Ramblemuse Touch Points

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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Back toward the end of last year, I’d posted a short piece about the book Three Cups of Tea, profiling Greg Mortenson’s work building schools in remote parts of Pakistan. NY Times Op-Ed Columnist Nicholas Kristof just wrote a column about Mortenson — It Takes a School, Not Missles. Kristof also extends the discussion and a chance to comment to his NY Times blog On the Ground.

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This is one of those bits and pieces posts. Being almost two months out from being sacked in the LLNL layoffs has added both to my learning curve and to my lists of tasks done. Last Sunday marked the fourth of four weekly required newspaper publications of my filed fictitious business name “Ramblemuse Associates”. What remains on that front is to receive the notification from the newspaper that publication is complete and then file it with the county registrar. What started the process was to file the name with the county and to get their notice of filing to give to the newspaper. Along with that was another copy to use with banks for opening a business account.

Taking a concept from John McWade’s graphic design book, Before & After Page Design, I put together a one-page flyer-style web-résumé. McWade had done this is page publishing software while I used some ideas picked up from the CSS Zen Garden to play with it in CSS.

I’ve slowly been building my connections on LinkedIn. Part of this has been reestablishing contact with former colleagues. Part has been expanding in new areas, including a few people I’ve met via the National Association of Science Writers. A LinkedIn connection places the responsibility for updating contact information on the person who owns it which is useful enough in its own right. The other ways of using the system to increase connections are by joining interest groups and by asking or answering questions. Interest groups often come with discussion forums on other group-based networking facilities such as Ning or CollectiveX. Using the LinkedIn question capability increases visibility and can be used to show expertise — both useful outcomes for freelancers.

The paper on massage therapy guidelines that I’d posted on earlier, came back from the reviewers in mid-June with a new deadline of 30 June. That took a lot of editing and reformatting on my part, but we got it back to the journal and into their online system by the deadline. I also, in writing more about the creation of guidelines as a knowledge management function, came across a quote in Gary Klein’s Sources of Power (p. 170) that brought me back to the LLNL diaspora.

In organizations, much of the knowledge is held within the heads of the workers and is never shared. This is tacit knowledge. In most organizations, the culture seems to ignore the expertise that already exists, to take it for granted. If a skilled worker retired after thirty years on the job and tried to leave with a favorite personal computer, some programs, or a set of tools, he or she would be stopped. The organization knows the value of the equipment. But the organization lets the worker walk out with all of that expertise, which is worth far more than some minor equipment, and never says a word, never even notices the loss. Yet in an organization, knowledge is a resource and should be treated as such.

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In current times, forwarding a science career is a much about business as it is about knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs). This statement is not about the business of the institution or company you work for at any given time, but about treating your career as an individual, entrepreneurial business. You need both a business plan and the ability to make hard-nosed decisions about your career/business. Two key questions are: “Is there high potential for carving out a post-postDoc career in a scientific domain?” and “Does a position you are considering substantially further that career or simply postpone a portage to a new knowledge area?”

The first question, aimed at avoiding spending years working toward a career that has dismal employment projects beyond postdoctoral positions, is well-motivated by the NY Times article by Jennifer Lee on the Postdoc Trail: Long and Filled With Pitfalls. The second question is more about periodic reevaluations of the growth or decline of funding and the likelihood of winning the competition for limited resources in specific research areas.

Does a potential work position further your abilities or lead to becoming “eddied out” of the current of research flow? Evaluating compensation for the latter sort of project, requires including the eventual costs of retraining yourself and rebuilding your marketability when the project ends. This is particularly true if there is limited marketability and limited employers for the expertise you would develop and use in such a project. The compensation (or tail-end insurance) you require to work in an area should increase as the general marketability of skills and expertise goes down. Your evaluation needs to included the downtime and costs of rebuilding a career to the same level of professional standing should the project terminate. In short, market comparisons of total compensation need to include comparisons of expertise marketability.

In their book Consulting for Dummies, Bob Nelson and Peter Economy warn about the volatility of today’s job market. The paragraph is flagged in the book by an icon for a bomb with a lit fuse; the symbol used for something that can “blow up in your face” if you don’t pay attention.

The days of having a job for life are long gone. Today’s economy is one of rapid change and movement. As companies continue to search for ways to cut costs, they increasingly turn to hiring temporary workers or contracting work out to consultants. Having a job today is no guarantee of having one tomorrow. When you work for a company — no matter how large — you can be laid off at any time, for almost any reason, with little or no notice. If you’re lucky, you get a severance package of some sort — maybe a few weeks’ or a few months’ pay. If you’re not so lucky, your last day is just that, and you’re on your own.

In his 1995 book JobShift, William Bridges cautions that, “All jobs in today’s economy are temporary.” I’ve a penciled notation in my copy of the book that, in an NPR interview, Bridges expanded this to, “100 percent of today’s jobs are temporary, it’s just that 75% of us are still in denial.” Bridges then defines the concept of employment (not job) security.

Employment security is going through one of those fundamental redefinitions that marks a societal turning point. Now security resides in the person rather than the position, and to a cluster of qualities that have nothing to do with the organization’s policies or practices. From now on, you will have a harder and harder time finding security in a job. In the future, your security will depend on your developing three characteristics as a worker and as a person.

Employability — Your security will come first and foremost from being an attractive prospect for employers, and that attractiveness involves having the abilities and attitudes that an employer needs at the moment. Ironically, the employer’s need is likely to be created by the very changes that destroyed traditional job security.

Vendor-mindedness — Being a traditional, loyal employee is no longer an asset. It has, in fact, turned into a liability. So stop thinking like an employee and start thinking like an external vendor who has been hired to accomplish a specific task.

Resiliency — Organizations today operate in such a turbulent environment that no arrangement serves them for very long. What you will need (both for the organization’s sake and for your own) is the ability to bend and not break, to let go readily of the outdated and learn the new, to bounce back quickly from disappointment, to live with high levels of uncertainty, and to find your security from within rather than from outside.

College and university classes provide a conceptual foundation, but skills and expertise come from doing rather than listening. It’s estimated that expertise in an area requires about 10,000 hours — hours spent involved in tackling real-world research. Getting in that 10,000 hours and then applying them implies stability of funding in a focused area. Getting the hours in efficiently, means being able to apply yourself without continual distractions. Advice on price setting for consultants indicates that it’s realistic to expect about 200 active “business” days per year. If you’re putting in about 10 hours per day, that’s about 2000 hours per year, or five years to expertise. That provides at least a rough estimate of the meaning of “stable funding”.

Reevaluate how your current situation matches your longer term goals every 3-5 years. Compare your current situation to what’s available elsewhere. This is business—your business—treat it seriously. Rather than seeing yourself as a scientist at some institution, see yourself as a scientist at large in the world floating on a sea of institutional possibilities. Float to the high ground. If the sea of possibilities in a particularly area starts to dry up, find another sea with long-term potential and portage quickly into it. There’s a substantial advantage to being an early entrant into a new and growing area of research. In business, this is currently referred to as the “blue ocean strategy”.

In evaluating retirement plans, look toward maximizing immediate offerings. What an institution offers to long-term, post-decadal employees is likely irrelevant in a short-term world. If an institution has a tier, consider your entry-point, particularly as you mature in your career, to be negotiable. This tier will effect benefits such as length of vacation and corporate defined contributions to 401(k) retirement plans. Weigh the deal you can negotiate in defined contributions as part of the entire business package you’re being offered. The 14-20 June issue of The Economist, has some valuable observations on retirement plans in the article Falling Short.

If you’re a student considering entry to an area, do your homework on the expectable job future. Look at postdoc forums and sites such as PhDs.org. Practice negotiating for your needs, using techniques such as the Noel Smith-Wenkle Salary Negotiation Method. Most of all, think of yourself as an independent business and have plans for career development and career risk management.

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