grouperlab

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March 25, 2012

Your 21st Century Has Arrived

Often, I spend my weekends catching up on work deadlines and writing papers and proposals for our research.  That’s the life of a faculty member, and since I really enjoy my research, that isn’t such a bad thing.  However, I’m also the parent of two twentysomething children (!!!), and I spent time talking with each of them on Saturday afternoon.  At the risk of soundly solely like an overly proud parent, allow me to note some of our conversations.

 

The first confession I must make is that this is not the first time I’ve looked to my children’s lives for a research discussion.  Their use of information technology during the days of Myspace and Facebook has supported social connections and interactions as they have moved from Madison, WI, to Conyers, GA, back to Madison and their current lives.  I found that interesting, and used their examples to write about the mathematical descriptions of coupling and persistence that support their connections to friends and family.  Yesterday’s conversations were updates on their current activity, of which there is a lot.  (Kyrie is a student at the University of Wisconsin, studying Religious Studies and Art History, with a minor in East Asian Studies.  Piers is a musician studying audio engineering at SAE in Oxford, UK, and is also known as the ambient electronica artist, Mr. Squirrel.) 

 

My first conversation was with Kyrie, who was telling me about her sports and academics (not in that order; allow me a bit of literary license).  Dad, can you help me go to the Fencing Championships?  She took up fencing as a frosh, and competes with the fencing club.  The electronic scoring that counts touches relies on signals from the metal blade to the metalized fabric in the fencing fabric.  (Those of you upset about the lack of a jet-pack and cool-looking sci-fi clothing from your 1950’s movies, you need look no further than an athletic locker room to see where your space age clothing went.)  Actually, more of our conversation focused on her excitement about ideas for an undergraduate research thesis topic… on the use of religious themes in a variety of Japanese video games.  In the same way that grudging acceptance of photography in the 19th Century led to a field of art and art criticism of the photographic medium, and the slow respect given to movies in the 20th Century now has the support of departments of film studies, Kyrie is interested in the emerging place of video games as an art and entertainment medium in the 21st Century.  (There is an exhibit on the art of video games at the Smithsonian, with a symposium that she wants to attend in May.  Dad, can you help me get there?)   We were talking about mandalas and reinterpretations of Okinawan folk dances and combinations of Shinto and Buddhist philosophies… in the characters of Final Fantasy X, a game we enjoyed playing together a few years ago.  But today, she’s talking about how software is enabling exploration of religious themes, and abstract art forms, and giving new life to history… while we’re both talking to each other on our stylish, wireless smartphone devices.  Okay… yes, I had an earpiece and microphone hooked to my ear, linked to the iPhone in my pocket, talking to my daughter while putting my bicycle in my car.  Satellite and cellular communications, wireless information technologies, while we consider visual digital culture expressed on game platforms with more computing power than designed and built and flew Apollo missions to the moon.     

 

Later that afternoon, I went to my laptop, sent Piers a short message on Facebook chat, and he called me on Skype from the room he’s renting in a house in Oxford.   Friends are trying to get him to go out to the pubs on a Saturday night, as a break from studying audio production signal processing and engineering acoustics.  No, I’m going to stay in and talk to my Dad in America.  OK, that’s cool.  Piers is having a great time, and we’re talking about his explorations and appreciation of 1970s funk pieces, and classic jazz, and the new blog he’s been asked to write on music appreciation (for once, I’m leading my kids on a social network technology).  He’s got an interesting idea for a BS thesis, to capture and integrate (and thereby honor) the songs of various indigenous peoples as a way of reminding us of the commonality of music and human connection to rhythmic expression.  (There was a bit of discussion about acoustic analysis of Stonehenge, and how one of its primary roles may have been as a resonant amphitheater—and a ballin’ party zone!  Yes, you can download an app for that, suggesting that there are cool information technology implementations of archaeology as well.)  So, we’re having a great conversation about the history of technology and society, ranging from prehistorical and Roman-era Britain (there’s a nice production studio in Bath) to the astronomical projections done in Mali that allegedly presaged the discovery of Sirius-B hundreds of years ago.  Models and debates about how items might have been used, seemingly dismissed years ago, only to be readdressed with new technologies and knowledge.  New inquiries and instruments can change our understanding of the world we thought we knew?  How primitive will others think of our keyboards and our external communication devices, just as we think of the crank telephone hanging on my wall, which I was showing him by moving my laptop.  Oh, that’s right.  Skype is a videophone.  We’re using IP addressing and 802.11 wireless connectivity for me to comment on his hairstyle and give him “thumbs up” on his recent successes.  But the phone isn’t there for making calls.  It’s art, and it’s craftsmanship, and it’s a reminder that what we are really about is information and communication and experience that we have, and share, and use in our interactions with others.

 

I used to be afraid of a dystopian view of my life, based on the sadness expressed in the song, Cat’s in the Cradle by Harry Chapin.  However, those conversations gave me a very positive sense of what and how my kids share my experience and sense of the world.   Despite not being engineers, both of my kids are demonstrating passionate integration of society and technology, of art and analysis.  We talk using technologies that were the science fiction of Star Trek, about entertainment media that allow us to bring together drums and voices and visual patterns from Edo to Edinburgh, acoustics for the Picts and Sirius binary star transits for the Dogons.  All are braided together, and a curious mind using tools in their hand and lap that cross disciplines and integrates perspectives to create a beautiful tapestry of understanding, giving lie to our worst assumptions about our limits or failures.  However, none of this is a given.  I find it a precious wonder to have had those conversations.  Those opportunities for sharing stretch my brain just a bit more, listening to the ones whom I once fed strained peas now feed me ideas and examples for research in socio-technical systems engineering.  

 

I didn’t expect the doorbell to ring, announcing the delivery of that 21st Century I ordered.  It didn’t come packaged as I expected it.  And it doesn’t come free.  But it certainly is a package I want to continue unwrapping and trying and understanding.

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March 7, 2012

Stream Management

“Hire the best people, and then get out of their way.”  — Arnold O. Beckman

 

While I was an undergraduate, I frequently heard variations of this management philosophy; as an independent-minded student, often working by myself on projects, the mindset was very appealing.  However, as a major professor and lab director, things are not always that easy. 

 

Recent updates of the lab webpage have focused on further elaborations of the range of projects (“streams”) that GROUPERs are involved and productive.  Instead of just listing the two primary research application areas (healthcare and spaceflight), we’ve now elaborated all three application areas (including STEM education), as well as the three more general methodological / theoretical considerations (communication effectiveness when resources are constrained; the effects of delays and information asynchrony on performance; and processes of knowledge sharing in teams and communities).  Why all of the additions?  Not just to sound more impressive and recruit more students (with seven grad students, two undergrads, and a 50% administrative appointment, it’s not clear that a much bigger lab is needed or wanted).  With the new population of students (see the “Restocking GROUPER” entry), it is almost inevitable that the interests of this collection in 2012 would “load” on the streams differently than the lab circa 2004 or 2008.  They even change their allegiance to a particular stream as their understanding of their topic (and their understanding of how the streams are organized) evolves through their development as students and scholars.

 

So, how does one remain sensitive and aware of these issues?  One problem, of course, is that you don’t know what someone doesn’t know, or that you didn’t agree on basic elements, until implicit expectations aren’t met, or unquestioned assumptions aren’t grasped.  This seems to show up most frequently, and with the greatest sense of immediacy, when students are in the midst of a critical written milestone (a thesis proposal or dissertation preliminary document, or a thesis or dissertation draft in preparation for a final defense).  And with that, I again recognize the challenges of managing a diverse lab that works on novel and bleeding edge problems or approaches.  There really isn’t a good way to give someone a past completed thesis and say, “Read this, and do exactly the same sort of thing with the same format, and you’ll be fine.”

 

In some cases, even that might not be sufficient.  After 22 years, a dozen dissertations chaired (and another 20-30 as a committee member), and over 30 theses chaired, it’s easy for me to have the different pictures in my head.  Research methods questions?  I just go back to my psychology background.  Systems engineering definitions?  Yes, the style of that is covered, all the way back to my sophomore Unified Engineering experience.  But what if your writing style was formed and honed by those with backgrounds in mathematical optimization, or physics, or political science, or software simulation?  I’ve experienced all of these from GROUPER students in the past two years… and they’re not the same.  Good luck with putting them all into the same box, or worse yet, into a blender and hoping that something palatable comes out.  (Suddenly, I cannot help but think about the old “Bass-O-Matic” Saturday Night Live skit.)  Yes, it would be much more straightforward to have a single stream and project focus, with all of the students having very similar backgrounds.  However, I confess that I wouldn’t enjoy it as much. 

 

There is a balance between being too far away, and being too close.  Each person, and each group, needs its own balance.  So, I’m looking for dynamically stable equilibria in academic research management and educational personal / professional development.  Last academic year, I spent a fair amount of my time working with two students both trying to finish their dissertations at the same time.  This year, the challenge has been a dissertation, a thesis, and dissertation prelim document, in addition to other research projects.  I keep insisting on being directly involved in each project, and each document, and each student—to the extent that I felt guilty and nervous when I mentioned during a lab meeting that I would be gone for a few weeks and unable to keep to the weekly schedules.  With this level of commitment, I can be both overwhelmed and concerned when I am not there every moment—exactly the opposite of Beckman’s admonitions.  And yet, when I expressed worry that the GROUPERs would be left vulnerable and exposed in the “dangerous jungle and forest” of graduate student life, the response was one of the most rewarding and valuable validations I’ve received in a number of years:

 

“We’re not in the forest.  We’re in the Lab.”

 

That’s also a philosophy I can live with.

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February 8, 2012

Feeling like a real lab

Although it’s still only early February, our academic calendar says that it’s the fourth week of the semester.  That means, there really is stuff to discuss, issues to address, and activity to promote among many of the members of the lab.  Not everyone is in West Lafayette right now, but there’s still activity engaging all of the students.  Jeff is in Maryland, working on the background section of his dissertation.  Melvis is in Hong Kong, updating her research design.  Natalie is in Spain, providing Kelly back here at Purdue with coding structures for the new Pharmacy / CHF medication study data collection and analysis.  Yes, we’ve got that distributed performance thing covered–we don’t just study it, we do it.  (That sounds more impressive than it felt two weeks ago.  These things go in cycles.)  

 

Jeremi met with her committee today to discuss her thesis concept.  She proposed some pictures as illustrations of where the thesis might eventually be able to go (“I don’t know what that means, but it’s HOT!” was one comment).  In lab meeting yesterday, we talked about Jake’s work with control room visualization and sonification, and its potential use in new generations of control rooms. (I find it interesting when news stories in the media, such as the expected licensing of a new power plant in Georgia, generate a response: “Oh, that’s what we talked about on the phone last week–it looks like our work has even more relevance now”.)  However, it wasn’t just the topics of these discussions that fills me with enthusiasm; it was the process.  The discussion of Jake’s research also became a primer on how academics put together research proposals–not just the cool ideas, but how to write deliverables, and craft budgets, and manage timelines.  Jeremi’s thesis committee helped talk about how to organize a project that makes real impact on a field, but has enough grounding in existing research to give others a sense of continuity and comprehension.  The folks at the National Science Foundation talk about Intellectual Merit and Broader Impact; a good project considers both, and communicates them both well.

 

The album by the lab’s alter ego musical persona, Surviving December (a hip-hop emo group), is filling out its tracklist.  (These are, in fact, humorous references to comments actually made during lab meetings.)  The new hit is “Doin’ 2 B Doin’ 2 B Doin'”–a reference to this sense of additional productivity and generativity.  Let’s look at tools to help with increased project activity.  We need access to the shared drive.  The new monitor helps a lot in discussing the Statement of Work–what else do we need?  Mendeley has most of the lab’s references and cited papers in it: over 2500, including the merged set from Caldwell’s EndNote collection.  [If you’re not in the lab, you can’t see us.  But we’re there.]  So, the persona and the tracks are a bit of humor to lighten the mood and add a sense of shared identity and experience.  But the work is real.  And so is the lab’s activity.  Let’s do real things, with real impact, in real settings.  Because that’s what engineers do.  Ideas to reality.

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January 6, 2012

Happy New Year

It’s been a while, but we’re now starting up again with the GROUPER lab meetings for Spring Semester.  This also means that I am trying to update our lab’s website, which you can find at http://www.grouperlab.org.  Are we busy?  Of course.  Do we just spend our time promoting ourselves? No.  However, GROUPER is glad to note that two GROUPER alumnae, Sandra Garrett and Ashley Benedict, were featured in the January 2012 Newsletter of the Society for Health Systems. (You can see their paper here, courtesy of the Institute of Industrial Engineers.)

 

Stay tuned.  Later this month, we should have some additional papers in development for the 2012 Industrial and Systems Engineering Research Conference; the 2012 Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics International Conference, and most immediately, the Society for Health Systems / Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Symposium on Human Factors in Healthcare being held in March in Baltimore.  We’re working on journal papers, and in February, it will be time for the HFES Annual Meeting papers to be submitted.  As you can tell, the mark of a new year for GROUPER is one of file and status updates.  Resolutions?  Well, maybe a little (like being more timely in our blog updates), but we prefer to do the work than promise that someday…

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November 14, 2011

Push and Pull

Well, it’s been a while.  We haven’t written, and maybe someone out there has noticed this.  But, since we don’t have lots of followers, this lag has not cost us followers.  Alternatively, I could say that we are not responsible for excessive irrelevant material that clogs your email inbox and causes you to want to delete your subscription.  I did reference, in an earlier post, the problems of people complaining about posts on a discussion list that they consider irrelevant by asking to be removed from the list—by replying to the entire list.  This is a problem of “push” vs. “pull” information and communications technologies.  You might want to have your favorite information delivered right to you, but it seems unreasonable to have, as was once prophesied, a “Me Channel” with nothing but information that you want, but all of the information you want.

 

So, in the lab last Thursday, we did a bit of push and pull ourselves.  We went around the room, and everyone gave a brief update about the project that they are currently working on for their next degree—undergraduate honors, master’s thesis, doctoral dissertation.  They’re not all on the same topic, of course.   In fact, the best way of describing GROUPER research is a matrix of application domains (healthcare, spaceflight, STEM education) and theoretical concerns (communication bandwidth limits, requirements for knowledge sharing, and system delays and lags).  But there are enough areas of overlap, and enough interests among the lab members, that each person could share feedback on others’ project ideas.  Interestingly, one of the students then asked what I thought distinguished GROUPER from other research labs across IE or the College of Engineering.

 

Collaboration is already an evident element of the lab, just from the setting that generated the question.  Students aren’t competing against each other for access to the equipment, or the field site, or even for the money.  (That’s right.  This semester, I’m funding none of the students—they have assistantships from other sources.)  But I think there is something even more important operating: contact hours.  So far this month, I estimate that I’ve spent approximately seven hours in individual meetings with students, four hours in group-level meetings, and another 10-12 hours in reading and reviewing emails and sending responses.  (The email creates a modern update to what used to be described as “management by wandering around”—discussions occur that fuel internet searches that result in paper downloads that get attached to email replies.)  Whether this is push or pull may depend a bit on where you sit.  However, it should be clear that the process of generating a research topic is not strictly sequential.  I don’t like telling people exactly what to do.  It goes against my general philosophy.  (I can most certainly tell them what I want accomplished, and I do.)  So, the student who expects their dissertation to be crafted solely by me, for them to execute without having to think about it, is going to be in for some problems.  By contrast, I don’t like waiting in an information vacuum, and I am very uncomfortable leaving a situation to stagnate if I can actively do something about it.  (I’m an engineer.  “What do I do about it?” is a frequently expressed sentiment.)

 

I also realized something recently.  After more than 20 years as a faculty member, and closing in on 40 MS and PhD students, there is a lot of experience that any new GROUPER should have the opportunity to call upon for assistance.  That experience may come from others in the lab—hence the value of the GROUPER project discussions.  But some of it is in my head, just waiting for the right connection to emerge.  It can’t be purely pull from the student: they don’t always know what question to ask, because they haven’t been through this before.  If they can only meet with me once they have figured it out, that’s a large waste of time and a failure to engage available expertise.  But undiluted push doesn’t work either: they do need to put some effort into making sense of the problem and helping me understand their own perspective.  As my son once said, “Part of learning is trying to figure out the answers yourself.”

 

I’m not sure I want the “Me Channel”.  I learn a fair amount from making new connections based on things I haven’t thought about before, from perspectives that aren’t mine.  GROUPER theses and dissertations wouldn’t be as interesting or far-reaching if they only came from a single disciplinary or experiential origin.  New knowledge isn’t purely about learning what I’ve already decided is important—because if I don’t know, what criteria am I supposed to use to figure out what I need to know?  Obviously, though, I can’t spend all of my time just picking up random factoids: lectures still need to have a point (and they need to get written) and conference presentations and journal papers still need to answer the question about addressing the research question in an effective and focused way.  Oh, yeah.  It’s that exploitation and exploration thing again—I talked about that before, too.    Push and pull.  What is the dynamic stability range of information access patterns?  Don’t wait for someone else to generate the answer for you, though.

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September 27, 2011

GROUPERs on GROUPER

BC Intro:

After the GROUPER lab meeting on September 8, and in concert with my own blog entry, I asked both the continuing and new students to consider their experience in learning about life in the lab.  There were several styles of response, from undergraduates and graduates, new and continuing, that describe GROUPER in ways that I couldn’t.  So, let’s just hear from them.

 

The first commentary comes from Jeremi, who actually created her own blog post at: http://jeremilondon.wordpress.com/2011/09/22/grouper-lab-__-chess-club-__/.

 

Next is Marissa:

School is back in session and with that comes new students. There are a few new graduate students who are currently trying to figure out if GROUPER is right for them. At the most recent lab meeting, Dr. Caldwell decided it would be best for the current GROUPERs and the “prospective” GROUPERs to bond over some pizza. One of the new graduate students asked me how I came to the conclusion that I wanted to study “information and knowledge sharing and nursing expertise coordination in healthcare”. I turned to him and empathized as I was in his exact predicament a year ago. I was trying to figure out whether or not GROUPER was right for me and also a specific research interest. I told this student that I was not one of those students who knew exactly from the age of five that I wanted to go to Purdue University and be a member of the GROUPER lab studying in the healthcare field. I was quite far from it. (I think when I was five I told my dad I wanted to be a ballerina.) The only things I knew when I sat in the GROUPER lab for the first time a year ago was that I wanted to study healthcare and that I enjoyed working with people and studying how they behave.

The GROUPER lab does not recruit one specific type of graduate student and quite frankly, the lab doesn’t even stick with just graduate students. Not all of our students have a main focus in industrial engineering and not all of the students are stellar at one particular component of industrial engineering. (The only common ground is that all lab members study how people get, share, and use information well.) When I joined the lab, there was one student studying space flight operations, one student studying first responders, and two students studying two separate components of the healthcare delivery system. Once I joined, two more students deemed GROUPER right for them. One was studying another unique component of healthcare and the other, like me, had no clue! Through the lab meetings during my first semester as a Boilermaker, two of my GROUPER labmates, Dr. Caldwell, and myself decided that we would write two papers for a conference simply because we had an interest in the two subjects of the papers. One of those papers became the basis for my research; I found the topic absolutely fascinating. Therefore, the above wordy description of my research was neither my idea nor Dr. Caldwell’s idea; in essence, it was GROUPER’s idea.

GROUPER is filled with diverse, forward-thinking overachievers. What makes us unique is that although we have very specific and different research topics, we are able to come together to talk about what we find interesting (or funny, controversial, frustrating, inspiring) in order to help each other, and even ourselves, find one’s niche.

 

A few words from Kelly:

As a new student to the GROUPER lab, I have had a lot of positive feelings toward the lab in the short amount of time I’ve been here. The collaboration that happens during the lab meetings is productive and beneficial, even to members who are not working on the project that is being discussed. Everyone is very welcoming and is not just willing to help, but happy to help. With the number of projects going on, it would seem that it would be hard to get the entire lab to come together and focus on helping the lab as a whole. But, this is not the case. Each person in the group wants everyone else to succeed and has the best interest of the lab at heart. The GROUPER lab has been so welcoming and helpful and I look forward to starting my own research and continuing to work with this group.

 

Finally (and fittingly), comments from Natalie:

Each time I explain my research project that analyzes information sharing and adherence in Congestive Heart Failure patients, I pause and wait, and without fail, the respondent utters some form of the question, “Oh, that’s interesting, but how is that engineering?”  Explaining what GROUPER does, requires revamping the stereotypical definition of engineering. Yes, most engineers build, design, or formulate ‘things’. However, many people struggle to grasp the concept of engineering the intangible. GROUPER focuses on engineering information and communication in such a way that the system associated with the information is understandable for all users. We strive to bridge the gap between information and technology. If we cannot find a way to deliver this advanced technology on a consistent basis, what purpose does it serve?

 

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September 16, 2011

Restocking GROUPER

On campus, the new school year is well underway, and there is a lot of novelty on my mind.  New projects (especially Purdue’s selection as one of two finalists for the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination), new assignments, and especially new students.  But that’s not really how this entry started.  It started with a discussion list.

 

A researcher on one of the discussion lists which I (BC) follow (this one happened to be within the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, but you can find this in a variety of groups on a variety of topics) had initiated a thread about a particular research topic.  Potentially interesting, but not really my specialty, so I only glanced through it.  What really drew my attention, though, was some of the responses to this new thread.  Several people were highly annoyed that someone had taken up the bandwidth of a thread to discuss a topic that wasn’t in their particular interest.  In fact, some then complained that the thread was inappropriate for the list, because it wasn’t particularly interesting to them.  You can probably guess what happened next.  More comments about the complaints about the thread, and then a set of finger pointing at the software itself for not keeping unwanted discussions out of their mailboxes (I think that the “delete” key works especially well for that function), followed by a slew of “remove me from the list” emails.  (Nothing is a bigger waste of bandwidth than a set of “remove me” postings to a discussion list.)  To me, this sort of behavior (and it seems to be common across email and web-based discussions) is fascinating, because it seems to reflect different attitudes about willingness to be exposed to new material that isn’t exactly within one’s current focus of view.  I thought about writing an entry on “Pushing and Pulling Sticky Balls: Accretions and Connections of Knowledge as Inertia,” and maybe I still will.  But not today.

 

I think what became even more fascinating to me is this idea of tolerance for novelty, as a companion to or essential tension against desire for directed focus.  Those who know me know that I do seem to tolerate and collect a fairly large range of novel connections, and seek out new connections between existing ideas.  (It seems that one of the best ways of distinguishing those who “get” me and those who don’t is their response to one of my nonlinear connection interactions.)  This shows up especially clearly in the process of recruiting students.  GROUPER spends an unusual amount of effort in trying to identify students who like working across project areas, and in collaborative teams, as potential members.  This fall is a special challenge: all but one of the students who were continuing members one year ago today are now elsewhere.  (Three have taken permanent jobs—all accepted before depositing their PhD dissertation.)  It’s a lot to place the burden of maintaining the culture of the lab on one PhD student, one MS student, and one undergraduate (only the MS student was part of the lab on September 15, 2010).  We have three new potential graduate students and a new undergraduate, all wanting to start in the lab—more than the current population, and the single largest addition of students (in terms of percentage change in lab size) in the 20 years of GROUPER.  So, what’s a professor and lab director to do?

 

I called out for pizza (well, actually, one of the students did) and told some stories. 

 

Telling stories is a famous mechanism of developing and sustaining an entrepreneurial organizational culture—Hewlett-Packard was legendary for their “Bill and Dave” stories.  So, I told some “Dr. C” stories of novelty and connection and the pictures in my head.  (Again, that discussion can come later—it’s about a three-dimensional coordinate axis of sensory experience of the world, capability of processing the world from external or internal frames of reference, and overall cognitive capacity, which I tend to reference as “horsepower”.)  It was interesting, and gratifying, that three of the GROUPERs made the connection to neurodiversity that had spawned my development of the coordinate space, even though I hadn’t mentioned it in that context.  (That’s another hint that there is a possibility for a good match—not only do they “get” my connections, but they can make connections like the ones I make.)

 

In a little while, you’ll get to read the students’ perspectives on this “restocking” and story telling pizza party.  Until then, what is my sense of the need to restock a lab without completely changing what is its essence?  I continue to think about this process of novel discovery and focused activity as an essential balance affecting individuals, and teams, and organizations.  It may even be an evolutionary requirement with a fundamental mathematical dynamic—similar balances can be seen in the behavior of ant colonies, balancing environmental exploration and resource exploitation.  Maybe we’ll get to study that sometime, too.  Obviously, there is no lack of topics for the blog, or for our projects and papers.  Bear with us, though, if you’re waiting for updates here: there’s a lot to work on, and an ecosystem to innovate.

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July 19, 2011

A commentary on PR

(OK–BC here, admitting to a shameless plug.  I am running for an Executive Council seat in the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, and while others have sent out “vote for me” messages, I thought it would make more sense if I made some commentary on what I was thinking about, so that people would have a clear indication of why they should–or shouldn’t–consider me.  So, this is the text of that commentary.)

Good morning / afternoon, colleagues and friends.  It’s a busy summer for everyone—so much so that I hope you won’t mind this belated reminder to make sure to vote for Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES) Officers and Executive Council members…  You have two votes to make for Executive Council; I hope you are willing to use one of them for me.

This is a time of challenges, not just for HFES, but for many broad areas of human factors practice, research, and society.  It’s also a time for discussion and debate on how we might best meet those challenges.  For instance, the HFES discussion list recently included a consideration of writing Congressional representatives to address proposed reductions in social and behavioral research funding; others suggested that this might not be an effective (or ergonomic!) strategy.  If you are a US government employee, or at a university like mine with strict anti-lobbying concerns, you may not even see a letter to your Senator or Representative as a legitimate option for you.  The Society must be able to address this range of perspectives, and demonstrate awareness that there are few simple solutions to organizational, social, and societal challenges, and we should avoid simplistic ones.

One issue that gives me frequent pause is one of effective communication and, for lack of a better term, “public relations (PR)”.  In another part of my life, I manage NASA education, engagement, and scholarship / fellowship programs for the State of Indiana.   I have been a space geek for most of my life; I forget that other people don’t get deeply involved in the richness of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education addressing the range of aerospace engineering and earth and space sciences.  So, it’s especially surprising for me when I have people ask questions such as “Why are they cancelling NASA?”  “Why is NASA preventing commercial space companies from working on vehicles?”  “Couldn’t we just go to Mars now instead of wasting money on the Space Station?”  Details aside, what causes me such surprise is that, although people are interested in this aspect of STEM in their lives, their understanding is highly limited—and really, whose fault is that?  In other words, why does NASA need PR?  Putting on my best human factors / macroergonomics hat, I know better than to just blame the user.  We who do the rocket science have to stop assuming that the rest of the world will immediately understand it the way we do, with the priorities we have.  PR is about learning those other priorities and understandings, and communicating our goals based on those criteria.

Although there are only a few thousand of us in HFES, I see some of the same concerns in play.  Without question, HFES seeks to be a society that promotes research, and our research is intended to improve the quality of human lives.  It sounds like an ideal area of application, investigation, and learning.  Is it true that the public doesn’t care about human factors?  I don’t know if I could go through a day of popular media and network television (especially not if I surf through the shopping channels) without a mention of “ergonomic” or “user design” or “safety” – the stuff we do all the time.  But if the public doesn’t know who we are, or what we’re doing, or how, it probably isn’t a great place to start to complain about their limited understanding of STEM and direct them to an advanced textbook.  (For much of the public, I am learning, any college level textbook is an “advanced textbook”.)  Whether you elect me for Executive Council or not, this is an issue that we face, and especially for a small professional society in this economic and political and social setting, effective PR may be more than an afterthought or necessary evil.  This is not just about the impact factor of this journal or the acceptance rate at that conference.  Our contributions to society are more vital, and more subtle, than that.  No matter what role any of us have in the Society, that is a task for all of us to address, a challenge for all of us to meet.

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July 19, 2011

Delays and Synchrony

In our first post, we talked about how our research inspired us to start a GROUPER Blog to provide you with updates more frequently than our journal and conference publications.  We anticipate that the various projects going on in the world are moving faster than the year-long or half-year-long publication cycle permits us to get updates out to the designers.  In the previous post, Dr. Caldwell discussed the idea of people’s perception of waiting.  In this post, we will combine these two ideas with a discussion of waiting during information sharing.  We have talked about aligning the update frequencies of the design and our research output, and we have talked about what people feel when they wait.  Today, we will present our perspectives of a second timing concept, delay.

Delay, lag, latency, and lateness are all words that describe the fact that information does not arrive instantaneously to its intended receiver.  We can go into detail about why this is always true in another post, but to keep things brief we will limit today’s discussion to obvious cases of delay.  Consider cases where e-mails are sent across the Internet, voice mails are left for our family members, satellite news video feeds are transmitted up to orbit and back down on the other side of the world, and memos and documents are shared between team members.  All of these cases experience some large or small amount of delay between when the sender generates information and when the receiver gets that information.

When there is delay, people have to compensate so that they can still do their job well.  The degree to which they have to compensate depends on the medium of communication.  GROUPER classifies communication media two ways:  synchronous media and asynchronous media.  Synchronous media are those in which the sender and receiver wait for each other to send messages and receive messages.  Telephone conversations, chat-room messages, television and radio, and face-to-face communication are all synchronous.  The receiver can sometimes process the message as the sender is generating it, as in the case of a face-to-face message or telephone conversation.  Other times, the receiver must wait for the sender to compose and send the message, as in the chat-room message, but the receiver is still listening and waiting for the message.

In contrast, asynchronous media are those in which the senders do not wait for the receivers to get their message and respond.  This is because the senders can expect the delay in the communication to be longer than they are willing to sit there and wait.  E-mail, voice mail, postal mail, memos and documentation, and blogs are all asynchronous.  When dealing with asynchronous media, the sender can send a message and forget about it, moving on to other tasks.  The receiver can work on her tasks and forget about the sender until she decides to check for, or the medium notifies her of, a new message.

This is not going to turn into a physics / philosophy discussion about whether two events can actually be truly simultaneous.  Our focus is on whether the delay between events is meaningful compared to the time involved in the task requiring the information flow.  This depends on the task itself, and not just the total amount of delay.  If I’m listening to a stereo CD, or watching a video with audio track, a few tens of milliseconds makes a huge difference in my perceptual system’s experience of synchronous behavior.  However, if I send out documents before going on a week-long vacation “off the grid,” it doesn’t matter to me whether the responses take an hour or six days.  The GROUPER emphasis is on whether delay interrupts one’s cycles of task performance, with time spent waiting rather than doing.

On occasion, we experience a shift in the media, for example when sending an e-mail at work, we might receive a very quick reply.  We then reply quickly ourselves, and, for a short period, the e-mail medium becomes more like an instant-message (synchronous) medium.  However, GROUPER still classifies e-mail as asynchronous in general because at any moment the two communicators may leave the communication without the other being aware of it.  We’ve experienced both the unexpected reply to a late-night email, and the frustration and change in expectation when we realize that work time for us is either sleep or holiday time for someone else, and that is why they’re not available.

Neither synchronous media nor asynchronous media is always better than the other, but each have specific situations in which they are better and should be used.  For example, if the goal of the news channel is to deliver news to viewers faster than their competitors can, then they will want to forgo the option of editing the satellite news feeds from the reporter on-location and tolerate the delay in the live feed.  If the goal is to provide a company-wide notice of a new corporate policy, it may be best to not interrupt daily tasks, but to leave an e-mail for all employees for when they have a moment to really absorb it—and not require them to drop their tools and listen, for example.

The challenge that GROUPER has identified with regard to synchronous and asynchronous media is that, when communication has enough delay, it is not only disruptively long, but the receiver must nevertheless wait for the message to come through the medium before he can continue his work.  The receiver can also unknowingly continue to work in the environment with information that is either incorrect or incomplete.  For example, telemedicine can be both synchronous and asynchronous.  Telemedicine, or distance medicine, involves the use of technology to enable patients to communicate with their physicians and physicians to communicate with other healthcare professionals.  Telemedicine is synchronous when a patient communicates with his physician in real time via videoconferencing.  All of the information shared between the two parties is both timely and accurate and does not hinder the physician’s capacity to make informed decisions regarding the patient’s care—unless the patient is withholding certain information.  (See Vallette et al. (2011) for more information.)  Telemedicine can also be asynchronous, for example when two physicians, a primary care physician and a specialist, are communicating regarding a patient’s care and using email-like store-and-forward technology in order to share the patient’s medical history documents.  While using this technology allows the specialist to view the documents on her own time, the patient might come into the primary care physician’s office with an emergency, and the specialist might not see any change in the patient’s medical documents in time for the patient’s next visit.  Then she might make a diagnosis based on outdated information.  The specialist would never intend, of course, to make a misdiagnosis, but, unfortunately, in this case she may not know the whole story because of the nonroutine visit by the patient.  Without respect for the medical-document medium as an asynchronous medium, the specialist is more likely to forget that she may not always have the most up-to-date information.

Further reading:

Caldwell, B. S. (2008).  Knowledge sharing and expertise coordination of event response in organizations.  Applied Ergonomics 39, pp 427-438.

Vallette, M. A., Chafac, M. N., Benedict, A. J. & Caldwell, B. S. (2011). Reducing barriers to knowledge sharing among healthcare professionals and patients. Proceedings of the Industrial Engineering Research Conference. Reno, Nevada: Institute of Industrial Engineers, Inc.

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May 26, 2011

What are we waiting for?

Prof. Caldwell (BC) here….

One potential value of a blog like this is its grain size.  Ideas that are too small for a journal paper or full grant proposal, but still of some potential interest for later use, can be just the right size for a 1100 word blog entry.  Just a couple of references, the outline of a project or concept for further development, and a tease for those who might find GROUPER an appealing place to study, collaborate, or support.  Here’s the first of those items.

Last Monday, I was in Chicago (after a weekend of graduation parties for two new PhDs, Ashley and Karim) to submit a visa request for a trip to China.  When I arrive at the Chinese Consulate at about 9:45, there is a room full of people sitting and waiting, a line of people standing and waiting, and five windows of clerks.  Since I’m there for a visa, rather than something else, I select a ticket for that type of service, and sit down.  How long am I going to have to wait, and will it matter that the Consulate closes at 12 noon for lunch?

Other IE researchers sitting in this waiting room might start thinking about queueing models and arrival distributions, but my friend and I began to discuss the perception of waiting and the sense of time pressure.  This field of human perception research dates back to the laboratories of Wilhelm Wundt and William James (not to be confused with author brother Henry James) in the 19th Century, and the concept of the “perceptual now”.   In this model, one’s sense of time passage is tied to two processes—a sampling of an internal clock, and processing of one’s own task activities (physical or mental).  The more you are doing during a period of external (“objective”), the fewer samples of the internal clock one takes, and the larger the list of things done between sampling cycles.  The theory suggests that the sense of having the time “filled” leads to a lower sense of boredom, and less perceived time passage.  Conversely, with less to do, there are more opportunities to sample the internal clock, and less activity that is perceived as filling that period between samples.

Prior work in the lab has studied not only the issue of time perception, but of time pressure.  Instead of conceiving time pressure as just the amount of time until a deadline arrives, we have considered pressure as a ratio of time required for a task (Tr) to the time available (Ta) to complete it.  Waiting is a challenge, though, because there is both the time required to do the thing you came to do (file the visa paperwork), and the time waiting to get to the window to do the thing you came to do.  Thus, we have a compound task of passive waiting and active doing, both with their own Tr / Ta ratio and a composite ratio.

So, while I am working this out, I notice that time has passed, and the number called is closer to my number.  OK, the queueing folks have something to say here—I’m trying to estimate the average service time for my type of service.  But, I’m also noticing that by having something else to do, one source of stress (time perception) is reduced.  Because this is a Chinese Consulate, I also think about tai chi and meditation activities.  This leads to a consideration of four different ways that one could deal with the wait, and four different experiences of the passage of time:

  • Pause:  a quiet state, without attending to time (sleep or meditation)
  • Hold:  passive waiting, low activity / limited attention to other tasks (“watching the clock”)
  • Distract:  using the waiting time to do other tasks, not attending to time
  • Do:  Active involvement in the task one intended to do.

Time pressure, in terms of the Tr / Ta ratio, now looks like the sum of wait time (which is an estimate of the average service time * the number of people in front of me) + my service time, divided by the time from now until noon.  (Yes, I’m skipping over a lot.  If you want more, get in touch with us.)  It’s looking better, because some people are not there, and average service time is going down—but it’s getting closer to noon.

The sense of time pressure is another element of the psychological effect of the Tr / Ta ratio, but this has multiple factors including individual personality, cost of missing the deadline, “hardness” of the deadline (is 12:00 really 12:00:00, or a few minutes after 12, or something else?) , and prior experience.  There seem to be four stages of this sense of time pressure affecting the experience of waiting (especially when it’s hard to attend to something else):

  • Comfortable
  • Pressured
  • Panicked
  • Resigned

The lab has done some work in determining where the transitions are between these stages, but there is a lot tied to the complex interaction of person, situation, context, and experience.  There are different strategies to help the experience of a user dealing with pressure-laden delays.  I tend to like the distraction and pause responses, as well as ensuring that backup plans and additional flexibility keep pressured from morphing into panicked.  That’s for me, though, from the user’s perspective.  Some of our papers also discuss strategies from the provider’s perspective.

In the end, I got to the visa window at about 11:50, and only took about four minutes to provide the required forms.  I could talk more about the nature of service quality, but that’s for another time and venue (I will be working on a contribution to an edited volume on intercultural service systems later this spring).   I got a pickup slip indicating when I should return for the passport and visa—that Friday—and what to do—stand in the pickup line.  If I had gotten to the window with the documents by 11:00, I could possibly have gotten rush service and picked up the visa by 2:00 that afternoon.  However, there was no sense of pressure there, since I didn’t know about that earlier deadline and thus made no effort to arrive at the consulate early enough to meet that deadline.  (Hmmm… there’s no pressure from a deadline you’re not aware exists; one can create artificial internal deadlines where no external deadline or performance impact exists.)  All in all, a pretty good morning’s experience.

Oh, and why am I going to China?  Giving lectures on human factors and systems engineering for the development of a university program in industrial engineering.  How fitting.

For further reading:

Caldwell, B. S., and Wang, E. (2009). Delays and User Performance in Human-Computer-Network Interaction Tasks.  Human Factors, 51 (6), pp 813-830.

Caldwell, B. S., and Garrett, S.K.  (2010).  Coordination of Event Detection and Task Management in Time-Critical Settings.  In Mosier, K., and Fischer, U. (Eds.,) Informed by Knowledge: Expert Behavior in Complex Settings, ch. 22.  Florence, KY: Psychology Press / Taylor & Francis.

James, W. (1890). The Principles of Psychology. New York: H. Holt and Co.

Svenson, O., & Maule, A. J. (Eds.). (1993). Time Pressure and Stress in Human Judgment and Decision Making. New York: Plenum Press.

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