I always knew what I wanted to do: anything in the space program. Getting a job offer to come to work at NASA Mission Control in Houston was beyond my wildest dream. To tell the truth, I would have paid them to let me come and sweep out the floors. But it worked out much […]
Curiously, the concert that I left work to attend last night was something I discovered almost exactly one week earlier (even to the same clock time). The group I went to see was Black Violin, two classically trained violinists who are a) black, from Ft. Lauderdale; b) insistent on thinking outside of the box; and c) have a strong alternative vision of how the world can be different than it is, beyond existing stereotypes or interpretations. (Yes, the highlighted words and links are in fact the names of their albums. Go listen.) Last Friday, I was on the train to spend the New Year’s holiday in my hometown of Philadelphia with friends. I had put on the music just for some simple enjoyment, and found myself transformed and emotionally intense and resonant. (Yes, it’s also when I found out about their concern in Washington, DC last night.)
Black Violin, with the National Symphony Orchestra, Feb 6, 2017
One of my favorite descriptions of my approach to the world was provided by a GROUPER a couple of years ago, during a 1:1 meeting at a conference. (I can still see the design of the French patisserie / café in my memory.) The description was that I live part of my existence in the future, but the nice part is that I “send postcards”. This is a delightful image, but it hides a painful and problematic truth: not everyone can receive “postcards from the future,” or even know that they exist. I used to think this was a simple problem of better explanation, but I have had to come to the recognition that there is more at play. An alternative metaphor comes from my son, who once made a surprised and surprising revelation once when watching me dance to a piece of music to which I resonated very strongly. He admitted that he had thought that I simply didn’t have a very good sense of rhythm. Then, as he got older and started thinking more seriously about music composition and production as a career, he listened to more music, more often, at a deeper level. His statement at a friend’s house was with a type of confused awe: “You’re trying to dance to all of the notes, not just the normal beat.”
One of my favorite and most inspirational books of my life is called Cyteen, for a number of reasons (including some too complex to go into here). I am particularly taken by one of the descriptions of a major protagonist’s sense of their life’s work… that, if they are devoted and dedicated to their passion and their gifts and their uniqueness, because of and not simply despite their unique or alternative make-up, they may have the opportunity to someday speak their “Word,” their major contribution to history’s arc. While Speaking Words to History sounds pretty cool (at least for my sense of doing what I was built to do), it comes at a major, even profound cost. I am drawn most to the myth of Cassandra, who was cursed for defying the god Apollo (isn’t that usually how things like that turn out?) by being able to see and foretell the future, but being unable to alter it, and being doomed to have others not believe her when she told them. (I have to hand it to Apollo, though: that’s a pretty exquisite form of sadistic torture. But really, just because she turned you down for a date? I mean, you’re a god and all…)
Poor Cassandra. (From Wikipedia page, public domain image: Cassandra (metaphor)
It’s really hard to explain to GROUPERs the process of finding and sending postcards from the future, and more importantly, I don’t think it’s a proper thing for me to insist that they do so. For nearly all of the students I’ve met, it’s not the right lesson to be teaching, and there are certainly a wide range of valid and important jobs that one can take on without invoking divine curses. Having someone who can simply receive the postcard, and translate part of it, is worth a lot. For example, our current experiences of politics, local and national security, and even the nature of honest communication is based on elements of situational context, information cues, and media characteristics of different information and communication technology channels. We’re asking about tolerance and acceptance of new communications media in various organizations. That sounds like a really great research project, especially when combining new forms of social messaging as various types of an advanced, or evolved, model of email (written electronic communication), or other group interactions (with or without audio and video capabilities). It might still be considered a bit ahead of the curve, or timely, because we’re in the midst of it now. But consider a study of organizational acceptance of alternative media channels conducted in 1992, fully 25 years ago. That’s before there were any iPhones, or web browsers, or T1 lines (or many of my students). No graphical email or tweets with emojis. Do the questions even make sense? For most people, not really. (At least that’s the memory of reviewer comments for the Taha and Caldwell, 1992 submission to the Human Factors Society conference.)
Back to the train last Friday. Imagine me trying to dance to all of the notes as the train pulls into (and then out of) Philadelphia as I continue my journey. The lights of Philadelphia’s Boathouse row are still holiday festive. I am crying my resonance to the music playing in my ears. I finally feel like a type of homecoming has occurred, one that I had sought in vain for nearly 40 years. In the midst of this, an insight. Normally, I wouldn’t tell anyone, or I’d write it up piecewise in journal papers. Not this time. I’m going to show you the postcard here.
A few years ago, Jeremi London (not the actor) and I worked on a model of STEM education based on the concept that what we in fact try to teach engineers in order to be functional, productive engineers is not a single thing, but a large matrix of skills, habits, attributes, and techniques. Different courses supposedly load on different matrix elements, and different students have different strengths and weaknesses in those elements. I visualize this as a type of dynamic matrix of peaks and valleys, as you might get in a audio spectrogram. What we might think of as intelligence or skill or functionality is actually an aggregation of those peaks and valleys across that range of matrix elements: a person’s functionality is, generally, how well their peaks map onto the things they need to do on a daily basis. Zero functioning is actually hard to imagine, and if most of the population was in fact functioning at zero, we might not even see it as a relevant matrix attribute element to consider. (If someone had a peak there, would we even think about it as a peak? Consider the question of tetrachromats.) For the sake of analysis and comparison, it’s important to both retain the spectrogram as a matrix, and also consider a simplified representation of it. You could call it IQ or something. Let’s just describe it as the determinant of the functionality matrix.
Some of you know that I have a deep, longstanding, and personal interest in questions of neurodiversity: creating models of acceptance, encouragement, and tolerance for people with different sets of skills and forms of excellence. (This isn’t just a “feel good” about diversity and tolerance as a moral issue. This is about benefitting from excellence where it is found, including functionality peaks due to alternative wiring that represent “signs of life” not common in the general population. Well, if you’re training PhD students, that’s not a bad thing to look for: higher, and more distinct, functionality peaks than exist in the general population. After all, not that many folks get PhDs.)
So, the more your spectrogram pattern of peaks and valleys differs from the standard version (not just higher peaks, but peaks in different places), the less “standard” you are. (Standard, in this case, represents not just the population norm of the matrix determinants, but the modal matrix pattern.) In an extreme case, someone with a whole lot of peaks in places where standard people are close to zero, and very low functioning where standard people have peaks, would find it exceptionally hard or impossible to communicate with standard folks at all. (The concept of “communication” here might work as a multi-dimensional convolution integral, or a multiplication of functions against each other. You don’t worry about that just now, unless you really want to.) The more non-standard a person is, the further their pattern is from the standard pattern, and the more overall capability and functionality it might take to compensate for the mismatch, and be seen as equivalently functional as the modal, standard person. If we considered a function where the matrix determinant was the height, and the difference in pattern was a radius (different types of different patterns would be angles, so we’re in polar coordinates), the “bowl” would be a surface of “equivalent perceived functionality,” with an edge being at a place where someone, no matter how many peaks they had or how profoundly high those peaks are, could not interact with standard folks well enough to be seen as functional. (So, you can’t see in our standard visual spectrum? Well, we think you’re blind, even if you have a great visual experience of radio waves. Too bad if you can hear and sing the vibrations of the planet. We work in 200 – 4000 Hz, thank you, and if you can’t hear or produce in that range, we won’t hear what each other is saying. Literally.)
Another of the elements we have been playing with in the lab gets the shorthand description of “The Six Dimensions of expertise,” with a corollary of “the disk”. As we described the matrix above, there are lots of different ways we could organize the elements of the matrix of ways people are good at different things. They may be socially skilled and charismatic; they may be great with tools and interfaces; they may enjoy structured rules and processes; they may enjoy mathematical analysis and quantitative exploration. There are other ways to slice skills up into different collections, but there’s been a lot of work recently into “four-quadrant” cognitive styles inventories that are used in organizational assessment. For the purposes of this discussion, all this tells us is where in the spectrogram the matrix elements of your peaks and valleys are likely to be found. Useful, if we want to do systematic comparisons of different patterns of functioning (and convolutions of functionality for communication or information alignment). Which is the “right” four-quadrant model? That’s not a proper question; it’s kind of like asking what is the “right” set of compass directions. We agree on one for the purposes of discussion, even though there isn’t even alignment between magnetic and geographic compass directions, and it’s even possible that we could have a situation where magnetic south points towards geographic north.
What I’ve described for each of the views above is far from a standard description of how we consider psychological concepts of intelligence, personality, functionality, or cognitive diversity. Lots of researchers toil very intensely in intelligence assessment or engineering aptitude evaluations, or the genetic contributions to Asperger’s syndrome, or refinements of MMPI or Myers-Briggs inventories (to use examples of standard questions in each of the three views). Mathematically, however, what I have laid out can be combined (although it’s extremely hard to draw the picture in three dimensions). Imagine the spectrogram matrix (#1) of a “standard average person” (both in terms of normative / neurotypical wiring rather than autistic spectrum, and in terms of average intelligence), where the matrix is organized according to a four-quadrant disc model where different capabilities are ordered within quadrants with respect to their relative frequency and strength in the population. Take the determinant of that matrix (note that this result should be independent of how you order the matrix elements). We’ll now define that “value” of the bottom of the bowl as “standard normative functioning in the modal pattern”.
Is this what the lab is currently working on? My goodness, no. I would NEVER assign this, in totality, as a project for a student thesis. It requires significant revisions of three or four major disciplines, as well as some advanced mathematics for the methodologies, and new forms of data collection on thousands or millions of persons on a set of variables we don’t even define well, let alone currently measure or collect. But, for the first time, I have been willing to describe a panoramic postcard of this type in a public venue. Why? For years, I was worried that lots of other people would understand, and jump on the problems, and start working on them, and that my best contributions would be left behind, meaningless and trivial. Then I started to think that this would be considered foolish and ridiculous, unless and until I took on myself the responsibility of being able to explain it better so that “most people” could get it. But, Words Spoken to History are not widely understood, even for years or decades, and the measure of the mark on the tree of knowledge is not how many people applaud when the mark is made. Galileo learned this lesson, as did Leonardo DaVinci, and Marie Curie, and Rachel Carson (and Ariane Emory). Am I comparing myself to them? No, not even close. I’m just trying to Speak my Words.
Thank you, C. J. Cherryh, for the concept of sets, and A-E, for the introduction.
Approximately 5:30 Friday (yesterday) evening, I told my unit chief that I was headed out for the evening and weekend. That was not only okay, it was expected; I’d been heading into work 11 hours earlier to work on a very active set of reports from the day’s activity in Japan, which I summarized and sent out to our colleagues. (Ah, the joy of nearly 24 hour coverage due to time zone differences: the Japanese Embassy in Tokyo starts to wind down about the same time that the first folks in Washington are getting on the Metro to start their work day.) He surprised me by encouraging me not to think about work for a couple of days as I went to a concert and planned for a quiet time at home. Well, those who know me will recognize an immediate disconnect: Barrett to not think about work for whole days at a time?
Well, that is a challenge these days, for multiple reasons. It’s actually something that we discussed in a couple of our (distributed, online) lab meetings last fall, about finding appropriate forms of balance and mechanisms for taking care of one’s internal resources. Now, it would have rung hollow if I were to take 3-4 hours on Christmas Day to write up a blog entry on work-life balance. (Don’t worry. I spent much of the day with a roaring fire, computer games, and lots of cookies.)
When I woke up this (Saturday) morning, I was looking forward to coming out to the kitchen to a waiting blanket of snow, to make some tea and settle in for a quiet day… of typing up notes and responding to Purdue emails and designing new projects. That is a day off? Well, it is a day away from reading media reports of Japan – Korea tensions or considering meeting preparations for trilateral engagement. But on the other hand, the truth is that I have somehow set myself to try to manage two full-time jobs. How does that really work?
McPherson Square, with the first snow of the season: a good day for learning.
One of the first recognitions is the difference between what I want and what is, and if there is a gap between the two, what do I want / choose to do about it? The truth is, I specifically chose the Jefferson Science Fellowship opportunity as a unique experience to expose me to activity and opportunity that I could not get in my past patterns at Purdue, with a few grad students and departmental responsibilities and a few obligations to the state of Indiana. Those aren’t bad things, but there was a gap that needed to be addressed. (When I return to Purdue, there will be another gap, because for me to return to exactly the set of activities I left this past August would be a waste of this experience, no matter how familiar, or comfortable, or well-prepared I am for them.)
I am seeing this recognition in another context when I think about the experiences of my students. To be here, in Washington DC, is more than anything an experience of learning. And sometimes, learning takes up all of my time: it is one of my primary job tasks. Learning is also a task that takes focus, and discipline, and patience. I’m not just talking about the process of collecting a bunch of facts for later regurgitation, which is what most students think of in the context of taking a class for a grade. I mean a deeper learning, about context and discernment and recognizing what aspect of this pattern is important, and real, and valuable for me to integrate into a larger whole.
Well, that can be a process of life discipline, which then applies to everything. Learning is about noticing how I balance on one leg during morning exercise, or how well I could run through the cold last night to catch the bus or rail, or… how I improve the management of the lab.
It’s often been suggested that I have a casual approach to managing the lab. Actually, this is not true. I could insist on clocked hours, minimum amounts of in-person time in the lab, weekly reports, and any number of other rules. Some people actually have de-selected the lab because I don’t have lots of those rules. As I experience this year as an immersion in this bureaucracy, I recognize that it’s not that students don’t learn anything if I impose such rules; however, it’s clear that they can easily learn the wrong things. Did you reflect on the task, or simply put in the time? Did you embrace the difficulty as a form of instruction, or simply as a burden? Do you examine the situation as a system with gaps in design or execution of objective functions, or just complain about how “they” don’t care about (fill in the blank with whatever you feel is important from your local perspective)? Do you even think about what the various objective functions are?
As a result, I now have a much deeper appreciation of what choices are being made when one of the members of the lab considers taking on a full time job at various stages of her/his graduate professional progression. These are not trivial decisions, and there are various reasons why someone may need to choose to work at a job during one’s graduate career. And I’m not casual in my feelings about this. But I need the student to learn the right lessons, and I have learned (with both students, and children, and other organizational participants) that the right lesson comes from a well-designed combination of the teacher, the student, and the lesson (there is an interesting book on this called The Seven Laws of Teaching, originally published in 1884. Read widely, question deeply.)
One of the lessons is that getting a PhD is about learning to think about questions, and developing answers, that others have not done so. If you can’t work your way all the way through your own dissertation topic and method and analysis and interpretation, you really don’t deserve the PhD. Yes, your advisor can help you, but if you need your advisor to give you all of the steps, then it’s not your PhD. (Thanks, I already have my own, and I don’t feel the need for another.) Another lesson is that very few people outside of academia, or those who do not have a PhD already, really understand what that first lesson is about. There is just a different way of thinking and working going on. Not bad, not good, just different. So, if you’re used to approaching the world with one set of priorities and tools, and you move to another place where people don’t approach the world that way, you’re going to have to shift back and forth… and most people don’t shift back and forth among ways of thinking that well.
On the other hand, given how much I think about rules and lessons and managing and studying humans for a living, if there is a rule or insight or lesson I try to share, it’s usually not just for the sake of the rule. (See above.) That’s not casual either. If there is a disagreement between myself and a student on a dissertation topic, or methodological approach, or insight available from a course, there is a possibility that the student is right and is operating based on information not available to me. (In other words, they are good and working in an alternative domain.) However, one observation of learning the right vs. wrong lesson is when I see students trying to fulfill the letter of a rule, but miss the spirit; or try to avoid the rule because it’s not ideal or fun or convenient (or “fair”?); or argue with me about how my accumulated experience is not relevant for a particular case. Again, there may be reasons why any of those is correct. But, to be honest, that’s not likely, and what concerns me more is, what lesson is the student learning or trying to execute?
So, as I move forward through 2017, there are lots more lessons to learn, and quite a few gaps to examine and determine how I might want to resolve them. I admit that I am nowhere near content with my resolution of how to perform both Purdue vs J Desk jobs ideally. (One lesson is, I really want to do this J Desk job really well, because that is the priority and opportunity available to, and surrounding, me now. I care about the Purdue version / job, but it’s hard for me to do that full time too, and still care for my health and sleep and eat properly. So it slips in priority right now… but I know that’s only for a year, not for an indefinite shift as a career. That’s a lesson also for the students.)
Lessons are, in fact, about resolving gaps—not just gaps of factual knowledge, but gaps of how experience can affect interaction with the world. I continue to explore how to find the right gaps, and resolve them in good and effective ways, to solve the right problems. That’s a fairly comforting and happy thought for me as an engineer. And although we didn’t get as much snow as I might have hoped, I can improve my recognition of what gaps were most important for me to close today.
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