grouperlab

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Tag: history

August 1, 2017

The Last Weekend, Part 2: Bumping into Bits of History

Now that the calendar has actually turned over to August, reality is starting to set in: last weekend’s relaxed enjoyment and exploration really is the final full weekend in Washington, DC of my tenure as a Jefferson Science Fellow.   In some ways, it feels like the time at the end of a party: people are starting to say their good-byes, but no one has actually left yet.  There is also the question of leaving early and maybe missing something, or staying until the very end with the hosts wondering, “When will this guy ever leave?”  In the social media era, people seem to talk about this as FOMO, but there is another concern in play here.

 

One of the local public / community radio stations here in Washington is WPFW; they are one of my options for jazz music.  (As I just mentioned in the blog a couple of days ago, I have a long personal history with jazz.)  An interesting piece of spoken jazz was in fact a parable: imagine an insect (ant or beetle) navigating on one of the most beautifully designed, luxuriously tufted, exquisitely crafted Oriental rugs ever created.  However, this insect has lived its entire life with the tufts and weaves of the rug, and only sees the tufts and knots as problems confronting it and degrading its existence.  The insect has never had the chance, or thought, to raise up its perspective to look down on the beauty and wonder of the pattern of the rug, and so it laments as burden what we would see as splendor.  Poor, foolish insect.  However…

 

Things have been very hectic at work over the past few weeks.  Offices at the State Department are used to turnover during the summer, where people head off to embassies and consulates across the world, and others return back from those locations to take up work here in Washington.  Those rearrangements don’t always mesh smoothly; right now, we’re down a few folks. Combined with travel, it meant that there were only two of us around in my particular unit for a while, and one was tied up with logistics for a very high profile event.  Last Thursday, that event came to fruition, with lots of last minute frenzy and scheduling nightmares and trying to navigate 100 people through a maze of hallways and elevators into a room that holds 80.  What could possibly be worth all of this?

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Figure 1. William F. Hagerty IV sworn in as US Ambassador to Japan by VPOTUS Pence.

Not surprisingly, the official naming of an Ambassador is a pretty significant historical event, especially when the Vice President of the United States (VPOTUS) does the swearing in ceremony.  It takes a few moments of someone not yet jaded by the process (a foreign affairs intern) to put it in perspective: even with the challenges, “you’re experiencing history”.  In the Old Executive Office Building (the Indian Treaty Room).  With dignitaries.

 

Situations like this can be trivialized with the goal of trying to diminish their historic significance or my involvement in them, but over time, I have come to realize that this actually doesn’t have the effect that I had originally intended.  Sometimes a moment ends up with more impact than is intended, such as a young boy from Arkansas meeting a US President.  They can even be played up to fictional excess, such as Forrest Gump’s unintentional influence on history.  But let’s dial that back a bit.  The event was what it was.  There were other people who felt this particular ceremony very important to attend, which of course makes it more special for those who were there…

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Figure 2. L-R: Sen. Corker, Amb. Hagerty, VPOTUS Pence, Mrs. Hagerty, Sen. Alexander

Particularly, if you happen to be from Tennessee, as the Hagertys are (although the Ambassador’s mother still prefers U. Kentucky basketball, but thinks Gallatin is a better place to witness the Great American Eclipse than Hopkinsville), this is a pretty significant bit of history to experience.

 

On Sunday, I saw a person on the National Mall wearing a t-shirt, “I am Black History”.  I can become easily overloaded by such a statement, even though I do actually have a t-shirt that says, “I am kind of a big deal” (thanks, Keena!).  No, I could never wear such a shirt!  I didn’t do this, or that, or whatever else… I’m not these people:

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Figure 3. NASA Legend Kathrine Johnson receives Medal of Freedom from POTUS Obama.

 

But, as Kathrine Johnson said, history is what each of us does, every day.  I am reminded of this quote from meeting her daughters earlier this year:

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Figure 4. NASA Program Manager Allen, Kathrine Johnson’s Daughters Katherine and Joylette, BSC

Yes, there have been a number of such experiences—not just during this fellowship, but in my own past.  Apparently, I keep bumping into bits of history in the rug.  I should not minimize the value of getting a sense of perspective on them, or lament my interactions with them.  From a different vantage, the beauty and value of the pattern is hard to ignore.

 

 

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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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June 28, 2013

Communication and Documentation (longer, connection-enhanced version)

Communication and Documentation

 

[I am feeling a bit like Chuck Lorre, the producer for several extremely popular television series, including the The Big Bang Theory (TBBT).  Chuck has “vanity cards” which appear very briefly at the end of each episode of the shows.  These vanity cards express Chuck’s perspectives, insights, and fevered rants on a variety of topics, and basically act like a blog.  Since I record TBBT quite extensively (any similarities I have to Sheldon Cooper will be, and have been, hotly contested), I have gotten good at pausing the recording to read the card.  Every once in a while, the card makes some reference to censoring, but with a website address to indicate where you can read the uncensored version of the card.  When I first created the “Communication and Documentation” entry for the Indiana Space Grant Consortium Director’s Blog / Notes, it was pointed out that it was long and tangential and wouldn’t appeal to some of the readers.  Well, in Chuck Lorre fashion, I edited the blog entry for that audience, but here’s the full version.  Why?  It’s GROUPER—so, it’s because I can.  And those of you in GROUPER will recognize Karim and know why Shannon and Weaver are important.  So there.  –BSC]

 

“Document your code!”

 

This is a lesson I remember from my first computer programming course as a college frosh, now more than 30 years ago.  The language was FORTRAN, and the computer was a PDP 11/44[*] but the lessons were the same.  If you didn’t provide enough comments in your code for the instructor to understand what your logic was intended to accomplish, or what the variables meant, or what that subroutine was for, you got points off.  The essential message was not subtle: no matter how good a job you think you did, you haven’t done the whole job unless you’ve effectively documented it.  Over the past few weeks, I’ve had substantial reminders of the importance of those lessons of communication and documentation.

 

Since the Affiliates’ Meeting in April, the INSGC staff have been trying to upgrade our processes and activities, and bringing onboard a new set of student interns for the summer.  Part of this comes from our Affiliates’ survey of communications with the Central Office.  Although the overall responses were excellent (from the perspective of demonstrating to NASA that we take our performance seriously and assess it regularly), there were some areas of concern (from the perspective of continuous improvement and achieving a model of excellence).   It’s clear that we could use our website to better advantage, and thus that is a priority for us this summer.  Angie has reported a much more timely and useful set of responses to our requests for reporting, due in part to our more clear presentations of what, when, and why we need those reports to meet our NASA grant reporting and documentation obligations.  Wow… we can get that much more just by being more explicit about what we’re looking for, and how we need to use it?

 

Effective communication is a tricky thing.  Some people like their documentation “spiced up” a little bit; others just want the immediate facts, in order, with an agenda of what will be covered and how many minutes are associated to each fact.   I just had two conversations this weekend highlighting these challenges.  On Friday, I had dinner with one of my former students, who recently started a new job at a major hospital as a quality engineering and improvement manager.  He noted that some of the physicians and others at the hospital were frustrated with some of his meetings, because they couldn’t see how, or whether, there was a point to the meeting and what they were supposed to recognize and respond to that point.  (Interesting: that was, almost verbatim, one of the comments from our Affiliates’ survey.)  He said that those people would have found our research lab meetings intolerable, but he then took the feedback as an indication to simply write down what he already had in his head and give it a more formal structure as a meeting agenda.   I have had to learn the same lesson in our INSGC Central meetings and those with Dawn and Angie—it’s the agenda that helps focus time and understanding, and improves advanced preparation.

 

What level of communication works for you?  A friend of mine commented on my software commenting style over the weekend, because I was the only person they’d known who actually used “emotion” and eloquent language structures in their code [†]comments.  On the one hand, there is a big world of language out there, and it’s nice to be able to use it well and communicate richly.  On the other hand, one doesn’t want to turn into Dennis Miller as the color commentator for Monday Night Football, making snarky or esoteric literary references that even your colleagues don’t understand, when all they wanted to say was that it was good that the guy in the blue uniform tackled that guy in the white uniform.  Do people find your style amusing and intelligent, or obscure and elitist?  This is an important question when you’re trying to do public outreach and engagement for the general population.  There are lots of different audiences (faculty and students who receive awards, administrators who want to know effectiveness of campus cost sharing, people who stop you on the street and ask you questions about airspace utilization), and I want to learn how to connect with them all.

 

Is this where I mention that one of our primary ways of regular communication with our affiliates, partners, and friends is the INSGC Director’s Blog?  I try to put together a new blog entry every month or so, and use it to communicate some of our strategic concerns and general oversight topics.  Great, right?  Except that Dawn told me a few days ago that people don’t look at the blog entries.  (That is the point of website analytics—is anyone actually receiving the message you’re sending?)  Well, if we never updated the blog, that would be the expectation.  Or, if it was assumed that nothing important ever showed up there.  But what if I said that the best way to see what we’re planning for (and why) will show up first, or best, or most explicitly, in that Director’s Blog?  Would that get more visits?  Perhaps, but the goal of the blog is not more visits.  It’s to communicate more effectively with our constituents.

 

According to information theory (as developed by Bell Laboratory researcher Claude Shannon and MIT professor Norbert Weiner), communication includes a sender, a transmission channel, and a receiver.  There have to be several effective elements of good communication:  the sender has to send a message that is meaningful to the receiver; the channel must be able to support that message; there has to be a minimum of noise or signal loss to distort the message; there has to be enough redundancy of the message so that the receiver understands the intent of the message even if some of it gets lost.  (This seems very tangential to the point of anything else relevant for Space Grant Directors.  However, it’s actually part of my research background and training.  For me, the analysis of communication effectiveness is a social and technical engineering problem, and not just a management or persuasion issue.  Remember, the message is based in part on the context of the sender as well as the context of the receiver.  I’m trying to explain more of my context in a more explicit way.  Any resemblance to Dennis Miller’s football color commentary is accidental.)

 

So, what next?  Over the rest of the summer, expect additional upgrades to our communications: not just in the use of the available technologies, but in our strategies, messages, and references.  This is a critical point in Space Grant evolution, and I believe that one of the ways that INSGC will succeed in the future is to be a powerful and effective source of communication and documentation of STEM engagement in the State of Indiana.

 

 

[*] The specifics here are only to suggest that I have been a geek for a very long time.  Some of you may fondly remember coding in FORTRAN, or even what a PDP is.  If you don’t, just think of it as part of that quaint long-ago time when there were pay phones that people used coins to operate when they weren’t at home to access their permanently wired landline phone.

[†] Yes, these are the sorts of friends I spend my time with.  We talk about styles of software comments, and mathematical models of information exchange in company meetings, and the use of multi-dimensional graphs to understand social dynamics.  Don’t judge.  It works for us.

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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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