John F. McGowan, Ph.D. solves problems using mathematics and mathematical software, including developing gesture recognition for touch devices, video compression and speech recognition technologies. He has extensive experience developing software in C, C++, MATLAB, Python, Visual Basic and many other programming languages. He has been a Visiting Scholar at HP Labs developing computer vision algorithms and software for mobile devices. He has worked as a contractor at NASA Ames Research Center involved in the research and development of image and video processing algorithms and technology. He has published articles on the origin and evolution of life, the exploration of Mars (anticipating the discovery of methane on Mars), and cheap access to space. He has a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a B.S. in physics from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
In this video, I discuss how to defeat soft or stealth censorship of the Internet by giant social media companies such as Facebook, Google/YouTube, Apple, Twitter and the government using the proven, established, widely used free open-source decentralized technology RSS (Rich Site Summary also known as Really Simple Syndication). I demonstrate this using the RSS reader in the free open-source Thunderbird e-mail program available for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and most Linux platforms.
The government has many potential ways to apply pressure on social media companies in the absence of explicit censorship laws:
John F. McGowan, Ph.D. solves problems using mathematics and mathematical software, including developing gesture recognition for touch devices, video compression and speech recognition technologies. He has extensive experience developing software in C, C++, MATLAB, Python, Visual Basic and many other programming languages. He has been a Visiting Scholar at HP Labs developing computer vision algorithms and software for mobile devices. He has worked as a contractor at NASA Ames Research Center involved in the research and development of image and video processing algorithms and technology. He has published articles on the origin and evolution of life, the exploration of Mars (anticipating the discovery of methane on Mars), and cheap access to space. He has a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a B.S. in physics from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
Many online web sites and services, including many that have useful information, have become highly distracting and addictive — wasting many hours of precious time and clouding our judgement leading to bad purchases and other critical decisions. This increasing level of distraction is probably due to a combination of increasing integration of persuasive technology and advances in recommendation engines and other algorithms.
I personally have had significant problems with lost time and distractions from YouTube and Hacker News. Both of these sites have useful information as well as large amounts of distracting dreck. I find both addictive. I substantially reduced the amount of time wasted on Hacker News by switching from the web site to the Hacker News RSS feed in my Thunderbird email program.
Hacker News Web Site
Below is the Hacker News RSS feed in Thunderbird.
Thunderbird RSS Hacker News Feed
Thunderbird has a feature to subscribe to and manage RSS feeds. As can be seen, I have subscribed to Hacker News and Slashdot. Although Slashdot is similar to Hacker News in a number of respects, I have consistently found Hacker News much more distracting and addictive.
There is also an “End of Month” folder. I have configured message filters in Thunderbird to move important but distracting articles from Hacker News and Slashdot to the “End of Month” folder. This includes for example articles on some political topics that tend to get my blood boiling.
Hacker News has a “social” system of user and article scores, upvotes, downvotes , comments and other decorations. This “socialization” of the new articles seems to be a major factor in why the web site is substantially more addictive and distracting than the RSS feed. In addition, as noted, I am able to filter out articles that tend to distract me, putting them aside for a planned time to deal with distracting topics.
Many web sites have RSS feeds including Hacker News, Slashdot, and Tech Crunch (not shown here). This method can be applied to many distracting web sites to reduce the unwanted distractions and lost time while still keeping up with useful information. Message Filters can be configured to delete dreck, set aside articles on important but distracting topics, and highlight articles of special interest. With message filters, you — the reader/user — are in control instead of mysterious machine learning algorithms and recommendation engines.
How to Set Up RSS in Thunderbird
The Thunderbird web site provides detailed instruction on how to set up a Feed Account and subscribe to RSS feeds here.
Step 1: Create a Feed Account
First you must create an account in Thunderbird for your feeds.
1. In the Menu Bar, click File > New > Feed Account. The Feed Account Wizard window appears.
2. Type a name for your Feed account in the Account Name box, then click Next.
3. Click Finish. Your new account will now appear in Thunderbird’s folder pane.
I gave my account the name Blogs and News Feeds:
Thunderbird RSS Blogs and News Feeds Account Example
There is a main dashboard for Blogs and News Feeds in Thunderbird:
Thunderbird RSS Dashboard
Click on Manage subscriptions to add an RSS feed. You will need the URL for the feed. The picture below shows the feed dialog in Thunderbird.
Thunderbird RSS Feed Dialog
How to set up message filters
Select the Message Filters menu item from the Tools drop down menu:
Thunderbird RSS Message Filters Menu Item
This brings up a dialog for creating and managing message filters:
Thunderbird RSS Message Filters Dialog
Click on the New button to create a new message filter. For example:
Thunderbird RSS Trump Filter Creation Example
The Distraction Economy
Smartphones and the Internet have become more and more distracting and addictive over the last several years with no signs of the trend reversing. This translates into many hours of lost time per week, month, and year. Even using the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, five or ten hours per week lost to cat videos on YouTube, software industry gossip on Hacker News, or a million other online distractions translates into $36 to $72 per week, which is a lot for someone earning the minimum wage. Of course most readers of this article probably should value their time at $15 to $100 per hour.
A dollar estimate does not capture the lost real world social, personal, and professional opportunities. Outrage inducing videos and articles are often addictive but they are certainly not pleasant entertainment either.
Many of these distracting web sites, apps, and services seek to persuade us to buy products we don’t need, vote for public policies that don’t benefit us, and have other hidden costs that are difficult to measure — unlike lost time.
Many of these distracting web sites, apps, and services are also tightly integrated with a growing system of mass surveillance which, thanks to new technologies, is unprecedented in human history even in extreme dictatorships like Nazi Germany or Stalin’s Soviet Union. Extremely high bandwidth wireless networks, inexpensive high resolution video cameras, remarkable advances in video compression, huge disk drives, and ultra-fast computers have enabled levels of monitoring far beyond the dystopian future in George Orwell’s 1984.
Fears of terrorism and an implied Mad Max scenario of global economic collapse due to peak oil have contributed to a public acceptance of these highly questionable developments, along with shrewd marketing of social media and smartphones.
Waiting for companies obsessed with quarterly earnings and politicians beholden to wealthy campaign contributors to roll back or reform these developments is unlikely to work. People can take effective action — both individually and acting together — to reduce the level of distraction in their lives, regain valuable free time, and think more clearly, such as switching to RSS feeds and away from distracting web sites.
John F. McGowan, Ph.D. solves problems using mathematics and mathematical software, including developing gesture recognition for touch devices, video compression and speech recognition technologies. He has extensive experience developing software in C, C++, MATLAB, Python, Visual Basic and many other programming languages. He has been a Visiting Scholar at HP Labs developing computer vision algorithms and software for mobile devices. He has worked as a contractor at NASA Ames Research Center involved in the research and development of image and video processing algorithms and technology. He has published articles on the origin and evolution of life, the exploration of Mars (anticipating the discovery of methane on Mars), and cheap access to space. He has a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a B.S. in physics from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
I find Facebook useful for keeping in touch with friends and family that I can’t see in person regularly. I live in California and many of my relatives live on the East Coast of the United States. Similarly my busy life makes keeping in touch with some friends and acquaintances even in California in person difficult. However, Facebook became very distracting for me the last few years, primarily due to political posts during the 2016 Presidential election and even worse after Donald Trump won. I found Facebook was contributing heavily to distractions and wasted time.
Here are the steps that I have taken to largely eliminate the Facebook distractions in my life:
Remove the Facebook and Facebook Messenger apps from my smartphone entirely; only check Facebook on my laptop and desktop computers.
Configure my Facebook account to only send absolutely essential email and other notifications. No marketing or promotional notifications, no “someone liked this post” notifications, etc.
Install Matt Kruse’s Social Fixer add-on for Facebook and enable its’ built-in politics filter as well as add some custom filters for “Trump,” etc. I’ll say more about Social Fixer below.
Use SelfControl on the Mac and ColdTurkey on Windows to block Facebook entirely during my work day as well as sometimes at home.
Social Fixer
I have been using Social Fixer for about three months with a dramatic reduction in mostly political distracting posts. Social Fixer is a Javascript add on for Facebook available for both the Safari web browser on the Mac and the Firefox Web browser on a number of platforms. It comes with a built-in politics filter as well as user customizable filters and many other features to enable fine control over what Facebook shows you.
Social Fixer Web Site
The politics filter proved quite good although occasionally something will slip through. This enables me to keep in touch with friends who are freaking out over Trump (for example) or other hot button topics without being inundated with a continuous stream of distracting political posts.
Social Fixer Add On for Firefox
At least so far, I have found Social Fixer is a better option than unfollowing a friend on Facebook, where you lose all of their posts whether distracting (e.g. politics) or not.
Don’t Get Your News from Facebook
Facebook, YouTube and many other social media services appear to be using recently developed — we might say unproven, mostly untried — methods such as Deep Learning and Machine Learning to recommend, prioritize, and otherwise manage a wide range of posts, notably posts with political content. As I discussed in my previous post on reducing YouTube distractions, what these methods appear to do frequently is promote posts that generate strong often irrational instinctive reactions such as our “fight or flight” response. This often overrides our higher cognitive function which we need to use for most (not all) political issues. If you really care about politics or humanity, as I do, you want to avoid this sort of content so that you can think calmly and rationally about important issues.
Set aside some time each day or week depending on your schedule when you are calm and collected to study current events and the issues dispassionately.
Avoid your “Ideological Echo Chamber.” Identify a range of web sites or other sources that discuss the issues deeply and carefully from many points of view, not just your own. If you are a conservative, you should be following at least a few liberal and left-wing sources. If you are a liberal, you should be following at least a few conservative and right-wing sources. You should also be following some “fringe” sources that don’t fit neatly into the traditional right-left paradigm.
Fact-check and check the context of quotes and “facts” on all sides. A genuine fact can be highly misleading if other facts are omitted. Search engines such as Google and other Internet services make this much easier than years ago, when access to a top-notch library was generally needed.
Remember that Wikipedia is not reliable on “controversial” subjects. There are many examples of interest groups and activists capturing Wikipedia pages or bogging them down in flame wars.
Wherever possible use primary sources: read the actual memo, watch the unedited long form video, etc. Wikipedia is not a primary source.
Consider finding or organizing a dedicated forum — online or real-world — to share your concerns with friends, neighbors, colleagues and others rather than broadcasting your concerns with posts on Facebook or other general purpose social media platforms.
Conclusion
In my experience, it is possible to largely eliminate the distractions from Facebook using these methods:
Remove the Facebook and Facebook Messenger apps from my smartphone entirely; only check Facebook on my laptop and desktop computers.
Configure my Facebook account to only send absolutely essential email and other notifications. No marketing or promotional notifications, no “someone liked this post” notifications, etc.
Install Matt Kruse’s Social Fixer add-on for Facebook and enable its’ built-in politics filter as well as add some custom filters for “Trump,” etc.
Use SelfControl on the Mac and ColdTurkey on Windows to block Facebook entirely during my work day as well as sometimes at home.
(C) 2018 by John F. McGowan, Ph.D.
About the author
John F. McGowan, Ph.D. solves problems using mathematics and mathematical software, including developing gesture recognition for touch devices, video compression and speech recognition technologies. He has extensive experience developing software in C, C++, MATLAB, Python, Visual Basic and many other programming languages. He has been a Visiting Scholar at HP Labs developing computer vision algorithms and software for mobile devices. He has worked as a contractor at NASA Ames Research Center involved in the research and development of image and video processing algorithms and technology. He has published articles on the origin and evolution of life, the exploration of Mars (anticipating the discovery of methane on Mars), and cheap access to space. He has a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a B.S. in physics from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
YouTube can be very distracting. It is easy to spend many minutes, hours, even days watching videos of little or no value. If for example, you value your time only at the federal minimum wage in the United States — $7.25/hour — then ten hours of wasted YouTube watching in a week represents $72.50. Many people who use YouTube, especially professionally, should value their time much higher than the minimum wage. I usually value my time at $50/hour for business planning purposes.
Distracting YouTube videos are also often highly emotional and frequently negative; they generate anger, frustration, high blood pressure and other adverse consequences whose costs beyond the immediately wasted time are difficult to even evaluate.
YouTube is funded mostly by advertising and the distracting videos often have the purpose and sometimes the effect of getting us to buy something that we don’t need or that may even be harmful to us.
In this post I will discuss several ways to reduce time wasting distractions from YouTube, present some general observations and opinions on distractions caused by YouTube, and suggest some ways YouTube might improve the end user experience and even make more money by doing so.
Active Distractions
By active distractions, I mean distractions such as e-mail notifications and smartphone notifications that actively interrupt the user. They buzz. They beep. They flash across the computer screen. They appear as alarming red badges on icons.
Like most social media web services, YouTube by default enables many active e-mail, smartphone, and computer notifications. Most of these can be turned off either in the YouTube account settings or the settings for the smartphone or computer. Generally, all you really need to receive are any bills or receipts.
Passive Distractions
For me, a bigger problem with YouTube — and also other social media such as Facebook — has been passive distractions. A passive distractions is typically something that appears in your field of view such as a thumbnail image and/or catchy emotive headline that stimulates a strong emotional response and often an urge to click on the image or link. On YouTube this is typically one or more of the recommendations produced by YouTube.
YouTube appears to be collecting and storing a detailed personal history of everything you click on, watch, or do on YouTube. Probably this is integrated with other information that Google is collecting about you.
I have used YouTube for many years and it seems to be getting much better in the last few years at finding “recommendations” that “push my buttons” — get me to click and watch videos that often aren’t that useful but cause a strong emotional reaction. This may be the consequence of new algorithms such as the Machine Learning and Deep Learning research that Google publicizes heavily.
Removing Distracting Recommendations from Your YouTube Home Page
At present (January 28, 2018), you can remove the recommendations from your default YouTube home page by clearing and pausing the search and watch histories in the YouTube Settings.
For me, removing the recommendations on the YouTube Home Page significantly reduces the passive distractions, although once I watch a video, YouTube will still push distracting recommendations on the individual video page — not the Home Page. It will also occasionally recommend some YouTube channels on the Home Page which is markedly less distracting than the personalized video recommendations.
Upper Left Corner of My YouTube Home Page
You can get to the YouTube Settings by clicking on the avatar icon/thumbnail in the upper right corner of your YouTube Home Page.
YouTube PullDown Menu with Settings Menu Item
Clicking will bring up a pulldown menu with a Settings Menu Item. Select the Settings menu item. This brings up the Settings Overview page. At the bottom of the Settings Overview page (as well as the other Settings pages) there is a History button.
My YouTube Settings Overview Page with History Button Circled
Click on the History button to bring up the settings for the search and watch histories.
Clear and Pause Watch History Menu
Use this menu to clear and pause both the search and the watch histories. Once this is done (at least for me), the personalized video recommendations disappear from your YouTube Home Page. Mostly you see your subscribed channels and occasionally YouTube will recommend an unsubscribed channel. I usually click the X button to dismiss the recommended channel.
YouTube Pushing Unsubscribed Channel
So far, this has greatly reduced the passive distractions for me from the YouTube Home Page and using YouTube.
It is pretty clear from the video recommendations that appear when watching a specific YouTube video (not the Home Page), that YouTube continues to retain watch and search history information despite the change in the settings. I still see highly personalized recommendations which can sometimes be distracting.
Blocking YouTube Entirely
You can block YouTube, Facebook, and other distracting web sites or applications entirely by using software such as SelfControl, ColdTurkey, and other competing products. These can be configured to block access to the web site or software application (such as a game) on your computer for certain periods of time such as during the work day (9 AM to 5PM for example).
One of the problems with blocking web sites is that YouTube has lectures, technical presentations, sales presentations, and other content that is genuinely useful at work. Facebook, on the other hand, is usually entirely a personal activity and blocking it during work is not a problem for most people unless your work involves Facebook.
The Race to the Bottom of the Brain Stem
What YouTube specifically and many other social media services (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) appear to be doing, whether by design or somewhat unwittingly, is what former Google engineer Tristan Harris has labeled as “the race to the bottom of the brain stem.” In practical terms, they are using “Big Data” and machine learning algorithms to identify highly emotional topics that “push our buttons,” that invoke primal impulses such as “fight or flight” that override our higher cognitive function. That gets us to click and watch videos of little or no real value.
The primal impulses are nothing new. They include such hot button topics as:
Sex
Violence
Interpersonal Conflict
Our personal and group sense of identity
Religion and spirituality
For example, if you are a heterosexual guy it is almost certain if YouTube pushes a thumbnail of a pretty scantily clad young woman, you will have an emotional response and be distracted regardless of your higher cognitive function — and often click and watch. If you are a heterosexual woman, you probably will have the same reaction to a scantily clad athletic young man. Music videos, a popular YouTube video category, in particular exploit this a lot.
Violence and interpersonal conflict in particular invoke the powerful and often short-sighted fight or flight response.
Waiting for greedy, short-sighted corporations or politicians to fix this emotional hot button pushing problem is unlikely to succeed. Government action is also difficult to reconcile with the ideal of a free press.
People — customers, consumers — need to look out for themselves, reduce the distractions, and find effective ways to insulate themselves from the emotional hot button pushing.
Why Primal Impulses Override Our Higher Cognitive Function
Primal impulses override our higher cognitive function for good reasons. The example that is often given is our ancestors thousands of years ago encountering a major predator such as a tiger or bear. There is no time for higher cognitive function. The fight or flight response kicks in and, in this case correctly, overrides and even shuts down our capacity for careful, time consuming analysis.
A more relevant modern example is handling a car accident or near car accident. There just isn’t time to perform an in depth rational analysis of what is happening. The driver needs to react immediately. In a serious car accident, hitting the brakes or turning sharply — a flight response — can be the difference between life and death.
The problem is that in the modern world we are often confronted with threats or emotional stimuli that don’t in fact require an immediate emotional response. They often require careful thought. Nonetheless, the primal instincts can take over completely. High intelligence, education is often not an adequate defense. The response is fast and instinctive as it needs to be in a car accident.
YouTube, other social media services, and other new technologies are rapidly developing greater and greater ability to invoke these primal impulses, overriding the higher cognitive function of even highly intelligent, educated, experienced people. An immediate consequence is high levels of distraction and wasted time. More serious consequences could include stoking conflicts and starting a major war, even a nuclear war.
A Better YouTube?
YouTube is funded primarily by advertising which creates a strong perverse financial incentive for the emotional hot button pushing and the distraction. The more advertising you watch, the more money they make.
A YouTube or YouTube competitor funded by short free sample videos and micro-payments for longer, more in depth content could avoid this perverse financial incentive and probably make more money. By most accounts, YouTube is not profitable and seems to be struggling to find a viable business model.
My personal impression from using YouTube is that advertising on YouTube is mostly ineffective. I go to YouTube for the content, either “how to” information or entertainment. I don’t go to YouTube for the advertising and generally ignore it. My educated guess is most YouTube viewers are the same although I am well past the main age demographic of YouTube viewers.
I would be willing to pay directly for some of the content, but typically not short few minute videos or low quality content. I don’t like subscriptions since they often prove expensive and difficult to cancel. My personal unscientific impression based on my personal experience is that free short or lower quality content and micropayments for longer in depth content would bring in more money than advertising.
YouTube uses free samples and micro-payments with movie trailers and one time rental or purchase payments for many movies, but it is clearly not their major source of revenues. In my own experience, I will pay a few dollars to “rent” a movie from YouTube a few times per month. I have never bought something based on a YouTube ad.
YouTube — and many social media services — would be better if the end users had fine grained control over the algorithms in their account settings. There are add on products such as Social Fixer for Facebook that add this to some social media services. Nanny software that enables parents to control or try to control what their children see on the Internet is a related product.
It would be better to be able to configure YouTube to block emotional hot button content except for a few hours per week when you have the time and are prepared to deal with emotional topics.
Conclusion
It is currently possible to reduce the passive distractions from personalized YouTube recommendations on your YouTube Home Page — in my experience a major source of the distractions — by clearing and pausing the watch and search histories in the YouTube Account settings. It is also possible to completely block YouTube using blocking software such SelfControl, ColdTurkey, and many others. I have had pretty good results with these methods.
More generally, it is increasingly important due to the rapidly improving distraction technology to insulate yourself from the emotional hot button pushing on YouTube and many other social media services. It is an on-going battle. YouTube could easily disable the method described in this blog post.
It is important and prudent to evaluate on a monthly or even weekly basis the distractions and emotional hot button pushing from current “technology” including social media services and smartphone operating systems. The distraction technology is improving rapidly.
The distractions are costly in time and productivity and probably have other hidden or difficult to measure costs such as buying something you don’t need, voting for a politician or public policy that is harmful, or getting into an unnecessary conflict with colleagues, friends, or family.
(C) 2018 by John F. McGowan, Ph.D.
John F. McGowan, Ph.D. solves problems using mathematics and mathematical software, including developing gesture recognition for touch devices, video compression and speech recognition technologies. He has extensive experience developing software in C, C++, MATLAB, Python, Visual Basic and many other programming languages. He has been a Visiting Scholar at HP Labs developing computer vision algorithms and software for mobile devices. He has worked as a contractor at NASA Ames Research Center involved in the research and development of image and video processing algorithms and technology. He has published articles on the origin and evolution of life, the exploration of Mars (anticipating the discovery of methane on Mars), and cheap access to space. He has a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a B.S. in physics from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
A persistent source of distractions on the Macintosh (Mac OS X) and also the iPhone (IOS) is the annoying red notification badge on the App Store icon urging you to update your apps and sometimes operating system, sometimes with disastrous consequences.
App Store in Dock Urging Update to Mac OS High Sierra
It is, for example, generally a good practice to wait some time after an update is announced and pushed by a vendor until the almost inevitable bugs are worked out before actually updating. This is particularly true of major operating system updates such as Apple’s macOS High Sierra update which featured a major security bug enabling anyone to trivially log on as an all-powerful root user, giving new meaning to the Apple “It Just Works” slogan.
In addition, the red notification badges are simply annoying and distracting, often interfering with the user’s ability to focus and concentrate on cognitively demanding work, presumably the main goal of using a computer.
Fortunately, there are some options to turn off or hide the distracting red notification badges. On Mac OS X, in the System Preferences, there is a control for the App Store. In this control, one can turn off automatic checking for updates:
System Preferences Menu Item in Apple Menu
App Store Control in System Preferences (Third from Left on Third Row)
App Store System Preferences
Note that by default automatic checking for updates is turned ON.
Unfortunately, this does not help if the App Store is already aware of an update. In my case, App Store is aware of an update for the Xcode IDE (Interactive Development Environment for software) which says it includes the super-buggy macOS High Sierra update:
Unwanted Xcode Update with macOS High Sierra
As mentioned, I would rather hold off until the bugs are worked out and I don’t want to be annoyed or distracted by the red notification badge.
By default, the App Store is included in the Dock. However, one can remove the App Store and other apps from the Dock so that the annoying red badge is hidden unless you explicitly open the App Store.
Right Click on App Store Icon to See Options
Right click on the App Store icon in the Dock to see the options. The App Store has an option “Keep In Dock.” By default this option is checked. Simple un-check the “Keep In Dock” option to remove the App Store from the Dock. You must explicitly launch the App Store for it to appear on the dock and the App Store will leave the Dock when it is closed.
Tested on a MacBook Air (13 inch, early 2014) with macOS Sierra version 10.12.6
iPhone App Store
On the iPhone, one can turn off the red notification badges on the App Store icon by launching the iPhone Setting app:
iPhone Settings App
In Settings, select Notifications:
Notifications in Settings App
Then, turn off notifications from the App Store:
App Store Notification ON/OFF Setting
Now, you will have to open the App Store to see if any updates are available. The often annoying and distracting red notification badges will no longer display.
(C) 2017 by John F. McGowan, Ph.D.
About the Author
John F. McGowan, Ph.D. solves problems using mathematics and mathematical software, including developing gesture recognition for touch devices, video compression and speech recognition technologies. He has extensive experience developing software in C, C++, MATLAB, Python, Visual Basic and many other programming languages. He has been a Visiting Scholar at HP Labs developing computer vision algorithms and software for mobile devices. He has worked as a contractor at NASA Ames Research Center involved in the research and development of image and video processing algorithms and technology. He has published articles on the origin and evolution of life, the exploration of Mars (anticipating the discovery of methane on Mars), and cheap access to space. He has a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a B.S. in physics from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
