omenti

a 'I really know better than to post this post...'

a minipost

About this time of year I get a request or two to talk to a high school junior or senior about colleges and majors.  I'll give reasons why I'm not the best the person to talk to, but if they persist I'll spend some time listening and talking.  Curiously there have been three so far this year and two suggested I post something.  Perhaps it can spark you into helping some students - many of you have much richer backgrounds.

 

A caveat is that I came from a position of privilege: white male, reasonably good at math, and from a period of time when great positive change seemed possible.  I didn't view college as training for work.  Somehow I knew what I was curious about from the age of twelve, so it was just following a calling.  I knew I could always get work with the friend of the family in back home who had a thriving HVAC and water softener company. This gave me the freedom to follow a somewhat different path than friends who were thinking about what happened after graduation.   This led to good and bad choices.  I double majored, but the fields were too close to each other and I ended up with a narrow undergrad education. Since then I study a few areas on my own, but I didn't take advantage of a broader education back then.  On a more positive note I got to know several professors as friends and mentors. That part was priceless.

 

° Ask yourself why you want to go to college?  What is your drive?  Many answers are correct, but you should know yours.

 

° A 'what color is your parachute-ish' question: are there any kinds of work you would do for nothing or even pay to do? 

 

° Where may or may not be important.  It's a plus in some fields to attend a famous college, but in many cases the quality of education can be as good at state schools - sometimes even better if you're good at making connections and really dive into the courses.  Famous professors often don't have the time to talk to undergrads. 

 

° Spend some time finding out which professors can teach.  

 

° Double major if you can, but in mostly unrelated areas.  Even if you're focused on employment afterwards - a good ROI on college - choose the second major in a field that you might find fascinating.  The humanities can give you great depth and are underrated for turning you into someone who can think differently down the road.  I've mentored students with a variety of double majors: CS-music, CS-art, physics-philosophy, math-paleontology for example. If you're doing a D-I sport, consider that a major by itself.  It can give a rich training that can serve you down the line too.  If not a double major, make sure your minor is very different from the major.

 

° A benefit of getting to know professors and show an interest is you might be able to get in on some of their projects.  This is often in the form of work-study, which can take a bite out of the debt down the road.  I was lucky enough to get in on a few great projects.  The most interesting seemed boring at first and didn't pay, but it was in an area I hadn't thought about and the professor was brilliant.  There was even an opportunity to have a tiny contribution to a bit of history and I still use some of the learnings. 

 

° Remind yourself that you learn best when it's play.  This won't happen all of the time - or even most of the time - but work on it. 

 

° Learn to witness the immediate world around you in some depth.  I recommend basic drawing and field drawing courses.  There are many other paths, but a bit of time focusing on understanding the natural world around you changes the way you think. 

 

That's pretty much it.  I mainly listen to them. Some of the items I've mentioned cause them to react and think about their own situation.  This year I recommended How to be Perfect by Michael Schur.  It's basically a Philosophy 101 short course done in a brilliantly entertaining manner - the way an engaged professor might go at it.  (If you're interested the audiobook is much better than the printed version as Schur has a stage background.) 

 

design for kids and community in japan

a minipost

 

About twenty years ago I was associated with a human computer interface department. A good deal of the work was associated with this nebulous concept of “community”. The term tends to be defined in the mind of the person talking about it .. like the word god. We had a list of about twenty words that needed rigorous contest when we publishing internally or externally .. community was everyone’s first choice for the list, That said most of us default to a warm and fuzzy concept. How people and neighborhoods should interact. The sort of thing Bob Kraut worries about. (to be fair he also thinks about communities like QAnon)

 

A recent 99% Invisible podcast focused on Japanese community of place design.. deign for the six year old Mixed use zoning, very narrow roads, a school house at the center and very independent kids. Some of us worry about urban and suburban design and traffic - how to you minimize the two or three ton vehicle carrying a driver and a bag of groceries? We often look to the Netherlands snd the Nordics for inspiration Indeed they’re excellent examples of moving from 1970s car-centric design to something better for cyclists and pedestrians. Japan offers a different path - one that seems unlikely in the US.

 

Here’s the a link to the audio, a transcript and a few videos

 

A comment .. most of us of a certain age grew up with kids walking and cycling everywhere - starting around six for walking and seven or eight for cycling. It was the only way a kid could deal with the scale of suburban design with fixed zoning and wide roads. That’s the environment the Dutch and Nordics started with rather than doubling down on complete car dependance.

 

clearing the air

a mini-post

A year ago I managed to help out getting a small grant from the state to build a number of Corsi-Rosenthal boxes with the help of two teachers (science and art) and about twenty high school kids.  It took a Saturday morning to build about eighty of the air cleaners.  All but two are still working and, even though the filters are visually ugly and dirty, they're working just as well.   I won't list all of the learnings - get in touch if you want to know more - but a big benefit besides cutting the viral load is dramatically cutting PM 2.5.  Kids and teachers report fewer allergy and allergy problems and toxic particulate from a nearby highway has been cut.  I suspect these would be great for fires and dusty areas (thinking Arizona and Salt Lake City).   In the past year more clever variants have appeared so check out YouTube if you're curious.  Oh - and filter prices drop if you buy 100 at a time:-)  The only downside was I never want to see duct tape again,

 

The motivation for the post was a fun discussion Andy Slavitt had with Richard Corsi and Jim Rosenthal on his In the Bubble Podcast.   Such a fantastic project for kids and adults!  (there are a number of commercials - Andy donates all profits to charities).

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couplings and friction

a quick minipost

 

Beginning physics students learn about simple coupled systems.  Things like pendulums with a weak spring between them and the like.  Next you look at somewhat more complex systems like a group of pendulums.  Put them on a solid surface and start them in different oscillations and they do their pendulum thing unaffected by their neighbors.  Now add a little communication by putting them on a floor that can transmit a bit of vibration, something interesting happens.

 

The coupling of systems is common in nature covering a very wide range of complexity inducing our brain.  Many of these systems are mathematically fascinating.  Turn up the amount of coupling and they behave as you might expect - at least to a point.  Then, as the comments of the system impose themselves on each other,  there's a dramatic change.  Sometimes these are good from our point of view and sometimes they're disasters.  The point of inflection is often marked by a perturbation - lightning strikes, hurricanes, pandemics, big lies.   The couplings are too strong to allow for anything but a change to a new state.

 

One feature of our society is an increased coupling of systems.  Social media and other targeted messaging, GPS, the Internet of Things, globalization, just in time everything, religion, democracy....  More systems are being connected and the amount of communication is increasing at a terrific rate. These couplings are often introduced to decrease cost and the "friction" parts of the system have with each other.   Many are  too complex to understand well, but the basic math of over coupled systems is clear - these systems can be very unstable. 

 

Building alternate pathways and redundancy into these systems is an answer, but that costs money and clever design.  Another alternative is reducing the coupling of certain important subsystems.  It's something I find myself paying more careful attention to.  Highly coupled or low-friction systems are usually brittle at some point.  I dislike the term "black swan" as real black swans (the bird) are not uncommon in nature.  But we continue to build serious and increasingly effective black swam bait...

 

 

 

just two things..

minipost

Recently I gave a talk to an audience of non-scientists.  During the question and answer section some asked "what's something important you'd leave us with?"

 

Everything you see is in the past.  Light travels about a foot in a billionth of a second, so if you look at your feet, light takes five or six billionths of a second to make it to your eyes.  You see your feet five or six billionths of a second in the past.  The moon you see is one and a quarter seconds in the past, and the Sun about eight and a third minutes.   The Andromeda galaxy, the farthest you can see without aid, about two and a half million years in the past.

 

I was going to point out it's more complex as it takes a few tenths of a second for your brain to register the image and the whole notion of "present" is imprecise, but that would muddy things.

 

Next someone asked for another useful piece of energy.  

 

About a horsepower of solar energy falls on an average sized umbrella on a very clear day with the Sun directly overhead. 

 

 

 

expectation dislocation

a quick minipost

I was listening to a  training technique discussion sports scientist Ross Tucker was having with a Royal Marines Green Beret.  Royal Marine training consists of a lot of what you might expect and adds a few areas you might not.  Expectation dislocation is considered one of the most important.   How do you psychologically and tactically deal with unexpected change?  How do you train people to handle it?

 

In science dislocation of expectations are considered a good thing, although they can be extremely frustrating at the time.  The overlooked, doing something stupid, being on the wrong track, the holy grail of unexpected discovery, and things mostly out of your control like equipment failures.  These things tend to play out more slowly than the battlefield or in sports.  Early in your career you make a lot of the stupid mistakes, find yourself on the wrong track and tend to overlook the obvious.  You learn with experience, but curveballs aren't uncommon and sometimes there's the taste of discovery.  

 

Sport offers dramatic examples.  I've had conversations with Sarah about preparing for and recognizing these dislocations in her sport.  How do you manage the psychological implications when you're trying to be "in the moment" at the same time?  Covid and the postponement of the Olympics had a huge impact on her.  But there are smaller examples.  Here's one of the most striking ones:

 

Sarah and Melissa face April and Alix in a semifinal in Cagliari.  Both teams are amazing - arguably the best in the world.   It's night with a chilly heavy rain.  At the 6:30 mark in the video Melissa goes down with a seriously dislocated shoulder.  After a doctor looks at it and a physical therapist re-locates it, she decides to go on - playing with one good arm.  The Canadians need to figure out local tactics and find a strategy as they go along. They only have their shared experience and all to brief moments of communication.  At one point a very fast spike targets Melissa's injured arm.  Something lights up in Sarah and she goes into her beast mode.  They win and go on to the gold medal match.  Unfortunately Melissa's arm isn't in great shape the next day and  they only take silver.

 

It's widely applicable.  Your car breaks down on a trip, a bad medical diagnosis ... any number of things ranging from very bad to very good.   How do you handle them in your life or your line of work?  How do you prepare yourself for these events?  These moments that can probe what we're made of.

 

personal social media usage experimentation

minipost

 

A few years ago I found myself spending far too much time on Twitter .. generally an hour to an hour and a half a day.  Time I didn't have.   For a month I went cold turkey, but was frustrated as there were a few people I only interacted with on Twitter and, following about 50 people in one of my fields was a good way to learn about new discoveries and papers.  I decided to limit my time, aiming for a half hour a day in two or three sessions. One would be devoted to hunting for new papers and the rest of the time would be the water cooler.   It's been mostly successful - I'll admit to hours of serious doom scrolling around the January 2021 coup attempt, but generally I'm under my thirty minute a day limit.  (I also have one day a week when I try to cut Internet access completely).

 

With that background I was fascinated to come across a report on some real-world experimentation by a group of about sixty college undergrads - a group known for heavy social media use.   Matt Salganik taught Sociology 204: Social Networks at Princeton last Fall.  He posted a report on Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy's Freedom to Tinker blog:  

 

Improving Your Relationship with Social Media May Call for a Targeted Approach

 

From the introduction:

 

What students did:

Our class had about 60 students, from a variety of years and majors, and like most Princeton students, many of them were heavy users of several social media platforms. Each of them designed their own treatment and selected an outcome of interest. For example, some students were interested in improving their sleep and others were interested in wasting less time. In addition to these student-specific outcomes, we also had all students track two common outcomes that have been studied by other researchers: subjective well-being and time use changes.

This process of self-experimentation is a bit different from what social scientists normally do. Typically, researchers standardize the treatment, randomly assign treatments to participants, and collect data so that we can compare across participants and treatment groups. In our class, however, each participant was a researcher and designed a unique treatment for themself. Even though this is not standard for research, self-experimentation can be a good way to learn. The treatments students developed fell into three main groups:

Targeted limitation (about 45%). Students in this group restricted – but did not eliminate – their social media use. For example, students in this group did things like stopping TikTok use after 8pm and avoiding the Instagram feed (but still using Instagram for messaging).

Targeted increase (about 15%). In class, we learned about some research that suggests people who use social media actively—rather than passively scrolling—see an improvement in their well-being. So some students committed to increasing their active engagement with social media. For example, students in this group did things like posting 3 times per day on Instagram or direct-messaging at least 3 friends.

Elimination (about 40%). Students in this group eliminated their social media use altogether on one or more apps. Students who designed these treatments did things like delete Instagram or TikTok from their phone, and some actively replaced their social media use with another activity they valued such as reading the news or spending time with friends.

 

It's worth reading and non-technical.  It also offers some advice and techniques in the assignments section if you want to try learning about  your own usage.  It seems clear that there's a broad spectrum of positive and negative use patterns. 

 

ted lasso?

a minipost

I was listening to a panel discussion of elite sports psychologists, sports scientists, and a sports anthropologist when a question was posed:

 

Could a Ted Lasso exist?

 

If you haven't seen the show, Lasso is an American college football coach who is suddenly hired to coach an English Premier League team.  He had success in his D-II school, but it was clear he was hired to fail.  It turns out he didn't.

 

There was some laughter among audience members, but the panel members took it seriously.  It could work.  You'd need someone who was an incredible learner with success leading a team  of some kind.  Someone great at listening, observing and thinking.  They've need a Beard - a character who happens to be a serious soccer expert (among other things), but would never cut it as a coach.   Creating a bond with the players, listening to them, and be willing to experiment is key.  You'd also need management willing to put up with the time required to create a success.

 

The anthropologist noted some of these qualities are missing in NFL, NBA, MBA, and NHL coaching.  Coaches tend to be extremely confident of themselves and there is pressure to win.  Team culture can suffer and creativity is low compared with some other types of teams.  He pointed out some women's teams - particularly soccer and indoor volleyball -  are extremely innovative with positive team cultures well beyond any men's pro team he's seen. 

 

There was general agreement among those in the panel.  Coaching has a way to go in the big pro leagues, but the types of coaches selected are an issue.  A great women's soccer or indoor volleyball coach (several were mentioned) could be a Ted Lasso if they had a Beard at their side and the time to create change.   As an example a women's volleyball coach was mentioned.  Something of a household name in sports, he's as passionate figuring out how to coach a team of pre-teens as he is his countries national team.  He's experimenting and learning and might make a discovery with some twelve year old kids that works with his olympians.

 

It's culture all the way down at the top.  Maybe some of these multimillion dollar coaches aren't worth it, but it's unlikely the culture that selects them will change. 

 

It's an interesting game to think about the question in teams outside of sports.  

 

what's in a name?

Surrounded by dramatic peaks on a narrow road etched into the side of the mountains you drop into forested area that continues into a string of foothills.  It's clear and you wish you were on your bike this time around.  The trees thin out and suddenly it's upon you.  You're at the summit of the last foothill and the expanse of the prairie opens up ahead.  Off in the distance is a short mountain range, but mostly it's prairie and you need to catch your breath.

 

Oceans and mountains have their appeal, but so does the prairie.  I suspect Montana Jeri and Alberta Jheri know this too. More than a few people from the area are taken by the outdoors. You find a number of artists, photographers, as well as people who are taken to learn about their surroundings.  I feel hard for the sky and have yet to recover.

 

The area is positioned such that auroras aren't uncommon during solar maximums.  Alberta and Saskatchewan have groups of serious amateur aurora watchers.   About ten years ago they realized something was different.  Something more frequent than garden variety auroras with a different color (they'd say colour) and shape.  Early spectrographic measurements revealed it was a thermal emission rather than the distinct colors of excited atoms dropping to lower energy levels.  

 

Serious work using satellites and the rich ground-based observations of the Canadian amateurs began around 2016.  It was real and not an aurora.  It needed a name.    One based on a children's movie turned out to be perfect.

 

The backronym Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement nicely suggests STEVE.

 

 

Much more is known now and the name remains.  The past week has been some beautiful displays along the Canadian Rockies.  I say them as a teenager and then again in my 30s, but didn't realize they weren't auroras.   Cheers to those curious enough to ask the questions.

 

the cost of knowledge is a great deal of ignorance

a mini-post

First a caveat - I have almost no background in the social sciences.

This week a few people have written about information overload. It’s certainly been with us since the beginning of the 16th century in the Western world and one can make arguments that extend further back. The rate of new knowledge, as opposed to raw information, has increased in many fields, doubling or more every decade and causing many fields to fission into new subfields. It’s a major cause of the imposter syndrome I feel when I’m trying to hack through a paper in low temperature physics for example … sixty years ago there wasn’t a problem thinking about both.

We deal with the information increase by specializing and creating what are often rich traditions. I’ve been able to carry on rich conversations with people where I have no Mandarin and the other person had almost no English by jotting abstractions and drawings of our shared tradition on a blackboard (slate blackboards are another tradition in my field) .

But these traditions blind us to the greater knowledge around us. .. It reminds me of the early experiment where you train a dog to respond to a bell. When you measure the brainwave of the dog you get a clear signal when the bell is rung. Now put a piece of juicy meat before the dog and ring the bell. The bell signal is nowhere to be found - it’s been overridden by the sight and/or the smell of the meat.

It’s funny - we don’t make progress without tradition, but it can also blind us to the greater world.. My belief is it’s important to communicate across the boundaries of the many traditions. I think this is an area where the arts are very powerful. We’re resorting to mechanisms we don’t have a real grasp on.. machine learning comes to mind.. to deal with some of this. There are many views on the subject, but I’m guessing it isn’t as useful as many suggest.

Finally there's an issue in traditions where knowledge doesn’t increase rapidly. How to be kind, how to be a good person, love, peace. Areas where people a long time ago had figured things out within the context of their tradition and arguably we haven’t made progress..

anyway .. just random thoughts on a rainy Spring evening. There are so many issues here that are interesting to think about.

Enjoy the Spring and listen to some music and enjoy some art. And some of you are creatives so create rather than sit back!

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A note on ignorance .. that's a complex subject in it's own right, but the title seems to fit.