Ramblemuse Touch Points

The RIAA has framed the issue of music sharing as piracy. While that fits their interest in preserving a traditional business model, the indicators are increasing that the real issue is about a cultural change in how information is gained, used, and shared. While a result of technology, the effect is both a cultural change and a gap in generational viewpoints. I use “generation” loosely here as a marker for what Marc Prensky has called the differentiation between Digital Natives, Digital Emigrants. Other indicators for how information sharing as a life-process has become embedded in social culture are the advent of services such as myspace, flickr, youtube, facebook, and twitter. Twitter, in particular, embodies the social technology of sharing, briefly, “what I’m doing” and “what I’m listening to”. See also, The Social Life of Information by John Seeley Brown and Paul Duguid.

Another indicator of the shift from passive listening to music to co-living music with others shows up in From Major to Minor, a 10 January story on the music industry in the Economist.

In 2006 EMI, the world’s fourth-biggest recorded-music company, invited some teenagers into its headquarters in London to talk to its top managers about their listening habits. At the end of the session the EMI bosses thanked them for their comments and told them to help themselves to a big pile of CDs sitting on a table. But none of the teens took any of the CDs, even though they were free. “That was the moment we realised the game was completely up,” says a person who was there.

The article goes on to describe business uncertainty and the emerging use of of free music combined with indirect packaging (e.g. music distributed with cell-phones) as a means to create income. To be clear, there are indeed proposals and discussions about other means of creating income for performing artists. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), as well as funding legal counter efforts to the RIAA, has proposed using subscription services to generate income. In an 18 December article for Wired, David Byrne discusses both economic survival strategies for artists along with industry failings. The accompanying audio clips, such as “The people who know how to do this are the ones you fired” are well-worth a listen.

Still, the RIAA continues to use the heavy legal fire-power to resist changing social paradigms. While there’s been some recent controversy over whether statements made in the Jammie Thomas trial implying that ripping your own CDs is illegal were actual policy, copyright expert William Patry dug up a 1987 RIAA statement on home taping made during a joint legislative hearing.

Thus, there is no personal use exemption, nor any fair use immunity for home taping. Contrary to the premise of the question, there is no distinction between commercial and home personal taping.

This appears to remove a lot of the ambiguity about the level of control the RIAA wants. Still, all of this only sets the stage for the issues of social change and insurgency that more drive my own interest.

Technologically driven changes in social perceptions and attitudes are not new. They occurred both with labor rights stemming from the industrial revolution and with civil rights spotlighted by national television broadcasts. In both cases, some segment of the legal/justice system was initially used to attempt to suppress the civil unrest. The first state police emerged in the U.S. following the anthracite mine strike of 1902 in Pennsylvania. President Theodore Roosevelt noted that the Pennsylvania State Police were intended to replace the infamous Coal and Iron Police, the private company police used to counter unionism:

When the laboring masses locked in mortal combat with the vested interest, the State stepped in to prove her impartial justice by selling her authority into the vested interests’ hands! — whenever the miners elected to go out on strike — they invariably found the power of the State bought, paid for, and fighting as a partisan on their employers’ side. Nor was there any attempt made to do this monstrous thing under mask of decency.

Before the passage of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935 and it’s upholding by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1937, usage of the police power of the state to suppress labor organization was common, as exemplified by the 1934 West Coast Waterfront Strike. It was almost exactly thirty years later, that President Lyndon Baines Johnson maneuvered the passage of first the Civil Rights Act and then the Voting Rights Act. The story of this aspect of LBJs political savvy is told by Ronald A. Heifetz in his book Leadership without Easy Answers.

Johnson intended to mobilize the nation as a whole to work on issues that had been avoided for nearly two hundred years. Yet mobilizing the society to tackle hard problems and learn new ways required far more than fashioning deals in the legislature; it required public leadership. Johnson had to identify the adaptive challenges facing the nation, regulate the level of distress, counteract work-avoiding distractions, place responsibility where it belonged, and protect voices of leadership in the community. Nowhere did he illustrate this strategy of leadership better than during events in Selma, Alabama.

Heifetz continues on to describe how Johnson held off taking early action as tension built up around Selma. The dissonance between what people believed about values of fairness and justice in the U.S. and what they were viewing on television continued to ripen. When Johnson finally did act, at the explicit request of Alabama Governor George Wallace, the nation was ready to hear and respond to his televised speech, made before a joint session of Congress, advocating passage of a strong voting rights act. The dissonance between belief in human rights and values and the use of police forces to suppress them had become too strong and the nation was ready to act. At this point, it was not Johnson’s solution but the nation’s solution that resulted.

With these precedents, the question is likely not if but when a burgeoning national awareness of lack of fairness will result in a Post-Millennium Digital Usage Rights Act. Such an act would follow the precedence of the relief from legal suppression afforded by the National Labor Relations Act and the Voting Rights Act. Already, Ars Technica reports that EMI may cease funding of the RIAA. To understand the relevance of this announcement, I turn to a group of military strategists who consider U.S. involvement in what they term “Fourth Generation Warfare”. Growing from a seminar on Fourth Generation War at the U.S. Marine Corps’ Expeditionary Warfare School in Quantico, VA, these strategists have produced an unofficial draft update to FMFM-1, the Field Marine Force Manual originally issued by the U.S. Marine Corps in the early 1990’s. While the original manual dealt with maneuver warfare, the update deals with war in which all involved are not state entities. We thus come to situations in which superior firepower and the shock and awe strategies of intimidation are counterproductive.

The changes point to another of the dilemmas that typify Fourth Generation war: what succeeds on the tactical level can easily be counter productive at the operational and, especially, strategic levels. For example, by using their overwhelming firepower at the tactical level, Marines may in some cases intimidate the local population into fearing them and leaving them alone. But fear and hate are closely related, and if the local population ends up hating us, that works toward our strategic defeat. … This leads to the central dilemma of Fourth Generation war: what works for you on the physical (and sometimes mental) level often works against you at the moral level. It is therefore very easy in a Fourth Generation conflict to win all the tactical engagements yet lose the war. To the degree you win at the physical level by pouring on firepower that causes casualties and property damage to the local population, every physical victory may move you closer to moral defeat. And the moral level is decisive.

When the RIAA pursues a course of intimidating whom they wish; when they use overwhelming legal firepower to ensure that those who might oppose them in court face total financial ruin, they are engendering just the loss of moral authority discussed by this quote from FMFM-1A. When they saddle a parent with legal judgments of hundreds of thousands of dollars (c.f. legal history by the EFF), judgments that few parents have means to ever pay off, the RIAA impacts both the parent and the entire opportunities the parent can provide for their children. Most parents will find extreme dissonance with such actions. This is not a proportional penalty for unethical gains, but a recourse to heavy bombing. Intimidation, as the manual suggests, begets hatred, and hatred will never beget customers. Those who oppose such strategies don’t have to win all the court battles, they only have to use economic means to convince first the big four of labels, and then smaller labels that such tactics aren’t in their strategic interest. They only have to make it difficult and more expensive for the RIAA to pursue their tactics. Eventually, the RIAA will be Riding the Failure Cascade. Given their tactics, few will shed tears.

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Years ago, I became fascinated by James Burke’s series Connections. Burke had the ability to string a chain of interrelations from the problem of pumping water out of silver mines in medieval Czechoslovakia to the construction of the atomic bomb. This post runs in that tradition, going from RIAA lawsuits to a potential consequence of making the dissemination of child porn easier.

For anyone who follows RSS feeds on technical sites such as Ars Technica or slashdot, it’s hard to avoid encountering news releases on RIAA lawsuits and resulting countersuits. A top slashdot entry for today, for example, links to a blog post by Wired’s David Kravets covering RIAA statements made during the Jammie Thomas trial. Robert Scoble has some comments on immediate side-effects of RIAA actions in moving us altogether away from CDs. The Electronic Freedom Foundation provides comments and cases in opposition to RIAA actions. RIAA Radar points people to RIAA-free music.

There are strong parallels between the approach taken by the RIAA and the military concept of rapid domination called shock and awe. It is basically a strategy to create sufficient fear and terror that an opponent’s resistance crumbles quickly.

The objectives of this example are to achieve Shock and Awe and hence compliance or capitulation through very selective, utterly brutal and ruthless, and rapid application of force to intimidate. The fundamental values or lives are the principal targets and the aim is to convince the majority that resistance is futile by targeting and harming the few. — Ullman & Wade, Chapter 2

The side-effect is to engender civilian animosity and tacit support within the population for any subsequence insurgency, something we have become all to familiar with in Iraq. The RIAA policy of trying to shake several thousand dollars out of parents of students is one that makes it easy, even for people like myself who want to see musicians get their just payments, to have a feeling of hostility. I’d as soon spit on the sidewalk and cross to the other side of the street than share a sidewalk with a person from the RIAA. Such feelings often have a long half-life; one counted in decades. Parents may form a disparate clan, but a clan easily united in viewing the RIAA as a force of occupation. Once again taking a page from John Sterman’s Business Dynamics, actions often have unintended consequences that become more problematic than the original situation. Shock and awe may intimidate for the moment, but the hostility generated is for the long-term. For the upcoming generation the RIAA won’t stand for music, but for malevolence. There’s a precept in neurolinguistic-programming (NLP) that the meaning of the message is how it’s received, not how it’s transmitted. Now we just need a few Flash-adept cartoonists such a Mark Fiore, to make the point in the way that Fiore does for politics and double-talk on torture.

In contrast to the RIAA’s shock and awe approach, one can consider French Officer David Galula’s experiences in counter-insurgency and Pacification in Algeria. I had mentioned that in a prior blog. There’s a big emphasis on winning the trust and good-will of the locals. Galula essentially created a business model that was far more beneficial for villagers to work within than to resist.

Apart from the prospect of lots of social ill-will and increasing legal counter-challenges, the RIAA lawsuits will only spur more bright people to make it technically more difficult for the RIAA. The same path of technical developments are already interesting to those seeking catastrophe resistant distributed storage and censor-resistant information distribution. The NY Times had an article on Cleversafe, a secure, distributed-storage implementation. Yochai Benkler wrote an extensive article reviewing Peer Production of Survivable Critical Infrastructures. Some of the encryption concepts are based on threshold secret-sharing algorithms, including a 1979 paper by Adi Shamir on How to Share a Secret. The implementation steps in this direction, designed for censor-resistant distribution of information, already exist in technologies such as Freenet and GNUnet. If it is necessary for information to be anonymous, even to those who provide the storage for it, then it can and is being accomplished. Much as Iraq insurgents responded to shock and awe with better and better IEDs, we can expect better and better anonymous networks.

One can only be sad that the use of such technology becomes as necessary in the United States as in places more usually considered to be dangerous for sharing information. We also, in the manner of James Burke, complete the trip. A network that is censor-resistant is also information neutral. As noted in the Freenet FAQ, the expansion of storage capability dedicated to such a facility also expands the capabilities of those wishing to anonymously store less savory information, such as child-porn. Another nice piece of work for which the RIAA may become remembered as a driving force.

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Last Wednesday night I “BARTed” into San Francisco for the Northern California Science Writers’ Association (NCSWA) holiday dinner; a dinner intentionally timed to coordinate with the Fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU). Last night’s dinner speaker was Jack Shroder, a geologist and physical geographer with the University of Nebraska at Omaha who has been visiting Afghanistan since 1973.

While Jack presented numerous interesting thoughts on geological resources and the time immediately prior to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, his comments on the current situation caught my attention the most. In a manner resonant with my recent post on Greg Mortenson, Jack feels strongly that the way out of the current mess is via providing education and operating from cultural understanding. Jack also feels that, while there are many like himself who have spent time in Afghanistan and come to have a sense of its cultural and people, they are largely being ignored by those who frame U.S. policy. This wouldn’t be the first time that the U.S. has ignored or done worse to its cultural experts.

In 1971, Time Magazine ran an article on The Old China Hands. The article covers a period in which the U.S. first ignored and then blacklisted civil servants who had considerable knowledge of China following World War II but whose opinions did not match official policy. Twenty-five years later, during the Nixon era, they were called back to testify before Congress. The theme was expanded in a book by E.J. Kahn, Jr., “The China Hands: America’s Foreign Service Officers and What Befell Them”. By happenstance, I had read the book, partly during lunch breaks at an AGU meeting, while a graduate student during the mid-1970’s. Kahn’s book is still available in the second-hand market. There’s also a summary available online.

As a closing comment, we have been slow at learning and embodying into our policy and strategy the lessons captured on counterinsurgency by a French Officer in Algeria in the late 1950’s. Pacification in Algeria, by David Galula, is available thanks to the Rand Corporation. There are those from whom we can learn, but, as a country, we first need to learn the art of listening to multiple perspectives.

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We too often seem to live in a world in which few understand the method of achieving a goal by fostering conditions in which that goal would naturally occur. Groups opposing the rate of abortions try to reduce that rate by legal force rather than by working to create conditions of education and economic means that lead to other choices, including means of avoiding pregnancy. We attempt to create security by military force but ignore the policy choices and conditions that have led to a lack of security. We miss the truth that we gain security when more people have something to lose from a lack of peace than to gain from it.

Greg Mortenson has created an exception to this pattern, going from a failed ascent of K-2 to promoting peace by building schools and creating hope in the remote mountain villages of Pakistan. If it were fiction, Three Cups of Tea would be an amazing story. As a reality, it is stronger than any words I could coin to describe it.

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An episode of Freakonomics embodied the concept that creating explicit requirements replaces prior tacit requirements. In this episode, a day-care center in Haifa imposed an explicit fine for late pick-ups by parents. In contradiction to the expected decrease in late pick-ups, the explicit fine replaced the tacit penalty of parental guilt and the number of late pick-ups doubled. The monetary fine was less severe for parents than the prior emotional fine and they modified their behavior accordingly. Removing the fees later didn’t bring things back to where they had been. The bell had been rung and couldn’t simply be unrung.

Licensing of massage therapy also seems to be having unexpected side-effects. Before there were explicit state requirements for entry to practice, good schools would teach to tacitly held concepts of what knowledge, skills, and abilities made for a “quality” practitioner. There may not have been an explicit statement of requirements, but instructors knew what was good technique and application and would impel students toward achieving it. That system of evaluation, of tacit standards, is dying if not already dead.

One effect of licensing has been to supplant the tacit conventions, in total, with explicit requirements. Unfortunately, those writing the requirements generally haven’t had an understanding of systems theory. I’m now hearing complaints about corporate schools and career colleges that aren’t creating “good” practitioners. Yet, when I go and look at the prerequisites for licensing or certification, they say next to nothing about what competencies an entry level graduate should be able to demonstrate. At most, the requirements stipulate an ability to sit for certain numbers of hours in certain types of classes, to interact sufficiently well with other students to not make waves, and perhaps to pass a multiple choice exam at the end. There is very little to guide a consumer, a prospective student, a 3rd party payer, or a potential health care referrer in what to expect that a newly licensed entrant would actually be able to do.

As a profession mainstreams and increase entry stipulations, as massage therapy has been doing, the economics of providing training change. When hour requirements push up toward the federal financial aid minimums, 600 hours for loans and 720 hours for full access to grants, pay-as-you-go programs become infeasible, both from total cost and from competition. Financial aid requires accreditation which also raises costs and requires more administrative resources. The response of the system is that career colleges and corporate chain schools take on a new importance — they have greater resources to leverage the higher resource demands than do smaller, stand-alone schools. They also bring with them a recognition that training to specific requirements is an educational business rather that a self-supporting life practice, such as teaching martial arts.

As an educational business, a school is doing a “good” job if its graduates meet the minimum requirements for entry to a profession. If a school is doing this, yet the graduates fail to meet expectations, the problem is less likely to be with the school than with requirements that don’t sufficiently stipulate the expected outcomes from training. Most often this situation seems to arise from the idea that explicit requirements will add to tacit requirements. Almost always, however, explicit requirements, as with the day-care parents, replace prior tacit ones. If you don’t write a complete set of requirements, you won’t get what you expect. I covered this recently in my column Show me your Outcome Competencies.

I recently got John Sterman’s Book Business Dynamics — Systems Thinking and Modeling for a Complex World. The opening lines of the preface state well the premise:

Accelerating economic, technological, social, and environmental change challenge managers and policy makers to learn at increasing rates, while at the same time the complexity of the systems in which we live is growing. Many of the problems we now face arise as unanticipated side effects of our own past actions. All too often the policies we implement to solve important problems fail, make the problem worse, or create new problems. Effective decision making and learning in a world of growing dynamic complexity requires us to become systems-thinkers to expand the boundaries of our mental models and develop tools to understand how the structure of complex systems creates their behavior.

Sterman is Director of MIT’s Systems Dynamics Group and with the MIT Sloan School of Management. Sterman’s book is just shy of 1000 pages with CD in addition. That motivates why, in his speech accepting the Jay Forrester award, Sterman commented that he was instructed to make the speech shorter than the book. Several years back, looking far more briefly at systems thinking relative to massage schools, I wrote the column Ecological Succession. The closing quote from that article applies well to the writing of requirements.

You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you’re going, because you might not get there.—Yogi Berra

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In his Times Eye on Science Blog of 11 July, Michael Lemonick addresses the issues of Saving American Science, the theme of a recent meeting by the Aspen Science Center. The theme of lagging U.S. innovation in science and technology has been rising as a concern for several years now. Congressman Frank Wolf provides some of the background in his editorial for the American Physical Society, Competing in the 21st Century. In the strictly financial sense, it’s not surprising that science and innovation are starting to noticeably lag — in terms of dollars, many areas of research have seen flat or falling funding for over a decade. In terms of what those dollars can actually support, the picture has been even worse. The concerns expressed by Wolf and others led to the National Summit on Competitiveness in December 2005 and to the formation of The Task Force on the Future of American Innovation. There seems to be more than a little concern.

While I only caught Lemonick’s blog tonight while scanning through my RSS subscriptions, by synchronicity I was discussing the theme of science and scientists while walking with a fellow scientist during lunch. My colleague is from a different country, one he noted, in which those with advanced education generally carry more respect than is afforded in the U.S. One also in which which some level of perceived intellectualism is more of a prerequisite for political success. This difference in cultural attitudes brings us to the paradox of the U.S. as a country that has been highly successful in science and technology, but, with that success as a relatively thin veneer over a deeper thread of anti-intellectualism. For a while, that anti-intellectualism was pushed to the side by the challenges of the cold war. Wolf notes this period in his essay.

But it will take more than Congress passing a few pieces of legislation. The national crisis in innovation demands a dedicated national response. Remembering how the nation was mobilized to compete for the space frontier after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in the late 1950’s, I wrote President Bush last year urging him to embrace this issue. I asked that he dramatically increase our nation’s innovation budget—federal basic research and development—over the next decade to ensure U.S. economic leadership in the 21st century. Many in the scientific community have told me now that at that time, they didn’t think there was a realistic chance of that happening.

There’s an implication in Wolf’s statement that the nation was mobilized by Sputnik, that prior to Sputnik, such mobilization wasn’t evident. The report Waiting for Sputnik by the Center for Strategic and International Studies places us back in that state of demobilization and waiting for a crisis. The authors of the report are explicit about the basis of concern by themselves, Frank Wolf, and others.

If there is one point that we hope you take away from Waiting for Sputnik, it is that the underfunding of basic research in physics, math and engineering is not a problem for science policy or business, but a major challenge for the future security of the United States.

The American anti-intellectualism appears both to be widely acknowledged and to stem from several sources. These include a sense of American entitlement and a desire for simple answers, left-overs from the once frontier need for pragmatic skills, and the authoritarian aspects of religious fundamentalism. One thing that’s clear is it isn’t just about science but about pursuits of the mind in general. It’s also not something new.

Back in June 1963, Time ran a review of Richard Hofstadter’s book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. In a post titled The Diploma Mill, College English instructor Kevin Keating discusses that sad state of affairs in his own department.

The notion of intellectual apathy and, perhaps more importantly, pragmatism brings me to my fifth point. Students today believe that college is a minor inconvenience and, worse still, an unavoidable evil that must be dealt with in order to get that coveted degree. — No one would deny that Americans are a pragmatic bunch, but at what point can a strictly utilitarian approach to education begin to adversely affect an entire people? I would argue that we have become not only a culturally isolated nation, but a culturally illiterate one as well.

In a blog piece titled Lie to Me, Songbird6, an anthropology major, comments on the state of mind that she sees around her at college.

This was an Honors class, so this blew my mind. I had realized in my freshman year that Honors did not mean academically enthusiastic, when a fellow Honors student announced that evolution wasn’t true and then refused to have a conversation about it, shaking his head and waving his hands. Since then, I have seen people brush away questions, debates, and lectures as they would pesky flies, living in their stable world and seemingly afraid to let anything potentially challenge it.

She also takes us back to that theme of cultural perspective about scientists. It falls well short of esteem.

In an article I read recently for a class, a cultural scholar explained American anti-intellectualism as such: intellectuals were the learned, wealthy elites who had oppressed American settlers. In an effort to empower Americans, language and popular culture divided intelligence into the distant, cruel intellectuals and the rustic, capable, “American” intelligent men. Today, the intellectuals are professors, scientists, and doctors — three of the most suspect groups in America.

Finally, I’ll close my links with the late Stephen J. Gould’s piece Dorothy, It’s Really Oz, and Gould’s question of “Why get excited over this latest episode in the long, sad history of American anti-intellectualism?” Given this pervasive thread of attitude, will it require another competitive crisis of the perceived magnitude of Sputnik to, at least for a time, shift American attitudes sufficiently to “Save” American Science?

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One of the interesting things mentioned at this year’s Santa Fe Science Writing Workshop was the use of writing a book review as a venue for one’s own essay. John Horgan, who was the leader of my small group at the workshop, did this with his review of Chris Mooney’s The Republican War on Science.

The theme of political censorship of science was in the news this last week with the testimony before congress of former surgeon general Richard H. Carmona.

Former Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona told a Congressional panel Tuesday that top Bush administration officials repeatedly tried to weaken or suppress important public health reports because of political considerations.

Back last December, the Union of Concerned Scientists reported over 10,000 scientists signing a declaration condemning political tampering with scientific reports and conclusions. This announcement was also picked-up by the BBC. John Horgan’s book review essay brings the war on science down to it’s effect on an individual scientist.

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I’ve been quiet on this blog lately, but not dormant. The end of May, I was off to the Santa Fe Science Writing Workshop. This allowed me to learn from the faculty and presenters with a great diversity of backgrounds and experience, including NY Times, Scientific American, Knight Media, and freelance work. It was a major step in my own occurring transition into a greater focus on writing. The workshop also provided a great opportunity to network and play with some great people.

At the same time, I gleaned that there’s as much apprehension among media writers as there is among my current group of long-term flat-funded scientists. Among the latter, the attrition and wear-and-tear has been slow and inevitable; apart from the observed melting from global warming, like the unstoppable advance of a glacial ice sheet. The changes in journalism are far more punctuated. Journalism is losing its old business paradigm of newspaper publishing. Many newspapers are shedding large segments of their dedicated staff as they lose ad dollars to the Internet. The quandary is that much of what’s on the Internet is secondary material — links to and discussion about material from the traditional media. At times, blogs have caught and reemphasized material that was largely ignored by media commentators. The question still remains, however, of future sources of funding and staff to put people out into the field to ferret out the news.

Part of my attention has also been focused on several web site redesigns, including my base design and my recipes section. We’ve added several new recipes as well as doing the redesign. I’ve also brought back up a couple of technical articles from the massage domain. The first is on concepts of range of motion. The second, which still needs some fixing of links, is on the persistent lactic acid myth.

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In my last post, I’d included a quote by Danny Hillis on the massive increases of different uses of computers brought on by the staggering increases in power coupled with similar decreases in size — specifically, a computer in every doorknob. I was going through some receipts today when I noticed that a book I had bought as a “lie around” for my two boys was by by Hillis, The Pattern on the Stone — a book about how computers function at a conceptual level. A “lie around” is a book left around the house that, if it looks interesting, will sooner or later be picked up and read; not necessarily all in one sitting, but in bits and pieces and repetitively. Such “lie arounds” are part of my family model of informal education. Another wonderful element of this policy has been Larry Gonick’s series of Cartoon Guides to …. As to The Pattern on the Stone, the “stone” is silicon and the pattern the etching and inlays imposed upon it.

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Over the last 15 months, I’ve been working as part of the Massage Therapy Foundation’s Best Practices Committee on defining a protocol for creating evidence-based guidelines for massage therapy. Fairly early on in the process I did a draft literature review of existing criteria for guideline creation. Recently, I’ve been thinking of how to define outcomes from training. These are what the trainee should be able to do/demonstrate after the training, not the process of the training. It gets away from the pervasive idea in the massage world that the results of training are defined by hours. Several weeks ago, I put together a few notes and an example of some very rough XML.

With a bit more searching around, I’ve come up with some more pieces of what the informatics people are doing in similar directions. The first addition is the work on Learning Object Metadata (LOM). The second piece is with Reusable Competency Definitions (RCDs). In particular, look at Claude Ostyn’s white paper on Distilling Competency Information.

The interaction between these information elements would be useful, for example, to a rural health care facility willing to hire practitioners not fully meeting desired knowledge and skills, and then bring them up to speed. Thus identifying and remedying skill gaps would be important. The flexibility to do this, provides the rural facility more leverage in recruiting — i.e. lets them be more competitive in recruiting practitioners for what might be seen as less desirable locations. The facility could use guidelines to help determine what prior knowledge is essential and what can be added “in place”. The interaction of context specific guidelines [Guideline Element Model (GEM)], learning object metadata (LOM), and reusable competence descriptions (RCDs) facilitate this.

The guidelines can include fields both for suggested protocols and considerations for suggested competencies. The suggested competencies can point directly to a database of RCDs. The RCDs can in turn point to the collection of learning objects for the competencies. The comparison of the individual’s knowledge, skills, and abilities (based on multiple streams of input) with the LOMs in the RCDs results in the training plan. In searching around, I found sample use cases for implementation of these concepts in recruiting and filling team learning gaps. I also came across a paper and presentation specific to health care.

Back in December 2003, I attended a lecture by William A. Wulf, president of the National Academy of Engineering. One of his comments that struck me was on the difference between small improvements in technology that make something already being done easier and on the continuing and often unexpected social changes stemming from huge quantitative changes in technology. He noted that he had a computer in his briefcase 100 times faster than the ENIAC (circa 1946) which weighed 100 tons and was the size of a squash court. The computer in his briefcase? A greeting card with a general 4-bit microprocessor to generate music. Wulf quoted a statement by Danny Hillis.

“I went to my first computer conference at the New York Hilton about 20 years ago. When somebody there predicted the market for microprocessors would eventually be in the millions, someone else said, ‘Where are they all going to go? It’s not like you need a computer in every doorknob!'”

“Years later, I went back to the same hotel. I noticed the room keys had been replaced by electronic cards you slide into slots in the doors.”

“There was a computer in every doorknob.”

I expect the changes in the informatics of guidelines, learning objects, and competence descriptions to create a similar impact. We can expect the health care system (and other systems) to adopt both the mechanisms and the benefits of more specific granularity in managing knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) that technology is making possible. It’s more efficient use of people. One way or the other, legislation will evolve to accommodate such practices. We might as well look to the future and start defining competence in terms of KSAs and training outcomes.

All of this combines well with the studies of how people transition to new careers (e.g. Herminia Ibarra, Working Identity). Technology will change how we view learning and careers. It allows us to be more precise on what needs to be learned and when, and to allow the “try it on” approach that Ibarra discusses without the costs of “front-loading” education in the “linear model” of learning.

It also ties in with a quote in a presentation by David Leach, executive director of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education. “You Improve what you measure”.

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