Inertial Damping
I have been thinking a lot about damping lately. To be specific, inertial damping. You know, that aspect of your hybrid electric car’s regenerative braking system that recharges your batteries while you stop? Or the gyroscopic properties of a bicycle wheel that keeps you moving forward instead of falling over when you turn? Yeah, that stuff. People think about that all the time, don’t they? No?
This is what happens when a geek starts talking about their internal thought processes, and especially since I recently talked about postcards from the future, maybe I do need to explain my terms. Apparently, one of the first things I need to do is to explain that I am not talking about “inertial dampening,” which, as far as I can tell, is a science fiction plot device highly likely to get yourself into a fight with physicists for dissing their man Newton. That’s not my focus today. I’m trying to take a real physics and engineering term, and see how application of that term in a complex human setting helps me design, analyze, or improve sociotechnical systems in a more effective way… because that’s something that engineers do.
Actually, I started thinking about damping a lot based on a question that someone asked me at the end of the Jefferson Science Fellowship (JSF) lecture I gave on January 24. (For reference, the point of this lecture is to summarize the general area of work that each Fellow does, both for the policy audience of the State Department and Agency for International Development, and for the scientific audience of the National Academies.) I spoke about information flow and distributed expertise (because that’s something I do), including the challenges of appropriate coordination during event response for either physical (civil unrest, natural disaster) or cyber-physical (network or security operations) events. I got quite a few questions, as well as invitations for additional discussions with various groups across the State Dept. This was a very good feeling, in that it gave me the sense that some people could finally hear some of what I have been trying to study and communicate for years.
However, that does come with a price: when one of those people asks a question, can I give an answer that they understand and know what to do with it? In essence, that was the challenge when someone asked me a damping question. (They didn’t really ask it as a damping question, but since I am likely to see lots of things as connected feedback control systems, it’s not surprising that I heard it as one.)
If you have a large bureaucratic organization which lives on sending lots of messages to lots of people for their opinion and approval (aka “clearance”), don’t you run the risk of taking too long to respond to emerging, critical timeline events?
That’s a very reasonable question. And it takes me immediately to thoughts about damping. Imagine your new event as some sort of input function. However, the event isn’t always purely evident immediately, and it doesn’t just go from off to on instantaneously. There might be multiple events that may or may not be related to each other. You want your response (output function) to match the demands of the input function. The engineering version of this problem is one of “critical damping”. If your damping ratio is too high (over 1), your response to the new event is very slow. Although you may never over-respond to the event, it takes you a long time to actually respond to the event, and in fact, you may fail to do what needs to be done within the deadlines (people need fresh water and shelter and warmth within a matter of hours to days, or they die). We tend to assume that faster is always better. However, there is a limit / problem with that, which we now understand from the world of social media. Someone can respond *too quickly* with *too little* information, and be unable to tell the difference between the actual event that needs to be responded, and some distractor or misinformation. (Remember, I’m not trying to be political here, but since the lecture was just a few days after the Inauguration, I may have made a reference to a social media event or two.) This would be an example of having a damping ratio that is too low (close to 0), which is a different problem. (You might ask what is the inertial property here. Well, I have talked in the past about knowledge as “little inertial balls of expertise,” in the sense that expertise allows you to devote energy to efficient processing of the world and move to where you need to go in the future.) People going off on their first impression without checking sources or others’ understanding would be an “underdamped” response (damping ratio too low), which can be just as bad (but in a different way ) than a bureaucratic, “overdamped” response (damping ratio too high) that takes too long and doesn’t want to risk or challenge anything for fear of being wrong.
In essence, an effective inertial damper takes energy that comes at you, with bounces and noise and possible confusion that you don’t want to respond too much to, and turn it into energy that works for you in a time frame that makes for the tasks you need to do. That sounds great, and it’s a very interesting problem to work on. Perhaps the additional challenge is, How do I apply this to my own life? As much as I enjoy a string of fist-pumping, high-fiving successes in a non-athletic context, there is the challenge of appropriately damped responses when shifting from State Dept. to Purdue stuff. Reminder to Barrett: it’s not good to try to do two full-time jobs simultaneously for long periods, and I am feeling now the stress of trying to complete a large number of Purdue (or Indiana Space Grant) activities after spending all day working on Japan Desk activities. In fact, that stress might be better described as hysteresis, rather than damping. (Discuss.) More accurately, damping is the ability to take the frustration of emails and news feed updates and channel that energy into productive work, such as a book chapter, or journal manuscript, or even a blog entry. Like this one.
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October 23, 2017
Expanding the Territory
Now that I have returned to Purdue, I am back to experiencing some of my past habits and activities as a faculty member. In my previous entry, “Crossing Paths,” I mentioned my trip to North Dakota for the Space Grant meeting; last week, the travel was to Austin, Texas for the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES) meeting. After being in Washington for a full year, it was both refreshing and curiously strange to be back at an academic conference. More than anything else, I was able to enjoy re-connecting with colleagues and collaborators and others in a community that I have been an active part for over 25 years, rather than the valuable (but disconcerting) experience of learning a new environment and new norms in an unfamiliar context.
A year away from something so immersive as one’s primary research community does permit a new experience and view upon one’s return. It is not just that my presentations took on a slightly different tone due to the experience of writing for diplomats; I was thinking about the presentations differently, colored by my growing understanding of what it is to speak on policy topics. I was very glad to see GROUPER alumnae and hear of their successes; I enjoyed watching the current students present well and receive appreciative comments from the audience. That was much more satisfying in many ways than actually being the one presenting all of the papers. It’s an interesting expansion of perception and shift in perspective on the territory (dare I say legacy?) of one’s career. Interestingly, I could also hear it differently this time, aided by the alternative experience of last year. Where has the influence gone, and how has it traveled from its headwaters? Does the river notice its impact on the stones as it flows?
I recognize that some of what I missed while in Washington was the regular opportunity to work with and mentor people whose personal and professional trajectories could be increased. What I could begin to notice in Austin was how much influence my past efforts have had on others, even when I didn’t realize previously that what I was doing would affect them in a lasting way. In retrospect, it’s not surprising, but at the time, I found myself at a loss for words when I was introduced to a promising student by someone who had already been positively influenced by their interactions with me. I wasn’t actively recruiting new students… but I would be pleased to have such exciting and passionate people to help explore new projects and possibilities.
Another area of recognition during the past two months since I returned from Washington was the change in context to describe the applications of our work in the lab. Yes, it’s easy to excite other space folks about the NASA research on Mars exploration analog projects; pilots often don’t need to be convinced about the value of our aviation weather information studies. But policy impacts? Can’t we just leave that to others? As I have learned, the answer is “no”. The connections won’t be evident to all, as we’ve already learned from the story of Cassandra and “postcards”. What is the broader context of connections, within and beyond the communities that already sense the value of what we do?
Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised about this, but nonetheless, it has taken me a while to process this change in thinking due to my experience in Washington. My conversations while in Austin did not just cover the next steps for the HFES, but next steps for national science and technology policy. The research discussions were not just posed in the context of a single principal investigator grant to a directed funding agency call… but possibilities to address broader elements of engineering’s role in society. What justification would you provide to say that your research was worth funding to people who weren’t specialists in your area, or even in STEM research in general? (Oh. This is exactly what is being proposed in the U.S. Senate.)
I happen to like GROUPER’s statement of why we exist… however, I’m biased, and I already know what it means to talk about “human processes of information flow, knowledge sharing, and task coordination”. But what is that good for? A very similar question was asked by, and of, the National Academy of Engineering (now renamed as part of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine, or NASEM) to explain the role of engineering research and technology development to address 14 “global Grand Challenges” facing society in the 21st Century. Speakers at the Global Grand Challenges Summit (GGCS) in Washington in July asked members of the audience to think about how their work might address any of the Grand Challenges: in essence, a call to consider expanding one’s territory of impact. And when I brought that question to the lab, an interesting insight emerged.
GROUPER research addresses seven of the 14 Grand Challenges.
Five of these are pretty obvious: PERCH research on brain injury recovery and personalized medicine for chronic care directly touches on “Personalized Learning,” “Reverse-Engineer the Brain,” and “Advance Health Informatics”. CORAL and SHARK work on secure supply chains and network operations center teams hits on “Secure Cyberspace”. These projects, together with our STINGRAY work on spaceflight operations, provide examples of “Engineer the Tools of Scientific Discovery,” particularly discovery conducted by interdisciplinary teams of humans. In addition, there are two more areas that benefit by GROUPER’s ability to capitalize on connections. It’s not just the individualized brain trajectories and chronic care models, but the discussion of Systems Engineering to support improved information architectures for non-text references, that helps address the push to “Engineer Better Medicines.” Improved information architectures, improved network operations and event responses, and better cognitive framing for addressing uncertainty in event prediction and response all assist in the effort to “Restore and Improve Urban Infrastructure”.
That’s a very big territory. There’s more to do, not less. Who else wants to go explore and map such beautiful frontiers?
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