and concepts more than their content, and that this trend even translates into the industry.

“It doesn’t matter if it works as long as it looks good,” San Souci said. “That’s the point — you’re presenting it to people — whether it works or not, many people will never know.”

San Souci and his team made the 13-hour drive from Montreal to develop an app that allows users to plan and host custom scavenger hunts using mobile phones. The team planned to design the app so that participants in the scavenger hunt were required to complete some task — for example, answer a question or take a picture — at each location in order to progress through the contest.

The Canadians planned to finish and launch the app before the end of the event, allowing the hackathon to serve as the first trial of their product and giving the team the chance to get feedback about the design. This type of encouragement and collaboration is critical to the nature of hackathons, San Souci said.

“You meet a lot of really cool people — a lot of really talented people — I met a kid who was 16 (years old) and has been to eight hackathons,” he said. “It’s a really friendly community, even though you don’t know many people, everyone feels really close.”

The winners of the grand prize this year developed an iPad app — Workflow — that allows users to build complex programs using a few simple keystrokes. Like many projects at MHacks, it was innovative and supplied a technology lacking in the market today.

But, as many who have attended the event might tell you, the competition comes second at MHacks.

“There is a competitive aspect to it, but if you were to walk through, you would find that it doesn’t feel like a competition,” Erdmann said. “More than anything, everyone there wants to learn and everyone there wants to build something great, but they also want to use the hackathon as a platform for meeting other people and helping other people — and spreading what they’re already passionate about.”