Ramblemuse Touch Points

The first of two starting points for this post is David Evans’s An ‘Unacceptable’ Degree? in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Evans is discussing hiring practices and the rejection of potential candidates who lack a “trophy degree.”

One of the commentators mentions several reasons that a candidate would be rejected that, even if shared, wouldn’t help the candidate prepare for future searches. The most striking of those is, “Technically you have an appropriate graduate credential and your presentation was OK, but the school you attended just isn’t acceptable to our administration.”

There’s an implication in this that academic departments and even businesses might, at times, be turning away more capable candidates in preference to those coming from “the right&lrdquo; institutions. My own reaction to this is, “Great! Let them!” The place to put pressure on leveling the playing field toward maximizing capability and return on investment isn’t in hiring practices but in funding, a point raised by one of those commenting on Evans’s article.

The place to push back against blind elitism is in the review and funding process — ensuring that it doesn’t just become a process of the elite donating to the elite. Given that, such preferential hiring practices can open entrepreneurial doors. Any commodity, including talent, undervalued by some is an opportunity for others. If capable persons are overlooked by some institutions, they become available to those less concerned with trophies and more willing to discern abilities to function in the trenches. Potentially having a lower level of debt, such person may come with somewhat lower salary needs. So, for someone trying to build a new department or new business, rejection by some may improve the ability to create a “knock their pants off” facility. In an educational world in which both new technologies and a need to contain costs will play an increasing role, ROI is going to be something to consider.

The second starting point for this post is another essay by William Deresiewicz, again come across via Don Vandergriff’s blog. This time it’s, The Disadvantages of an Elite Education. This time, Dereesiewicz in noting that, while an education at an elite institution may strengthen some capabilities, it can also cripple other capabilites and create perceptual blind spots.

You learn to think, at least in certain ways, and you make the contacts needed to launch yourself into a life rich in all of society’s most cherished rewards. To consider that while some opportunities are being created, others are being cancelled and that while some abilities are being developed, others are being crippled is, within this context, not only outrageous, but inconceivable.

I’m not talking about curricula or the culture wars, the closing or opening of the American mind, political correctness, canon formation, or what have you. I’m talking about the whole system in which these skirmishes play out. Not just the Ivy League and its peer institutions, but also the mechanisms that get you there in the first place: the private and affluent public “feeder” schools, the ever-growing parastructure of tutors and test-prep courses and enrichment programs, the whole admissions frenzy and everything that leads up to and away from it. …

The world that produced John Kerry and George Bush is indeed giving us our next generation of leaders. The kid who’s loading up on AP courses junior year or editing three campus publications while double-majoring, the kid whom everyone wants at their college or law school but no one wants in their classroom, the kid who doesn’t have a minute to breathe, let alone think, will soon be running a corporation or an institution or a government. She will have many achievements but little experience, great success but no vision. The disadvantage of an elite education is that it’s given us the elite we have, and the elite we’re going to have.

On the average, tunnel vision education and hiring gives us leaders who are less flexible and less perceptive than they might be, opening the door for others either in the U.S. or the increasingly global economy. To the worst, an elite education may give us leaders seriously out of touch with the world, such as highlighted by Michael Watkins in his Harvard Business Review article, I Want To Live Like Common People: BP and the Great PR Divide.

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In the serendipity of looking through various RSS feeds, I came across Don Vandergriff’s recent post, The Best Leadership Article I have Seen, which reprints and links to William Deresiewicz’s lecture Solitude and Leadership posted on The American Scholar. I agree with Vandergriff that it is a very timely and thought provoking piece of writing. I also find it also lends perspective both to an article on the German concept of Auftragstaktik (mission tactics) and to some some blog posts on disincentives to pursue scientific research that has a long time constant (i.e. takes a long time to get results). I’m going to juxtaposition these three pieces, mostly by quoting from them, starting with Deresiewicz commenting on the students he encountered while at Yale.

So what I saw around me were great kids who had been trained to be world-class hoop jumpers. Any goal you set them, they could achieve. Any test you gave them, they could pass with flying colors. They were, as one of them put it herself, “excellent sheep.” I had no doubt that they would continue to jump through hoops and ace tests and go on to Harvard Business School, or Michigan Law School, or Johns Hopkins Medical School, or Goldman Sachs, or McKinsey consulting, or whatever. And this approach would indeed take them far in life. They would come back for their 25th reunion as a partner at White & Case, or an attending physician at Mass General, or an assistant secretary in the Department of State.

That is exactly what places like Yale mean when they talk about training leaders. Educating people who make a big name for themselves in the world, people with impressive titles, people the university can brag about. People who make it to the top. People who can climb the greasy pole of whatever hierarchy they decide to attach themselves to.

But I think there’s something desperately wrong, and even dangerous, about that idea. … That’s really the great mystery about bureaucracies. Why is it so often that the best people are stuck in the middle and the people who are running things—the leaders—are the mediocrities? Because excellence isn’t usually what gets you up the greasy pole. What gets you up is a talent for maneuvering. Kissing up to the people above you, kicking down to the people below you. Pleasing your teachers, pleasing your superiors, picking a powerful mentor and riding his coattails until it’s time to stab him in the back. Jumping through hoops. Getting along by going along. Being whatever other people want you to be, so that it finally comes to seem that, like the manager of the Central Station, you have nothing inside you at all. Not taking stupid risks like trying to change how things are done or question why they’re done. Just keeping the routine going. …

We have a crisis of leadership in America because our overwhelming power and wealth, earned under earlier generations of leaders, made us complacent, and for too long we have been training leaders who only know how to keep the routine going. Who can answer questions, but don’t know how to ask them. Who can fulfill goals, but don’t know how to set them. Who think about how to get things done, but not whether they’re worth doing in the first place. What we have now are the greatest technocrats the world has ever seen, people who have been trained to be incredibly good at one specific thing, but who have no interest in anything beyond their area of exper­tise. What we don’t have are leaders.

What we don’t have, in other words, are thinkers. People who can think for themselves. People who can formulate a new direction: for the country, for a corporation or a college, for the Army—a new way of doing things, a new way of looking at things. People, in other words, with vision.

Now, it’s interesting to correlate Deresiewicz’s comments on leadership and the lack of it with a few quotes from Major General Werner Widder’s (German army) article on Auftragstaktik or “mission tacticts”.

Thus, Auftragstaktik is more than giving a mission to a subordinate and allowing him the latitude to execute it. Rather, it is the superior’s duty to specify the objective and the framework within which the subordinate has to accomplish the mission. The commander provides all resources required to carry out the mission. This, in turn, means that execution itself becomes the executor’s responsibility. His skills, creativity, and commitment will be the key elements of execution. Thus, Auftragstaktik is not merely a technique of issuing orders but a type of leadership that is inextricably linked to a certain image of men as soldiers.

The decisive foundation for Auftragstaktik is peacetime training with a deliberate focus on training soldiers to think independently and to act according to the superior commander’s intent. The superior’s specified objective, his confidence in his subordinates’ capabilities, his and his subordinates’ acceptance of their respective responsibilities, and their freedom to act are the four cornerstones of Auftragstaktik on the one hand and its secret on the other. The onus, nevertheless, still remains with the commander, who must provide the necessary means to accomplish the mission. …

Auftragstaktik is based on an image of man who values his individual dignity and freedom and who harnesses them to achieve superior strength. This concept is still valid for the 21st century. Based on the premise that leadership encompasses two aspects—being a role model and accepting responsibility—leadership requires competence, strength of character, trust, initiative, judgment, assertiveness, and decisionmaking ability at all command levels.

Because I have a primary interest in leadership as it pertains to the pursuit of good science, I want to bring the focus back to this arena by turning to Canadian GirlPostdoc’s blog posts on Slow Science gets the Shaft – Part I and Slow Science Gets the Shaft – Part Deux.

This anecdote is my way of saying, that as academic scientists we make choices on a daily basis to pursue what is expedient at the cost of what may turn out to be interesting, all because of the lack of time. This rushed time frame creates an environment that does not support slow science. …

An environment that uses a carrot (tenure) and stick (terminal contract) incentive model narrows people’s focus and destroys creativity. If you don’t believe me, listen to the facts put forward by Daniel Pink, in his TED talk (it’s worth 17 minutes of your time) on the science of motivation. Why would you spend time doing science that you think is worthwhile when it doesn’t get you the carrot. Instead, the choice is obvious, you do science that you know will work, ie get you the publications, the grants, all in the drive for tenure. This carrot and stick model leaves no room for innovation and creativity.

A second effect that this “if you do this then you will get this or else” atmosphere does is it creates and attracts a particular type of scientist to academia and selects against another. One academic I know, has said that he doesn’t participate in a project unless he sees a publication in it for himself. …

So the pursuit of science has become one of the bureaucracies that Deresiewicz refers to. One in which it is better to keep the routine going than to risk straying too far into the unknown. One in which there are disincentives to develop the kind of Auftragstaktik that Widder encourages of using local authority within the greater direction of endeavor of the scientific framework. It’s an open question, how we work to reverse the push toward the safety of mediocrity. It’s likely not going to happen unless the system of rewards are restructured to value the uncertain and ambiguous.

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To date, the internet and technology have had some major impacts on the where and when of shopping for clothes but have not fundamentally changed the process. What existed before as catalog shopping pretty much transferred to web-based catalogs of clothes and shopping online. The process became more convenient, the ability to search and compare improved, but the process has still been an incremental improvement on what could previously be done via physical mail and phone calls. Now, however, we are on the edge of seeing the convergence of several technological developments creating a revolutionary and fundamental change in the clothing industry.

The first big change comes in both having personal fit data and in better understanding the fitting needs of an entire population segment. The article Computerized Female Form For Designers describes an effort to measure and statistically characterize the torso shapes of a diverse sampling of Japanese women.

The team took a close look at the bodies of 560 Japanese women aged from 19 to 63 years using laser metrology to map “control points” at specific sites on the women’s trunks. They could then fit this data to a generic 3D trunk model in the computer and fit the control points to it to build up a database of body shapes.

They then applied statistical analysis to the data employing principal component analysis and cluster analysis to classify trunk characteristics into five different types. Each depends on slimness or otherwise, breast size and angle, neck type, and shoulder slope. They obtained five classes of body shape which they say represent the majority of trunk shape among Japanese women.

A 2005 article in Science Daily noted that Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) had won an award for development and commercialization of a three-dimensional body scanner. That scanner development effort was being applied by Intellifit to determining fit for clothing. At this point, Intellifit is putting scanning booths into malls and store. Based on radio frequency scanning, a scan can be done through clothing in 10-15 seconds, measuring 200,000 points on the body that are then boiled down into a couple of hundred body measurements. The scans require about 1/350^th the power of cell-phone emissions. According to the information they provide in videos and other data, Intellifit is working with clothing manufacturers to database clothing size characteristics. These can be used along with personal scan data to steer a consumer to clothing that fits their body according to their shape and sizing preferences. For the consumer, this means being taken directly to clothing that fits their shape over multiple measurements rather than the hit or miss process of choosing one measurement and trying on the clothing to see if the garment works in practice.

For designers and manufacturers, a database of depersonalized measurement data could be used statistically, as with the Japanese study, to characterize and classify body shapes and their frequency of occurrence within the population. Having this data along with a means of steering customers can motivate clothing designers and manufacturers to more precisely target and market to previously under-served consumer needs. In other words, marketing not just to the average consumer shape but to the tail of a distribution or to multiple modes of a distribution of shape needs. There’s the classic example of a bimodal distribution in which the average value may hardly exist in the population.

The next big technology change comes in presentation. Here we see a merging of improved sensors to detect movement, improved displays, and much greater computational capabilities to render 3D images. The combination allows us to computationally augment reality. As an example of the new display capabilities, Andrew Nusca has recently blogged about Intel’s augmented reality digital display. Such display capabilities can be combined with the motion sensor and virtual rendering capabilities displayed in Cisco’s video, The Future of Shopping.

Finally, companies like Zugara carry this back to web shopping with capabilities such as the webcam social shopper. Your own web camera is combined with motion detection and rendering capabilities to create a virtual dressing room.

A report on research and teaching under the direction of Young-A Lee at Iowa State University lends further perspective on the interplay between virtual reality and real life clothing design.

“We’re seeing retailers use the concept of Second Life to test prototypes of clothing, shoes and other products” Lee said. “A person’s body scan data is made into an avatar, and this avatar is the real presentation of him or herself and carries each individual’s virtual identity within the virtual environment such as Second Life. Then, they can shop at stores, where a manufacturer may be testing out a new product to see if it is popular [within Second Life]. If it is, they may go on to actually produce the piece of clothing, shoes, or whatever they try out.”

Further Reading

Devarajan, Priya: 2004. Validation of ‘Female Figure Identification Technique (FFIT) for Apparel’ Software. Journal of Textile and Apparel, Technology and Management, 4(1), <http://www.tx.ncsu.edu/jtatm/volume4issue1/articles/Istook/devarajan_full_106_04.pdf>.

Explore Cornell. 3D Body Scanner. Accessed 10 June 2010. <http://ecommons2.library.cornell.edu/web_archive/explore.cornell.edu/scene0037.html?scene=The%203D%20Body%20Scanner>.

Lim, Hosun, Cynthia L. Istook, and Nancy L. Cassill: 2009. Advanced Mass Customization in Apparel. Journal of Textile and Apparel, Technology and Management, 6(1). <http://www.bioresourcesjournal.com/index.php/JTATM/article/viewFile/414/360>.

Nakamura, Kensuke, and and Takao Kurokawa: 2009. Analysis and classification of three-dimensional trunk shape of women by using the human body shape model. Int. J. Computer Applications in Technology, 34, 278-284. <http://inderscience.metapress.com/link.asp?id=ev4w6150k1137r18>

Polvinen, Elaine. Virtual Fashion Technology (blog). Accessed 10 June 2010. <http://fashiontech.wordpress.com/>

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The other day I was browsing a post by Chet Richards (Certain to Win) at Defense and the National Interest on 4GW comes to a town near you, 4GW being an acronym for fourth generation warfare. In particular, what caught my eye was a statement Richards makes about disconnection from (or marginalization by) the nominal state, resulting in stronger allegiance to other groups. Richards first notes that the state itself is not disappearing, then adds:

What does appear to be happening, however, is that in some areas, large numbers of people are transferring their primary loyalties to organizations other than the state to which they happen to be citizens. There is nothing new about this: Organized crime is as old as the species itself, and many state boundaries, particularly in areas affected by European colonialism, are arbitrary and don’t reflect ethnic or tribal composition.

While Richard’s immediate focus is the presence of Mexican drug cartel activity in Atlanta, his statement would apply equally to any black market in which legal goods are “redirected” from the normal lines of distribution or illegal goods are sold. The implication in either case is that there are a significant number of people who are willing to “defect” (game theory terminology) from social norms to enable the black market to succeed from the providers’ perspective. While the official state or community considers the activities to be illegal, the activities succeed because there is underlying support (i.e. a market) within the community itself. The “invisible elephant” in the discussion is that drug trafficking, sex trafficking, and black markets are community supported in the sense that the markets are often community based. In sex-trafficking, for example, the aspect of market demand was studied in papers by Julia O’Connell Davidson (Eurozine) and Katri Eespere (Ministry of Social Affairs of the Republic of Estonia). Given the profitability incentive, it remains next to impossible to eradicate such black market activities as long as social and economic factors provide them with significant community-based market demand.

As a computational modeler, my thoughts naturally turn to considering if anyone is doing social modeling, particularly agent-based modeling, of formation of black markets. In doing a bit of searching I didn’t turn up a lot, but did find a few items and throughts. One stone overturned was the research being done by Barry G. Silverman at University of Pennsylvania. Silverman’s papers also added the term “human terrain” to my considerations; a term in use by the military in consideration of cultural and social factors affecting their efforts. That in turn led to the Dartmouth College’s Laboratory for Human Terrain. I also turned up a page on GIS and Agent-Based Modeling, which includes links on agent-based modeling in the Second Life virtual world and agent-based modeling of crime.

Resources for agent-based modeling in the social sciences include Nigel Gilbert’s “Simulation for the Social Scientist” and “Agent-Based Models — Quantitative Applications in the Social Sciences”. Leigh Tesfatsion (Iowa State University) maintains a website on Agent-Based Computational Economics.

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The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ (I’ve found it!), but ‘That’s funny…’
— Isaac Asimov.

This piece got its immediate stimulus when I read a recent Opposed Systems Design (OSD) post on “Watts, intuition, ‘ahas’ and go”. What caught my eye and mind was the distinction being made between intuitive responses and the “aha” moments in which a perceptual change occurs.

As mentioned in OSD, the concept of intuitive responses have been well characterized by Gary Klein’s field-based research presented in Sources of Power. Klein attributes much of intuitional decision making to two factors: unconscious recognition of a pattern similar to one previously experienced, and perceptional changes that allow the experienced practitioner to see situational changes and anomalies missed by the novice. A course of action is not chosen because of rational comparison between options, but because a pattern is unconsciously recognized that also yields a workable course of action.

In Think Again, Sidney Finkelstein, Jo Whitehead, and Andrew Campbell note that, while such Recognition Primed Decisions are most often correct, they can occasionally lead to bad decisions. Such a “one-plan-at-a-time” decision process can exclude better solutions if the situational recognition isn’t correct. The three authors attribute a number of inherently bad decsions to the inability of later cross-checks to catch and stop an initially faulty intuitive decision. In some cases, the failure to stop a bad decision stems from the strength of the associated emotional tagging.

Now onto the second part of ‘aha’ moments. A bit of serendipty, a lot of hard work and background knowledge, and the flexibility of perspective to notice something unexpected are thought to be major factors in creativity and innovation. A number of accidental inventions are highlighted in the Smithsonian article Eureka!, including the discovery of Teflon® by Roy Plunkett and Post-It® notes by Spencer Silver and Arthur Fry. As with my opening quote by Isaac Asimov, however, most of these discoveries didn’t start with “I found it”, but with “Huh! That’s funny”. It was the experience and flexibility of mind to both notice that something unexpected had occurred and not to simply discount it or toss it out as a failure that resulted in innovation.

Back in the unnetworked year of 1983, I had read (and saved) a paper copy of “Profile of the Creative Individual”, Part I and Part II, in which Eugene Raudsepp looked at the personal characteristics associated with creativity. Among his thoughts was the extent to which we hammer creativity out of people.

Perhaps the chief danger of specialization, however, is that it emphasizes and demands strict conformity to the accepted dogmas and conventions of a field. Learning to comply with the established dogmas starts early in a person’s educational career. By the time he is ready to graduate into original production, he frequently finds that he cannot free himself from its bondage.

Relatively few individuals find the courage to tackle new problems in a new, unconventional manner; only a few transcend their subjugation to the traditional and jump beyond the orthodox to original viewpoints and approaches. The renowned physicist and father of operationalism, P.W. Bridgman, advises that the most important thing for the creative peson to remember is merely “to do his utmost with his mind, no holds barred.”

It may be that the question is not so much how we train creativity into people as it is how we stop early training that hammers it out of them.

Jerry Hirschberg, in The Creative Priority, talks about four creative themes: polarities, unprecedented thinking, boundaries, and synthesis. I’ve found his explanation of the latter two, in particular, to be a strong statement of creative requirements.

Boundaries are the lines between disconnected planes of thought. making them, clarifying them, and protecting them have been a principal preoccupation of business as well as education and society. Creative activity, however, does not confine itself to in-bounds play. It comes to life at the edges, whether by blurring, abrading, overlapping or breaking through the partitions. The creative priority embraces and utilizes the chasms and the barriers that separate departments, disciplines, cultures, personalities, and zones of responsibility.

It is perhaps the last theme, synthesis, that is most lacking in corporate thinking. Synthesis is the principal impulse of the act of creation. In a world obsessed with analysis, with the taking apart of things and issues into their component parts, creativity is the impulse to integrate, unify, and bring together. It tolerates (and at the early stages even prefers) higher levels of disorder and disintegration so that it can reorder at newer and higher levels of integration.

Hirshberg’s comments bear a striking resemblance to ideas developed by the late military strategist John Boyd. In The Strategic Game of ? and ?, Boyd used a snowmobile as a metaphor for destruction and synthesis. Skis are pulled off of the ski slope, an outboard motor is taken from a motorboat, handlebars are grabbed from a bicycle, and the idea of rubber treads is taken from toy tractors and tanks. Reassembled, they become a snowmobile. In terms of a strategic application, in The John Boyd Roundtable Boyd is noted to have written:

A loser is someone (individual or group) who cannot build snowmobiles when facing uncertainty and unpredictable change.

A winner is someone (individual or group) who can build snowmobiles, and employ them in an appropriate fashion, when facing uncertainty and unpredictable change.

Finally, I’ll simply add a couple of additional resources I’ve found to be insightful in looking for the sources of creativity and the change of perspective (in many cases also a change in mode from the symbolic/verbal to the visual/spatial) that lead to those moments of ‘aha’.

• James L. Adam’s Conceptual Blockbusting
• Stephen Nachmanovitch Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art

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While doing some other page template improvements, I discovered that a web-hosting server upgrade had changed the PHP version and killed the XSLT transformation of my massage and general bibliographies.

I updated the PHP XSLT coding and both bibliographies are available again. Both bibliographies are maintained in the Library of Congress’s MODS XML format. I also plan on doing some content additions in the near future.

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On the Twitter side, I’ve wandered into the discussion about the inaccuracies and damage to public understanding resulting from ‘he said, she said’ journalism. This is most simply defined as journalism in which both sides of a ‘public debate’ are quoted without regard to their actual expertise and scientific accuracy.

Back in 2004, Chris Mooney brought up this issue in an article in the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR). More recently, NYU professor Jay Rosen has been actively criticizing ‘he said, she said’ journalism in his Twitter feed and posting to his Press Think blog.

On the climate side of the house, Andrew Revkin recently wrote an article for the NY Times noting that one fossil fuel connected ‘denier’ organization ignored its own climate experts in claiming lack of a basis for anthropogenic climate change. In his Attytood blog, Will Bunch ties part of the damage the deniers were able to accomplish back to ‘he said, she said’ journalism.

Such sloppy journalism leaves it up to the readers to sort out the relative merits of the quoted ‘experts’. Many don’t have the background or the contacts. Good science writing, good health care writing, moves this expertise verification upstream to the journalist.

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After a too long hiatus, Ramblemuse Touch Points (RMTP) is active again, now updated to current WordPress and restyled to match the main Ramblemuse.com theme. For help with the learning curve on creating a WordPress theme from scratch, I can point to a tutorial at wpdesigner with thanks. The tutorial was organized the way I tend to self-learn, increment-by-expanding-increment of hands-on application.

The hiatus in my writing this blog had multiple causes, including that I had time and mental energy enough to “Tweet” but not to compose longer pieces. A large piece underlying that condition of fatigue was the combination of my own job transitions with my wife’s diagnosis of invasive breast cancer last September. The same week in September that I went off of the LLNL payroll, she went into surgery. She is now post-chemotherapy, just about to start radiation therapy, and with an excellent prognosis. She’s now back to gardening and planning, with friends, to do the “Bras for the Cause” walk in a couple of weeks. It has been a long but survivable journey for our familily.  I can only humbly thank the many friends who’ve lent us support, both locally and via CaringBridge.

While it still, at times, feels that we waddle on through molasses, things are back to regular enough that I’m once again scanning through journals and RSS feeds for things I find interesting or irritating enough to comment on. Please stay tuned.

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I’m off to San Francisco again for more of the AGU conference and tonight’s Science Writer’s dinner. Yesterday I caught the press conference on the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO), scheduled to fly “not before 30 January”. The OCO session talks and posters are today and tomorrow. The OCO takes us from about 100 flask samples of carbon dioxide concentrations per day to global coverage every sixteen days. The OCO flys in a polar orbit that precesses in longitude around the globe covering a 10 km wide swath in each pass-over. Because the orbit interlaces, it gets around the globe faster than 16 days, but that’s what it takes to fill in the spaces between individual swaths. The OCO will give a lot more data to increase understanding of magnitudes and seasonal behavior of sources and sinks of CO_2.

I also caught a talk on the vulnerability of California to climate change. We get our rainfall in only about 120 days of the year, so slight shifts in precipitation patterns can make a big difference. We also depend on accumulating Sierra snow-pack, rather than having it come down as more rain, so temperature makes a big difference in water management. As population in California continues to increase, more of this will occur in inland valleys, which also are expected to have more extreme heat days with global warming. Predictions are that warming will be larger in summer than in winter. Went by the California Water Resources exhibit booth later in the day and picked up a report and several CDs. More on those later.

I’ve had little time for longish blogs this fall, but after the NASW conference in Palo Alto this past October, I have been Twittering.

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Today was the first day of this year’s fall American Geophysical Union meeting. It was also the first time I attended an AGU meeting under freelance press/media credentials rather than as a scientist affiliated with an organization. But let’s move on to content.

I spent a goodly portion of the day, first at a press conference and then at sessions organized by Eric Barron and Jack Fellows of UCAR. The sessions focused on how research can more effectively help local and regional decision makers deal with climate change. Among the presentations, Johnathan Overpeck from the University of Arizona summarized NOAA’s Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessment (RISA) program. RISA started about 15 years ago, focusing on forecasting seasonal climate variability from the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO). It has grown to nine sites, with the focus shifting more to adaptation to climate change. Brad Udall, director of Western Water Assessment, discussed the large number of participants in water research and the great interest in addressing climate change within management of water resources. Interest by water management agencies includes both prognostic capabilities and historical variations in average amounts and extrema of rainfall. Donald Wuebbles, of the University of Illinois, described local efforts by a Chicago Climate Task Force to combine addressing climate vulnerabilities, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and improving quality of life. Another topic mentioned by Jonathan Overpeck was the growing use of seasonal climate forecasts by agencies managing responses to wildfires.

The various presenters stress the need for research that meets stakeholder needs both in topic and in timeliness. The research and planning needs to both involve stakeholders from the onset and create sustained partnerships. Changes in water availability due to climate change are likely the biggest issue. Another major issue, involving both climate planning and social research, comes in assessing population vulnerabilities to extreme heat events and improving adaptation capabilities. Vulnerabilities can vary greatly over small spatial scales and with variations in demographics.

I also caught a few presentations in a session on climate change and management of ecosystems in complex mountain environments. This extended the considerations above into the realm of biological systems. Considerations included how small scale spatial patterns in snowfall in California’s Sierra Nevada could create errors in estimates of water content.

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