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 21^st 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?

July 30, 2017

The Last Weekend, Part 1: Talking in Jazz

“It’s a beautiful day outside. I wish they could all be like today.”

“It is wonderful. I’m glad we have any day like today.”

The past two weeks have included some of the most beautiful weather one could hope for in Washington. Of course, we’ve also had the thunderstorms, and flood warnings, and 95F weather, but today was wonderful. As a result, it was easy to take a few extra minutes to walk around the various neighborhoods and take in moments of beauty and peace on what is, amazingly, my last full weekend of The Adventure here in DC. (Next weekend, I will be on campus for Commencement and Liang’s PhD hooding; after that, it will be moves with Amber and myself, taking up much of my attention.) A sunny day, with a bit of breeze and clear blue skies to allow my mind to explore and expand across my internal and external landscape. Walking around down on the National Mall can even have those moments of peace among all of the people, if one listens. Hear that? A musician busking across from the Museum of Natural History, or in front of the Museum of American History. What’s that singer singing, at Lafayette Square next to the White House?

One thing that has helped me gain a sense of balance while I have been here has been the effort to take the time to notice and appreciate elements of nature and ephemeral beauty when they occur. I noticed this earlier this month, when (on an early Monday morning return from Indiana) I was listening to a delightfully resonant piece of music while walking among one of our busy commuting streets. Taking pleasure in the music (perhaps I was dancing just a little bit?) was something that could emanate easily in that sense of pleasure and enjoyment; people I passed brightened up a bit and smiled. Why was the music so important? Recently, I have come to the realization that I don’t just want to hear the music, I want to allow and enable others to hear that resonant tune that brings joy to the face or even a tear to the eye. So, it’s been on my mind a lot recently.

Imagine, then, a cool and sunny day earlier this week (yes, in July, in Washington); I crossed the street and, just as I walked past an old streetlight on my way into the office, a breeze caught and rustled my clothes and touched my face. This was truly a gift of sensory awareness. I looked up, and there between the old streetlight and a new tree, silhouetted by the sun, was a delightful dragonfly moving between branch and blossom.

“Dragonfly out in the sun, you know what I mean, don’t you know…

“And this old world is a new world and a bold world for me… And I’m feelin’ good.”

An actual dragonfly gave me the reminder of the shared experience of the classic Nina Simone tune, Feelin’ Good. How can I be upset about that? That was the start of a very productive day.

Hearing the jazz in a moment’s pause on the way into work… and wanting to share that with others. Recently, I was told by one or two GROUPERs, and my best friend, that I “talk in jazz”. How can that be? What can that mean? Well, imagine that people studying a discipline are learning to recognize notes and specific tunes. Well, one can play a melody using nothing but tuning forks, and someone could recognize a snippet of a Brandenburg Concerto, or a rock anthem, or a jazz standard. But most of us would not go to a concert to hear that. We want to hear the instrumentation, and the virtuosic performance, and maybe a unique interpretation. Especially in jazz, that unique interpretation does not just stay on the melody, but is a combination of skill with the basic melody and rhythm, and the ability to experiment with it within boundaries, while remaining honest to the structure and returning to the theme in time. (Perhaps my upbringing has something to do with this. I remember, as a young kid, reading the liner notes to a jazz album; I think it was Miles Davis’ “’Round About Midnight”. One of the solo riffs during the title song has a distinctive reference to “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” as a type of musical joke—a baseball game at midnight? It’s where the musician went, and took us with him. I learned to hear the song differently because of those liner notes.)

Scan and connect; read widely and question deeply. Those are mottos of the lab, and critical elements of my personal philosophy. Don’t just hear the melody… listen for the nuggets in between. (Fortunately, as my son has gotten more accomplished in music, he has forgiven me for my strange form of dancing. Maybe Dad isn’t completely lacking in rhythm. Maybe he’s trying to dance to all of the notes.) Megan and I were sitting in a restaurant while she told me about this idea of talking in jazz, or in other words, talking around the answer. No, I am not meaning to tease my students, or in a more predatory sense, “play with my food”. I can hear much more, and want to share it, in the complexity and richness that some of the world appears. “Experience is a convolution function that elicits latent segments of the matrix of personality set” was something else I said to Megan. That’s not play. That might be an alternative time signature, or some unique syncopation… it’s also a reference to one of the pieces of the Cassandra’s Postcards entry.

Maybe I need to be reminded to play the melody a bit more often. W. Ross Ashby wrote a cybernetics text on “requisite variety,” which suggests the complexity of genetic variability is what gives us adaptive range in a variety of environmental conditions. That adaptive range is not always tested, if the environment doesn’t change. The genetic variability doesn’t go away, though. It is only when tested with changing environmental conditions that the relative value of variability is highlighted… in individuals or in populations. But just getting people to read and recite Ashby’s Law of Cybernetics is like playing the melody of Feelin’ Good on a set of tuning forks. We don’t learn important questions there: How is it used? What does it evoke? What do we learn by that experience?

I have already started to recognize elements of my experience here that I will miss once I return to Indiana. But there is a richness of available experience everywhere, and it is wonderful whenever I can experience it in beauty and pleasure. A summer day with bright sun and blue skies is a great opportunity. And guess what? I even got a moment to replay a bit of the melody: another dragonfly.

Dragonfly_Sun

Figure 1. Dragonfly: You know what I mean.

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May 5, 2017

Returning to Practice

I’ve been interviewing Millennials for work.

In one sense, that is no surprise at all. Many of the students applying for graduate programs stay in the same age range. I have, by contrast, gotten older. Incoming students who were approximately my age (or older) are now the age of my children (or younger). This is the nature of the cycle of life (cue the music from “The Lion King,” which is now considered “Classic Disney”). So, why was this experience different?

First, and most important, was that I was not interviewing people for work in the Lab. These were postdoctoral fellows applicants for Department of State positions. The vast majority of them are still just a few years from their PhD dissertation, experiencing a very different world and context than I did when I was interviewing for my first faculty position. Well, that suggests another difference: I interviewed for a faculty position, and never seriously considered a postdoc. I have spent months engaged with discussions of the role of scientists and engineers engaged in Science Diplomacy, and the interplay of innovation and policy—quite frankly, the education I had come to Washington to have in this very interesting and challenging period. These folks aren’t being recruited to work on my favorite projects, or to have exactly the sort of background I would like a GROUPER to have… but there was still a request from my unit chief for what sorts of people to identify in the stack of resumes and personal statements.

Signs of life.

I was starting to wonder about what that would look like in this context, and in fact, I was starting to question if my time away from the university had left me cynical or unable to see beyond my own narrow daily priorities. Maybe it was a broader sense of unease with the sudden transition from a snowstorm in late March to 90 degree days in late April. Where and how and when was I operating? (I had come to feel a certain sense of stress and negative anticipation regarding my transition back to Purdue, starting in late March when I was requested to provide new course syllabi for my Fall classes. There are new opportunities for next academic year, but after eight months here in Washington, I am neither ready to start right back in on the academic world, nor think in terms of another full annual cycle of activity here.)

And yet, my unit chief wanted me to not only be involved in the interviews, but to craft a few questions for them. It was, as I have said before, a bit different to operate in support of others, instead of being my own “Principal,” but that is part of my learning these days. I’ve also been learning a lot about the differences in cultures of science, and hearing about the distinct experiences of what I have come to call, “Millennial Scholars” (those who may be part of the generation born in 1985 or later, but also have completed their advanced STEM degree programs since 2010). I’ve even produced a few of those people myself, but I already knew enough not to look for people just like Ashley or Karim or Marissa or Jeff (or those who are in the lab now). The discussions in the AAAS meetings in Boston and Washington still had an immediacy and curiosity to me: I was meeting so many people interested in a concept, science policy, that I had long thought was an oxymoron. Why were they interested in this? What new was going on?

What are the challenges and opportunities, strengths and weaknesses, of these Millennial Scholars?

This is, in my experience with the lab, a “signs of life” question. Signs of life it had become a part of my thinking at a time where spring is definitely upon us in Washington. I’m walking much more around the city again, and over the past few weeks, I have been able to enjoy the cherry blossoms and new plants and warm weather. In other words, “signs of life returning” was part of my daily experience.

Figure 1. Signs of life: Tulips at the bus stop

The answers were also informative, as well as reminders of an earlier age. There were those who seemed to have trouble thinking about themselves, and their colleagues, in such a comparative context. However, this compared to several who actually commented about the relative lack of a sense of historical comparison as a weakness of Millennials. What was another weakness? There were several comments about the ease with which new information and new activities and experiences were available, leading to a sense of being dabblers in a variety of skills (“jacks / jills of all trades, masters of none”). In fact, that ease of collecting and novelty even extended to the strengths and weaknesses of networking. Although the world of embassies and interagency discussions and think tank receptions clearly indicates a value to the work of engaging with others… there is a difference between engaging in an effective, distributed knowledge network, and collecting friends and likes as a way of keeping score.

I found myself curiously replaying one conversation in my mind, about the concept that Millennials were more interested in finding ways to align their actions and employment with their passions. Now remember, I lived in Cambridge, MA and California during the 1980s startup crazes, where people were all about passion. I heard the Flower Children talking about living a life of meaning and service. And, most importantly, I have learned how much my career as a professor is actually well aligned with my passion for exploration and sharing what I found.

Figure 2. Albert sharing a sense of passion. Maybe science diplomacy was never so far from my thinking after all. (At the National Academies Keck Center, 500 E St NW)

Was this really different? And then I heard an interesting alternative take on this thought. “Well, if I can’t rely on a pension or Social Security to be around, there is no reason for me to trade boredom for security.” From that discussion, I was transported back to the first few times I taught the course Sociotechnical Systems at Wisconsin. I had known about two different models of work and income as “covenants”: income and status as a way of demonstrating success and favor, or work as a demonstration of one’s passion and artisan’s skills. It took discussion and debate in class for me to learn that there was a large population with a third approach: work was something one does to get enough income to spend the rest of one’s time doing what one really preferred to do. Apparently, lots of people live that way, whether they’re working second shift at the auto parts store, or vice president of global distribution for the auto parts company. I have not chosen to live that way, and I can’t really imagine doing something I hate just to have the income to do what I love, later. Is that what others were assuming we were all doing? Or were others doing this a lot more than I was ever aware?

I felt like I had come full circle in the discussion, and my awareness of my own experience as a young scholar. I am convinced that there are confusions in each generation, not sensing the range or intensity of experience from when prior generations were young and emerging, like new plants bursting into the sunlight and struggling against snow and wind and dangerous frost. I can appreciate it much more now, because I have been in both places, and I have come to feel them both. I am not yet done with the intensity of feeling and learning. And yes, I am still pleased to take a moment on a Spring day and feel the sensual joy of lamb’s ear as I walk from meeting to office or home. Because, even after a great enlightenment, a return to practice and repeat of small things still has value.

Figure 3. Lamb’s ear on 19th St NW. A good reminder of small lessons.

January 7, 2017

Weekend Balance #2: Cassandra’s Postcards

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.

View #1: The Spectrogram

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.

View #2: The Bowl

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.)

View #3: The Disk

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.

View #4 = Function (#1:#3)

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”.

Whose Project is This?

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.

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August 18, 2016

Superposition

With a flourish and frenzy of activity, the cycle has completed itself and begun once more. This week, of course, was particularly hectic. On Tuesday, we in GROUPER were pleased to celebrate Liang’s successful defense of her dissertation (now to finish the writing!), and after a 2-hour lab meeting, I went home and got some pleasure reading in. Wednesday was a travel day, with challenges of unstable weather leading to one canceled flight, and ground stops due to ramp closures at both the start and finish of the second leg of the trip. Hours late, but with the air cooled from the rain, I finally finished the trip and got home for a good night’s sleep.

“Hold it. You were at home, then you got stuck during thunderstorms, and finished the trip, and went home? Did you not get to your destination? Was your trip canceled?”

Even as I write this entry, there is a type of surrealism about this week. I’m sitting in one of the chairs I have had for over five years, with Amber on my lap, looking at her cat tree and food and a bunch of other items I clearly recognize. The window still faces east, but the image is different: instead of an empty parking lot across the street, I see a tall tree and an office building. In other words, the shift has now occurred. Amber and I have moved to Washington, DC to start my position as a Jefferson Science Fellow. My first day is next Monday, and I have begun enjoying the exploration of the neighborhoods of McPherson Square and Thomas Circle, and picking up coffee and pastry and fruit at the White House Street Market.

Amber exploring the new window view

My world is changing significantly, and yet some things remain consistent. I am still an engineering faculty member, but I am thinking about a completely different set of issues this August compared to last August. Our lab meeting addressed a very interesting topic based on students’ recent experiences, and one that I will be considering very hard in the coming months. Academia, government, and industry are considered vastly different places, and representing wildly divergent career paths for those with PhDs. And yet, we’re taught (and have first hand experience) that a variety of people all craft their actions, decisions, and processing of information based on perceived risks, costs, and outcome benefits. There’s only one challenge. The benefits that drive most industry teams (profit—hey, I hear the new Aston Martins are really nice) don’t come into play at all for most academic or government folks, and the primary risk keeping academic folks up at night (someone already published my idea in that journal I love!) don’t seem to bother industry or government people much. A government employee may complain bitterly about the costs of having to work 5-10 hours of overtime one week; many academics and industry research folks take a 60-70 hour average work week as pretty much standard.

You may notice that the website (http://www.grouperlab.org) looks very different than a few months ago; that took us a while to work through. Elliott, our wonder-undergrad, did a pretty thorough redesign and architecture job, but what was more important was not just the scripting language or tab sequences. We went back to a very basic question: who comes to our lab’s website? Three different types of groups (yes, it’s that “use case” thing) want distinct types of information, at varying grain sizes. Even our own GROUPER alums represent different types of interaction profiles. We’ve got government employees seeing how our work can inform improvements for federal agencies. GROUPERs are also rising up the ranks in industry, and may be in a position to hire a new or recent grad (in this sense, GROUPER is definitely a distinct and valued brand). With the lab’s traditional gender mix (somewhere approaching 2/3 female), it’s not surprising that a number of alumnae list their primary function right now as “Mom”. I see no reason to hide that, or feel guilty or ashamed to highlight such life pathways. If everything is a system, and GROUPERs look at information everywhere, can’t those skills be applied to everything from medical information use for family members, to understanding the daily experiences of neurodiversity, to getting a front-row seat to the miracles of how humans develop broad processes of learning and skill development sets in ways that still challenge our most sophisticated machine learning algorithms.

Over the next few months, the GROUPER blog will be more active again, but it won’t be focusing as much just on our current lab research. We’re still researching, of course, but we have other stories to tell, and other forms of impact and effect to consider for how we get, share, and use the information we’ve been gathering and lessons we’ve been learning. Thanks for visiting us again after our quiet period. Hey, it gets busy learning how to be in multiple places at once.

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November 26, 2013

They Got Game

You’ve probably seen the highlight film. If you happened to see the play live, you cheered (if they were on your team), or groaned—even then, you might have to admit it was a memorable play. The game winning grand slam. (Yes, I’ve got Red Sox gear, and Phillies gear, at home.) The clutch goal in the 85^th or 90^th minute. (Extra style points for headers or bicycle kicks.) Or maybe the 90+ yard touchdown run. (Just to show that I root for Purdue, as well as for Wisconsin.)

I’ve got to witness several of these plays this past Fall, either in the stadium or on live TV. Even the thought of the play brings a smile to my face. These are peak experiences for athletes, and sometimes even for their fans. Big plays on big stages, they say. “Big-time Players make big-time plays.” But, how do you compare those peak experiences to those of others in other domains? Do academics have the equivalent of a highlight reel? Especially those who are in academia, there is a sense of life in the research university as a different tier of performance and competition. Getting promoted in a US News top-10 ranked program is seen as a major highlight. Being selected as a Principal Investigator (PI) for a new grant from a major government agency can be a hallmark of one’s career. Academics even use the metaphors of sports to describe such events. Home run. Slam dunk. Major League.

For a few days this month, that’s how I felt regarding my own research activity right now. After weeks, or months, or in some cases years of effort, some ideas have been coming to fruition. At Space Grant, we submitted a proposal to the NSF to provide research experiences for teachers to use the Purdue’s HUB technology infrastructure to develop software models to teach STEM concepts to K-12 students in Evansville, Ft. Wayne, and Indianapolis—and highlight some of these software models in the local science museums there. I was asked to lead a FAA project to help with improving the quality and safety of weather information provided to pilots during severe weather conditions. And best of all… A NASA research project that I have dreamed about for months, to help with information flow and task coordination for human-robotic collaboration to do planetary science for lunar and martian moon surfaces—how cool is that? And my team was selected for such a project, within the Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute! Time to practice my fist pumping, shoulder brushing, touchdown dance?

Not so fast. It is, of course, November. This year, “Surviving November” (one of the GROUPER “song titles”) for me has included doctoral prelim exams, grading statistics exams, and evaluating team project summaries in both the statistics course and the capstone design course. The task lists, and the email inbox, both grow—sometimes faster than I can recognize that I have more tasks to do over the next day, or week. This is when it’s tough. Why did I sign up for this? Why do I put myself under this pressure? And, in a question that I have asked several of my colleagues… Why am I still trying to get tenure?

The answer to that question is both viciously insidious, and beautifully clear. I’ve been working like this for the past 30 years. I have lots of ideas, and am rarely satisfied with the standard way of doing things (or having people tell me there’s only one proper or correct way to do it). In 1983, it was becoming convinced that it was easier to get two undergraduate degrees rather than one. In 1993, I had to learn that I couldn’t put every cool idea into a single paper that could get me tenure immediately. But I did like the idea of studying the effects of time delay on tolerance for group interactions using this new technology called the web browser, or examining how to evaluate different options for that new digital voice mail technology being considered for state government. In 2003, it was believing that I could do more with Indiana Space Grant, and maybe we should try to write a proposal for an upgrade, less than 12 months after doing a complete overhaul of the program and award structure. So really, what’s been happening is that I have been rewarded and reinforced for being this way. Intermittent reinforcement works the best, as the operant conditioning psychologists have long known. If you want to make sure a behavior sticks around for a very long time, reinforce it. But only do so a fraction of the time—maybe 15% or so. On a semi-random basis. (That sounds like grant proposal writing.) In baseball or in funded research, what do you call a person who has an overall success rate of 40%? A member of the Hall of Fame.

It’s a tough world, and it’s a devastating level of competition that can emotionally and physically hurt. There’s no need to make it harder than it is, or to be erratic and cruel just to show the students how hard it can be. Can it be sufficient to just say, “We’re not going to tolerate less than excellence today”? That attitude doesn’t start with the award, and it doesn’t end with the award either. Every day is a struggle, but not necessarily against a competitor. Maybe it’s against one’s own doubt or insecurity. Perhaps it is just the need to push back the veil and curtain of ignorance. And sometimes, it’s just the desire to do just a little bit better than last time, or see if one can do just as well as last time.

I don’t want to be on the sidelines. I want to participate. Even if I’m tired tonight, I want to be able to function tomorrow. And tomorrow, the game starts anew.

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October 22, 2013

Who Do You Think You Are?

Well, sometimes you get stuck on a theme. There have been several topics that have been at the forefront of my thinking over the past month, coming largely from the experience at the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES) Annual Meeting in San Diego. Although there were only two current GROUPERs there, I did get to interact with a number of former students, as well as others who sought me out and seemed truly eager to interact with me during the meeting. In that light, I thought about naming this entry, “Back from Cali”. However, after reading the song lyrics, I decided that maybe I didn’t want to reference the song by Slash (even though Axl Rose, the lead singer of Guns N’ Roses, is originally from Lafayette, IN). How about “Back to Cali”? No, the LL Cool J lyrics aren’t suitable either. Even becoming snarky didn’t help. “Title of the Entry” reminded me immediately of the song by DaVinci’s Notebook. So, yes, I am aware of a song reference above. Apparently, I can’t escape it.

So, what was so important that I now have all of this music in my head? Well, it was a great room, with a wonderful view, but it wasn’t just about the view, or even the boat.

One thing I noticed frequently is that the capacity for positive effect that one may have on others should not be trivialized. I’m not always aware of this, and the meeting in San Diego was a great reminder of the power of the effect. Three former GROUPERs (and one honorary GROUPER) are now involved with the Society in positions of leadership. Sandra Garrett is on the HFES Executive Council with me; members of the Technical Program Committee for 2013 included Michelle Rogers (Workshops) and Erik Wakefield (Product Design) as well as Ron Boring (Interactive Sessions and Posters). Let me mention Erik for a moment. When I first started working with him, he was working in the College of Technology, with what seemed to be a bizarre idea—let’s have sports scores and updates that can be pushed, real time, to someone’s mobile device. Except that this was 2005-06, before iPhone and Galaxy smartphones. He got the project done, graduated, got a job, and… developed. First in one company, then another, and then another, with HFES as his primary professional affiliation. He’s a senior engineer now, and working on some cool projects. When I saw him in San Diego, I noticed the difference, and mentioned it. And I said that I was proud of how he’d developed. Apparently, that had an effect—he went out of his way to mention it in one of his status updates (check on October 1, 2013). And that’s what got me thinking. We can have an effect that we don’t recognize, until someone points it out to us.

In my previous entry, “Eaten up with Curiosity,” I mentioned how much I was affected as an adolescent by the Rudyard Kipling story about Rikki-Tikki-Tavi. Well, as it turns out, the Chuck Jones Gallery was just a few blocks away from the hotel, right in the midst of the Gaslamp District. I passed the gallery nearly every day, and Thursday evening, decided that I simply had to stop by. I confess that I took along a young colleague who had been expressing the desire and enjoyment of engaging in conversation and challenge; although it’s hard (and a bit arrogant) to simply wake up one morning to say, “I think I’m going to mentor that person today,” I did truly enjoy helping and encouraging them to consider their capability and career path from a variety of perspectives. So, in any case, we stopped by the Gallery, just for me to explore what might be there. And, behold, in one of the smaller rooms of the gallery, was a picture of Rikki. Actually, a production cel. A nice piece of animation history. So, there was a bit of passion expressed, moderated by a sense that such things were still beyond me.

Detail of Rikki cel. Copyright, Chuck Jones Entertainment

Who was Rikki? Just a pet? Or the hero of an epic confrontation, sung into history? Again, this is an entry about who we think we are. Sometimes we forget, or get stuck in a past version of who we might have been at some point in the past. I tend to call that past version “the ramen-eating guy in my head”. As an undergrad (and somewhat as a grad student), I was always watching every penny; once, when I found a $20 bill on the street in a puddle, I rejoiced—that was food for a month! This was someone desperate to show he could belong, that he could do something of note in the academic environment. Thirty years later, that ramen-eating guy still shows up sometimes. I have to remind myself that’s not where I am now. I have students eager to work with me. Former students greet me, and are thrilled to show me their new business cards. Others whom I never would have guessed knew about me seem honored to meet me; they’ve heard such wonderful stories about me. How I treat them now may not seem like much, but it can have a tremendous effect on their life and future. Who knows which young and eager student will become the next leader of our field?

These are lessons that I am very pleased to learn, with importance for my life both now and into the future. I thank all those who helped me with these insights and learnings.

Excuse me. I have to open a package from San Diego. It’s a reminder never to underestimate who we are. Rikki has arrived.

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September 15, 2013

Eaten up with Curiosity

The motto of all of the mongoose family is “Run and find out,” and Rikki-Tikki was a true mongoose.

–Rudyard Kipling

We find ourselves in the midst of a new academic semester, with the variety of challenges that face us in terms of schedules, task demands, and burdens both voluntarily and involuntarily shouldered. In one sense, it is as it always has been; but for each individual, it may be the very first time of an experience that defines and influences the remainder of one’s life. I have been thinking about this with the current configuration of GROUPER, and the need to help students make progress on existing dissertation topics or create new ones. This is not always an easy task, and though I have gone through this process over 50 times (with over 30 MS students and 14 PhD students advised, plus the students whom I have assisted in various less formal ways) on this side of the desk, there are always elements worth learning and improving.

Maybe it is simply the number of times that an issue presents itself within the period of a few weeks that it becomes more salient, and the gap between what is and what could be becomes more evident. Let’s assume that it may be no more than that, although a friend of mine was just mentioning today how there can be periods when one becomes much more open to insight and jumps in one’s self-learning. But there has been something about the question, “What should I do for my research?” that has struck me in very different ways this fall than in the past. I am asking myself different questions about my own research and career pathways; I am reminded of writings and insights from when I first arrived at Purdue. And of course, in the senior project design course, there is always the sense of importance to get the students—so used to textbook problem configurations and well-organized linkages between the information given and the equation to use—to start creating for themselves a system definition and sense of their own active participation in defining the problem to solve as a necessary part of being an engineer. And as an engineer myself, such gaps between what is and what could be are always met in my head with, “What do we do about it?”

And yet, there was something that I couldn’t quite bridge on my own in the conversations with the members of the lab. Where does one go to get ideas? How does one start the organization of facts and methods and tasks that gets one from classroom student to nascent researcher? Over the past month, I began to see that it was not just as simple as a statement in our “1:1 meetings” (as the nearly weekly individual meetings I have with all of members of the lab are known) to go figure out an interesting question. Interestingly enough, this recognition for me comes from a couple of sources, as I am again reminded that I don’t seem to approach the world in a way that is like most of those around me. Apparently, there are graduate seminars taking place in departments around the country (not just engineering departments, but bench sciences, literature, philosophy, sociology…) where students are encouraged and instructed to read through a bunch of journal papers or monographs or book chapters and determine which questions still required further study. (For the record, I took such seminars myself: it’s how I first learned, in 1985 and 1986, of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s work on cognitive strategies or the cultural specificity of the fundamental attribution error. I loved those papers. I just didn’t define my dissertation that way.)

Benson Snyder, in the 1960s and 1970s, discussed a critical issue affecting higher education, one that has come to be known as “the hidden curriculum”. (The “hidden curriculum” of the book’s title and premise is the informal sociological and socialization process of how and when to learn, not just what to learn.) This book seems to have had a very significant effect on me—not just because I have read through it multiple times (I still own a copy of the 1973 edition of the book), but because I can now see that much of the curriculum I experienced at MIT was shaped in part by the studies Snyder reports of students there 20 years prior. As I am teaching undergraduate statistics again after several years away from teaching it (but never far away from using it), I am also freshly sensitized to the processes of how to learn, and not just what. And this is how I started to recognize some of what I was finding vaguely concerning in the lab.

As an undergrad, one of the most telling philosophies of innovation and excellence I ever heard was one that was directly told to me as to why I had so much latitude in organizing my activities for my work-study job. “I’ve found that it’s best to give good people resources, and then get out of their way.” For me, that was an excellent and empowering approach, since I was never at a loss for ideas or novel approaches or unusual ways of thinking (at least ways deemed unusual by teachers or professors). In fact, I recently came to think about this as something I found exceptionally compelling in a cartoon I saw as an adolescent: Chuck Jones’ animated version of Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, narrated by Orson Welles. Rikki is perpetually curious, and fiercely protective, and powerful in ways that are belied by his small size and friendly interactions. But isn’t everyone curious in this way of mongooses? Isn’t everyone driven to “run and find out”? Isn’t that part of the essential “inside” of every researcher?

No, says the hidden curriculum. Students are socialized to learn which questions are the “right” questions, and these questions are “best” defined in an outside-in way. The existing corpus defines the way the field is configured, and thus how new questions should be approached. But wait… 60 years ago, we didn’t have plate tectonics or the cognitive revolution—just working from existing papers published in 1953 wouldn’t have gotten you there, and certainly wouldn’t have gotten you accepted within the “standard” configuration. The same is true with statistical process analysis or scientific project management 100 years ago, or pharmacy or aerodynamics 150 years ago, or electrical and thermodynamic processes 250 years ago. And yet, my learning and research now derives from all of those innovations. Someone has to move beyond the standard, outside-in framework, and be ready to do the new work and meet the new challenges (and face the inevitable questions and criticisms that such an approach will engender).

It’s obvious to me now that it takes a lot more than a brief instruction to a graduate student to think in terms of the problems in the world of task environments, and interacting with people who live in those task environments. (Although an introvert, I find it natural and obvious to talk to someone about the challenges of their work. It’s easier for me than making other types of small talk.) I begin to wonder, though—have I been assuming that, just by osmosis or creating a supportive environment, anyone and everyone will be “eaten up from nose to tail with curiosity,” as Kipling put it? Might they need more help than that?

If you were expecting an answer to these questions… sadly, you will have to wait with me for that. I’ve asked the lab to help me understand what I’m doing that’s different, and how the hidden curriculum has affected and shaped them up to this point (although I didn’t ask it of them quite that way). But at the very least, asking the question is an important part of the process, and an essential element of making progress. There are cobras threatening the bungalow of higher education… bringing in and raising a mongoose is not a bad idea.

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March 9, 2013

Bringing Sexy Back (A Post from Natalie)

Instead of just hearing from me, we’re starting to add more posts from more members of the lab, and from more perspectives. The first is from Natalie Benda, who is now a happy and proud GROUPER alumna. Here’s an insight from her:

My journey to Purdue begins in Dubuque, IA, “the home of America’s river”. (Yes, that is what the sign says when you cross into my county). When I was younger, I always thought I would end up going into medicine. I come from a family where you were the odd one out if you did not work in the healthcare field. Knowledge of medicine was a pre-requisite for the majority of the conversations that when on at the “grown-ups” table when I was growing up. My parents even met in a hospital where they have worked for a combined total of about sixty years. So, naturally I chose to study engineering in college. That makes sense, right? No? Well, it will eventually.

In high school, when discussing my prospects for secondary education, many times I heard something along the lines of, “You’re good at math and science, you should be an engineer.” It must have stuck at some point, because I started to do my about it. I found the descriptions and coursework for computer, electrical, civil, mechanical and even biomedical engineering, were less than intriguing. I did not want to be in a lab or at a computer all day tinkering away with components. In the words of my favorite mermaid, I wanted to be where the people were! So, when I came across material on industrial engineering, which emphasized the human aspect of engineering, it was a no-brainer.

With a newly found excitement for my presumed, I began the search for a school. My criteria – get out of Iowa but remain within driving distance, and find a large university with a strong reputation for industrial engineering. The three main schools I looked at were Northwestern, the University of Illinois at Urbana and Purdue. My junior year of high school, my mother and I trekked through a blizzard to visit Purdue on what was probably one of the coldest days of the year. I wish I could give a non-cliché account of all of the wonderful qualities that drew me to Purdue during this first visit, but I can’t. It just felt like the right fit, and I never looked back.

Fast-forward to my sophomore industrial engineering seminar. Although I was excited about getting out of freshman engineering classes and into my chosen discipline, I didn’t feel I had found that extra-curricular activity niche that many of my classmates had. Until one day, our seminar speaker gave a presentation regarding opportunities for industrial engineers in healthcare. Do you remember my rant about being destined to work in healthcare earlier? Is it starting to make a little more sense?

So, after their speech, I approached the speaker to learn more about how I could get involved in healthcare engineering at Purdue. It turned out she was a member of GROUPER. As many of you know, GROUPER works in many areas besides healthcare, however as Dr. C. says it is the new, sexy field for IE’s. This healthcare component was what initially drew me to the lab. What kept me there was breaking down the barriers of traditional engineering and finding ways to connect people and systems through communication. If you can’t tell by my quoting Disney movies and titling my entry after a Justin Timberlake song, I do not like to be subject to societal norms. And GROUPER is far from the norm.

In my two plus years as a GROUPER, I performed many tasks from managing the lab’s schedule to statistical analysis supporting Ph. D. research, and managed to stumble across some research of my own in the process. After organizing the lab’s document library, I found I had a special interest in chronic disease adherence. So, with the help of Dr. C. and the Medication Safety Network of Indiana, I designed a study that analyzed information flow between patients and pharmacists in pharmacy consultations for congestive heart failure medications. I could give you a dry, statistical run-down of the results, but for the sake of the blog I’ll get to the point: the results of the study evidenced the critical part that the pharmacist plays in patient medication safety by capturing potential adverse events the pharmacist was able to detect and prevent. The project is on hold for the moment, but now that we know these potential adverse events are there, couldn’t we find where they stem from? Could we in turn find the root cause of more adverse events that the pharmacist may not be able to prevent and discover ways to build a safer medication system?

Since my graduation from Purdue in December, I have begun a new job in Washington, D.C. as a research assistant for the National Center for Human Factors in Healthcare. In my first few weeks at NCHFH, I have worked on a number of projects that include validating the use of a serious game as an assessment tool (yes, I play video games at work), methods of reducing blood stream infections in dialysis patients and representing communication patterns through #socialnetwork mapping (okay, not that kind of social network, but you get my point).

The project that will be taking up the majority of my time is a classic information alignment problem. We will be working to help software vendors design electronic health record systems that facilitate providers’ ability to achieve “meaningful use” systems. The Office of the National Coordinator is strongly pushing the principles of user centered- and safety enhanced-design. To facilitate this, members of academia have developed a number of tools for the vendors to promote usability. As one could imagine, healthcare professionals, academic researchers and commercial software designers do not exactly speak the same language. Our goal is to help get to a place where these vastly different groups can understand one another and work towards the common goal of designing systems to deliver safer, more effective patient care. Thus far it is turning out to be a fascinating challenge, and my work with GROUPER has left me well prepared.

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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 19^th Century led to a field of art and art criticism of the photographic medium, and the slow respect given to movies in the 20^th 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 21^st 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 21^st 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.

Tag: curiosity

GROUPER research addresses seven of the 14 Grand Challenges.

View #1: The Spectrogram

View #2: The Bowl

View #3: The Disk

View #4 = Function (#1:#3)

Whose Project is This?