Reed's Ruminations: A Blog by Dan Reed

Undergraduate Research and Scholarship

What motivates us to discover, to explore new frontiers?  What unbroken causal chain connects a child’s boundless curiosity to the focused, but equally insatiable questioning of a trained researcher at the peak of their intellectual prowess?

Why is the sky blue? Why is the grass green? How did it all begin?  How will it end? Why is there anything at all? Why, why, why? Why, indeed?

As the inimitable and ever quotable Richard Feynman once remarked in an interview, “Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough.” This omnivorous curiosity has driven us since the dawn of self-awareness, shaping our culture, our values, and our future. (See Science:  It’s About the Wide-Eyed Wonder and The (Scientific) Good News.) I worry, though, that all too often we reward conformity and punish curiosity, particularly in formal education; the deep and existential why deserves more than a superficial because.

Education and Research: An Unnecessary Division

I’ve spent over half a century in U.S. educational institutions. Some might say I am a very slow learner, others might say it is good that I’ve been institutionalized. Perhaps they are right in both assessments.

Nevertheless, I remain amazed that we spend so much of our educational energy on the transfer and regurgitation of knowledge, rather than nurturing the curiosity that fuels learning. Make no mistake, knowledge is essential, the whetstone of a sharpened mind able to ask insightful questions and understand nuanced answers. However, learning can and should be an inevitable consequence of fueled curiosity, for a curious mind is passionate, indeed desperate, to know and understand.

I speak, of course, of the bicameral separation of education and research. (Here, I use research as a catholic placeholder for discovery and creative works in the sciences, engineering, and medicine, as well as in the arts, humanities, and social sciences.) All too often, formal education is presumed isomorphic with (sometimes) trained performers in classrooms and lecture halls, the sage on the stage, lecturing to passive and often restive students who have been told repeatedly and emphatically this is important and will be on the exam but not why it is interesting or why it might matter. In some, more enlightened contexts, this public education lives in more lively flipped classrooms and the halfway house of experiential learning. 

Meanwhile, research thrives privately in laboratories, libraries, field stations, workshops, communities, and offices, largely isolated from public lecture halls and student habitudes. While our faculty members lead double lives – teachers in the classroom and seekers in the laboratory – many of our undergraduates see only an enervated and desiccated version of the vibrant life of the mind that so energizes and defines faculty.

Our students walk daily past buildings filled with research spaces, unaware of both the process and methods of research and scholarship, and of the passions that drive scholars to pursue answers to age-old questions.  Then, we wonder why the public does not understand why fact-based reasoning and investment in basic research are so important to our nation’s future. (See Just the Facts, Ma’am: Reasoning is Not Dead, Jim and The Epistemology of Science.)

No bright line divides education and research, the known and the unknown. The great mosaic of human knowledge is fractal, with intriguing questions large and small, lurking everywhere, and few answers in the back of the proverbial textbook. (See Research: When There Are No Answers in the Back of the Book.) 

What is now transmitted knowledge was once breakthrough research, and when we separate the passion of discovery from the joy of learning, we diminish both. We want our students to slip unawares across the fractal edge of the known and the unknown, as they ask and seek answers to both old and new questions.

Expanding Undergraduate Research

All research universities, public and private, have organized undergraduate research programs (URP), where selected students work with faculty members. During my years at both Iowa and Utah, I have been impressed by the URPs run by Iowa’s Center for Research by Undergraduates (ICRU) and Utah’s Office of Undergraduate Research (OUR). More to the point, I always found it an unbridled joy to discuss research with students, as they explain problems, methodologies, and insights. It always reminds me that research and education are truly one, driven by curiosity.

Many of these URPs involve thousands of students, but few, other than at smaller institutions, seek to involve all of their entering undergraduate students as a defining and distinguishing educational attribute of their research university experience. There are many reasons for this, some related to scalability, others to fiscal realities, and a few lost in the mists of institutional history, but we can and should do better.

Simply put, I believe every student should have the opportunity to experience the consilience of the known and the unknown, from the very first day on campus. Research universities not only transmit extant knowledge; they create new knowledge. We ask the whys, not just explain the answers. Given this, education at a research university can and should differ from that at even an elite college.

There are national exemplars of this integrative approach, notably the Freshman Research Initiative (FRI) at the University of Texas at Austin and Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) at Georgia Tech. FRI currently enrolls over 900 first and second year students annually through 29 faculty-driven research “streams.” In contrast, VIP serves over 1,000 students at varying stages throughout their undergraduate careers in 70 faculty-drive multidisciplinary teams. These are scalable, highly successful programs with demonstrable outcomes.  Student retention and graduation rates rise, diversity and inclusion grow, and research awareness – informed curiosity – thrives.

At the University of Utah, the College of Science is building on these insights to create an Undergraduate Research Initiative, as a complement to our Office of Undergraduate Research, our Honors College, and our Office of Undergraduate Studies. I am excited about this future and its implications for our students.

Research is more than a metaphor for life.  It is life grounded in the knowledge and ability to ask and answer questions that shape our individual and collective futures.

Coda

Oh yes, I know you were wondering.  Why is the sky blue? Two words: Rayleigh scattering. Why is the grass green? Because chlorophyll, used in photosynthesis, absorbs red and blue wavelengths more efficiently, and the light reflected by plants is enriched in green wavelengths. How did it all begin?  How will it end? Those are among the deepest and most profound questions of cosmology.

Libraries: Arms Too Short to Feed the Mind

N.B. This essay was motivated by a conversation with Alberta Comer, Dean and Director of the University of Utah's Marriott Library.

From my earliest days, I have sought to plumb its great depths, gleaning knowledge here, seeking meaning there, and always, encountering fellow explorers on their own intrepid quests. I speak, of course, of that extraordinary thing we so prosaically call the "public library." Beyond mere edifice, a library is the embodiment of an ancient idea – that knowledge and its representations can and must be protected, preserved, and transmitted to future generations, that access to knowledge is not limited to merely the rich or the powerful, but available to all who seek insight and understanding.

This simple notion of knowledge preservation and transmission is a noble idea for which many a person has given their very life to defend. The burning of the great Library at Alexandria is an enduring lesson on the dangers of cultural loss. More recently, Ray Bradbury's dystopian account of book burning in Fahrenheit 451 is itself a cautionary tale of censorship and the dangers that lurk when the free exchange of ideas is suppressed, something we would do well to remember today.

Books have always been my friends. From my earliest days, my parents read to me, as I nestled in their laps. Then, when I could read myself, they took me to the local library. In our case, it was a humble, small town, Arkansas library with just a few thousand books. Nevertheless, for me, it was a magical place, filled with extraordinary things.

My new University of Utah colleague, Alberta Comer, the Marriott librarian, tells a similar story of her rural Oklahoma childhood and the transformative power of the library. Alberta's parents drove her many miles to reach the traveling bookmobile, where she discovered a world unknown. Decades later, her eyes still glisten with the memory as she tells the tale. My own eyes moisten, as I too remember and understand.

As a young boy, I remember staggering up to the library's checkout counter, arms filled with all the books I could carry. Looking up at the library clerk, I struggled mightily to set the stack on a counter that was above my head. In turn, the clerk looked down at me, smiled, and asked in the adult voice every child instinctively knows, "Are you sure you can read all of these?"

The implication of the library clerk's interrogative being, of course, that I had selected more books than a young boy could possibly read in the allotted time. I thought, but dared not say, for even children sometimes understand the power and importance of deference and discretion, that I was limited by the length of my arms, not by my reading ability. Given the choice – and longer arms – I would have taken twice as many books. Instead, I simply smiled and said, "Yes, I can."

I knew what the librarian did not. I had already set myself on a book a day habit that was both highly addictive and in equal measure, emotionally and intellectually satisfying. I neither knew the pronunciation nor the etymology of the word autodidact, but I intuitively understood its meaning. I could not delay; fierce urgency drove my actions. I had to hurry – there were so many books, so many things worth knowing, and so, so little time.

In that small town's store of humankind's intellectual treasure, I found transformative ideas. In those books, I felt the warp and woof of history; I saw the power of scientific revolutions; and I marveled at the extraordinary experiences of individuals both living and dead. I read of people, places, and things that once were and are no more, of those that never were but could be, and of those that lived only in the fecund imagination of others.

Like an idea-driven junkie craving an endorphin high, I read omnivorously – books, dictionaries, and encyclopedias. From aardvark to zyzzyva (I still haven't seen either one in the flesh), I read it all. I devoured popular books, some fluffy intellectual cotton candy, momentarily satisfying, but of little import. I read tomes that were as intellectually deep as they were physically weighty, laboring over each page. In that sense, Francis Bacon was right: "Some books should be tasted, some devoured, but only a few should be chewed and digested thoroughly."

I read books whose content was well beyond my years – poetry, literature, history, economics, and science – some of which I fully understood – and others whose full import exceeded the capacity of my limited life experience to appreciate. (Reading books on the My Lai massacre at age thirteen comes to mind.) Asimov, Bradbury, Ellison, Heinlein, and Browning, Chaucer, Doyle, Golding, Lewis, Shakespeare, I savored them and many others, an intellectual cornucopia that filled me with both knowledge and wonder.

In time, I came to recognize both the wisdom and the practical truth of Desiderius Erasmus' words, "When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes." At times in my life, I have unhesitatingly made that explicit choice – spending my last dollar on education – then subsisting on canned vegetables until my job provided enough to purchase a more varied diet. One can live for weeks or months on a meager diet, but a life without books, without ideas, is unimaginable.

From impassioned and zealous acolyte, I finally came full circle, having belatedly learned the most important lesson of all – I truly know nothing – having realized that true knowledge begins with the humility of ignorance. We are all ignorant, each in different ways. Recognizing that, we approach new opportunities as humble supplicants, seeking knowledge and insights from any who would teach.

Make no mistake, books have power, for they contain both knowledge and ideas. Knowledge transforms society; ideas change minds. And it all happens in a library, for books are still the best way to upload new ideas into the wetware of willing minds.

As Plutarch noted, "A mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled." Libraries blaze, but not, I pray, with the burning of books. Rather, libraries set minds afire, and those minds illuminate the darkness that is our collective ignorance.

The future is always burning with possibilities; it begins with each enlightened mind. Books and libraries are the kindling.

Just the Facts, Ma’am: Reasoning is Not Dead, Jim

As a kid, I watched Dragnet on an aging, black-and-white TV, back in the day when changing the channel required getting up and actually rotating the TV's channel selector. I still recall the dum, de, DUM, DUM Dragnet theme and Jack Webb's monotonic voiceover advising us that the stories we were about to see were true, a meme continued from its radio antecedents. In one ironic twist, the intrepid Joe Friday's catchphrase "Just the facts, ma'am" soon entered the popular lexicon, even though Joe never uttered exactly that phrase, merely several related variants.

In contrast, Star Trek's iconic, "He's dead, Jim" phrase, was actually uttered by Dr. McCoy. Woe be unto any "red shirt" extras who joined the away team, only to die, just before the first commercial break, as Bones looked up at Jim and began to speak those fateful words. So publicly imprinted was the phrase that DeForest Kelley later expressed some concern that "He's dead, Jim" might be the epitaph on his own tombstone. It was not, but at least one obituary opened with the phrase.

When innocuous, these cultural memes are an intellectual and social shorthand, framing a larger social context, quickly and concisely. "Just the facts, ma'am" became a caricature of deadpan delivery and dispassionate situational analysis, whereas "He's dead, Jim" poked fun at Star Trek's often formulaic storylines. In an extended riff, John Scalzi later wrote an entire novel, entitled Red Shirts, on the dangers of self-aware characters trapped and under the influence of badly written television script.

The more sinister variants of cultural catchphrases can label and ostracize, reinforcing inaccurate stereotypes and disenfranchising entire social, ethnic, or cultural groups. Simply put, such memes can become an intellectual crutch, a way to avoid rational and thoughtful discourse and ignore the timeless importance of fact-based reasoning. A line often attributed to the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan captures the essence of such fact-based discourse, "Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but they are not entitled to their own facts."

Of course, purported facts are not themselves facts; establishing actual facts (a neologism, for sure) is the essential prerequisite for fact-based reasoning. If one source claims it is raining and another says it is not, the wise person does not report both as opinions. Rather, he or she looks outside and ascertains the existence, as well as the time, type, location, and geographic dispersion of the purported precipitation. As Lincoln once said, "Calling a tail a leg does not make it so."

Nor does saying something loudly and repeatedly make it a fact, even if the source is both respected and authoritative. Indeed, appealing to authority is one of the biggest risks and fallacies in common, public discourse. It ranks right up there with strawman arguments and false dichotomies among the informal fallacies. (I will return to these informal fallacies as well as some of the formal ones discussed in elementary propositional logic, as found in introductory philosophy classes.)

An appeal to authority is especially pernicious in scientific disciplines. Richard Feynman reinforced the magnitude and the danger of this risk in describing the scientific method, "It doesn't make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it doesn't matter how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is… If it disagrees with experiment, it's wrong. That's all there is to it." (See The Epistemology of Science for a few musings on the interplay of scientific discourse and a lay audience.)

In a world of social memes, tweetstorms, fake news (real and otherwise), and alternative facts, it is especially important to think, analyze, and verify, and do so with careful deliberation. (See Contemplative Reflection and Instantaneous Communication for some thoughts on the dangers of speaking before thinking.)

What science fiction writer Bruce Sterling once called the major consensus narrative, a perhaps more erudite version of truthiness, is just that, a social construct, a shared belief. It may (or may not) be sophistry, fully grounded in the facts. (See A Conversation on Designing the Future, where Bruce and I riff on the interplay of technology and social behavior.)

In that spirit, it is worth remembering and holding dear some classic rules and frequent fallacies of logical reasoning. Many valued logics, higher order logics, measure theory, incompleteness theorems, the Chomsky hierarchy, Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory, and decidability are fascinating and worthy topics, ones I have spent many a day and night pondering, building constructive and non-constructive proofs, but they, like how Gödel struck down Hilbert's dream, are topics for another day.

Just a few basics of propositional logic and a bit of first order predicate logic, along with recognition of informal fallacies, cover most everyday needs. Here are just a few of the more common fallacies to remember and avoid:

• Ad hominem fallacy – discrediting an idea by attacking an individual or group
  • "Dan is uneducated, so climate change cannot be happening."
• Appeal to authority fallacy – adopting a position because of those who support it
  • "Your father said you could run fast; it must be true."
• Circular logic fallacy -- A is true because B is true; B is true because A is true
  • "You must save money to retire because it takes money to retire."
• Affirming a disjunct – A or B; A, therefore not B (both can be true simultaneously)
  • "The sun is up or it is springtime."
• Affirming the consequent – P implies Q; Q, therefore P (Q can be true even if P is not)
  • "Dan is tall implies he is a basketball player. He is a basketball player. Therefore, he is tall." (There are short basketball players)
• Denying the antecedent – P implies Q; therefore, if not P then not Q (again, Q can still be true)
  • "Dan is tall implies he is a basketball player. If Dan is not tall, then he is not a basketball player." (Again, there are short basketball players.)

These fallacies are everywhere if one reads the news critically or listens carefully to many public statements, and one must be diligent and vigilant to avoid being lured unaware by these seductive Sirens. Remember, given an inconsistent set of axioms (i.e. contradictory "facts"), any statement can be "proven" to be true or false.

Other fallacies abound in first order logic via misuse of existential and universal quantifiers (e.g., the existence of an instance does not imply universality); hasty generalizations are one instance of such. Likewise, here are two simple logic rules that everyone should remember; they are valued, everyday friends:

• Modus tollens – P implies Q; not Q, therefore not P"
  • "It is raining implies the ground is wet. The ground is not wet, therefore it is not raining."
• Modus ponens – P implies Q; P, therefore Q
  • "The sun has set implies it is dark. The sun has set, therefore it is dark."

Notice how similar modus tollens and modus ponens look to affirming the consequent and denying the antecedent; it is crucial to understand the difference.

Remember, it all begins with "Just the facts," rigorously tested and verified. This solid detective work would make old Joe Friday proud. From there, logical reasoning – establishing cause and effect – will lead to other testable hypotheses. It's about following the clues.

Make no mistake, logical reasoning is definitely not dead, Jim, though it seems to have been punched in the gut and beaten bloody by a gang of angry naysayers. Fortunately, it is a bit hardier than Star Trek's red shirts. As long as we pursue just the facts logic will both live and flourish.

Public Intellectuals: Seeing the Stars

Charles Austin Beard, a name now little known outside a select niche of American history scholars, was a controversial giant among American historians in the early 20^th century and himself a salutary lesson on the importance of social context and history. Beard fell from academic grace as historians reassessed his economic interpretations of U.S. Constitutional history, placing them in a much broader milieu of 18^th century politics and culture. Yes, there are academic fads, where ideas gain credence, attract intellectual adherents and acolytes, and then fall from favor as new and better ideas gain traction.

Despite the controversies, Beard was also the early 20^th century embodiment of what some might view as a dying breed – the public intellectual, a scholar who also actively engaged in the public debate. He also wrote popular books, and for most of his career, Beard supported himself almost entirely from book royalties. The nearest analogs today might be Douglas Brinkley or Doris Kearns Goodwin, though my personal nod of respect goes to Robert Caro. Beard's non-interventionist political positions, particularly those placing him at odds with President Franklin Roosevelt's arguments for U.S. engagement in World War II prior to the Pearl Harbor attack, ultimately led to a fall from popular grace.

However, I digress; this little ditty is about neither constitutional history nor Beard's cultural philosophy or denouement, but rather the enduring power of his words. Once asked if he could briefly summarize human history, Beard responded that he could describe all of history in only four sentences:

Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad with power.
The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small.
The bee fertilizes the flower it robs.
When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.

Brief and pithy, the lines speak to the importance of perspective and humility and the brevity of human perspective relative to the arc of history. The first line's wisdom on the dangers of power can be found in, among other places, Sophocles play Antigone. The second line's observation that the reckoning of truth may be slow but is rendered in depth is almost as old, dating from at least the 1st century C.E. The third and fourth emphasize opportunities inherent in almost all experiences, however they may seem at the time.

Almost fifty years ago, I first heard these lines repeated in a rural Arkansas school nestled in the Ozarks. I was thirteen years old, filled with teenaged angst and ennui. Feeling the profundity of the observations, I paused after class to ask the origin of the lines, but sadly, the teacher did not know. Others did – Martin Luther King, Jr used them as the basis of a sermon, which he entitled Four Proverbs.

Today, our society faces complex issues, a truism defining of any age in human history. Resolving complexity is messy and difficult, with much debate and struggle, emotional and intellectual. As the other President Roosevelt (Teddy) sagely noted in his speech Citizenship in a Republic, credit belongs to the person who is actually in the arena. Beard knew this well; so did King.

We cannot and should not hide in the academic cloister. We preserve and create knowledge; we transmit it to new generations; and we engage society with the fruits of our labors. That is the holy triumvirate of academic tradition and very definition of a public intellectual – one in the arena.

Fertilize some flowers; look at the stars.

Now Batting …

There's a frosty morning icing on the ground, with a chill in the air, and summer's green leaves now hang withered and brown. It's late October and the languid days of summer baseball have given way to the fall intensity of the World Series. The television coverage takes me back to Southern boyhood memories of yesteryear, when baseball was a nighttime play-by-play voice on the radio and a daytime fantasy with made up rules.

Schoolyard Intrigue

Like most of my childhood classmates, boys and girls, I played schoolyard baseball at every recess opportunity. We chose our own teams, we made our own rules, and because you can only squeeze in an inning or two at recess, the games sometimes lasted for weeks. Though it was BOYG (bring your own glove), every classroom was graced with a school-issued baseball bat and ball, and we played every day, rain or shine.

By school year's end, that ball had rolled through water, seen many a mud puddle close hand, been bounced off rocks on our less than regulation field, and been whacked enough times to make the dead ball era seem as though it had been played with Superballs. The bat didn't fare much better; we hit baseballs and rocks, leaving it chipped and dented.

It was only grade school, but I almost had my arm broken playing this schoolyard game. One recess, I stepped too close to the make-believe Babe Ruth swinging the bat at imaginary pitches and took a hard blow to my arm. On returning from recess, my 4^th grade teacher took one look at the rising lump, and then walked down the hall to the principal's office to call my mother. Mind you, there was no school nurse and only one school telephone.

During this interlude, alone in the classroom with my fellow students, I managed the classroom intrigue. The teacher liked me, I was not one of the cool kids, and my classroom social status was already shaky. I knew the schoolyard omertà, and I assured everyone that there'd be no casting of blame.

My mother arrived a few minutes later, oblivious to my political machinations, and, despite my protests, carted me away to the town doctor for an x-ray. He, in turn, verified that my arm was not broken and charged her the munificent sum of $7. Why that amount? Simple, that was the maximum expense the school insurance would reimburse, and he knew my mother could not afford to pay more. By lunchtime, I was back in the schoolyard with a new story to tell.

Ghost Runners and Homemade Bats

During the summertime, I played baseball with my neighbor and best friend. Yes, you can play baseball with only two people, but it does take a bit of childhood creative license. As I recall, the willow was first base, the walnut tree was second, the oak was third, and maple tree was home. Unevenly spaced, the distance from second to third was about twice that of first to second, but that was the least of the flirtation with the rules.

We played with a homemade bat, made by one of my older cousins in shop class. Turned on a wood lathe and a bit lopsided – woodworking was not his strength – the handle was wrapped with white surgical tape. All this seemed perfectly reasonable to me; I was proud of that bat and I swung it with pride, though I might have used black electrician's tape instead.

Now back to the rules. On a hit, the pitcher chases the ball and then races to catch and tag the batter. If successful, this is an out. (In a more physical version, the fielder can throw at the runner for an out. Our mothers frowned on that version, and I wasn't fond of it either.) If the runner reaches a base, then he or she can call a ghost runner and return to the plate to bat again.

Sometimes a mano a mano faceoff between batter/runner and pitcher/fielder determined outs. The fielder would toss the ball in the air, daring the runner to advance. As successive pitches went higher and higher, eventually the runner would bolt for the next base and the chase was on.

Let me add that long before I learned of the Friendly Confines or the Green Monster, I knew the importance of home field advantage. Even through my nine-year-old eyes, I saw how the lawn mowing mores of one's father heavily influenced the pace and outcome of the game. If the grass had been close cut recently, the batter had a huge advantage because the ball could roll more freely; otherwise, tall grass definitely favored the pitcher. My dad hated to mow the lawn, and I was a slow, chubby kid; I always wanted to play at home.

KMOX and the Cardinals

If ghost runners and fantasy filled the days, radio and imagination owned the night. In the Arkansas Ozarks, the nearest professional baseball team was the St. Louis Cardinals, and their games were broadcast on KMOX, a clear channel AM station. Those were the days of Lou Brock, Orlando Cepeda, and Bob Gibson, and Harry Caray was the iconic voice of the Cardinals, long before his days with the Chicago Cubs.

In a nightly ritual, my parents, my grandfather, and I would gather outside in cloth lawn chairs, parked near an open window so we could hear the radio. Armed with grape Kool-Aid (me) and iced tea (the rest), we would sit in the dark and listen to the summer breeze and the rhythm of the game.

No one in my family ever attended a Cardinals game; that would have been a wild-eyed extravagance beyond our means. Instead, we relied on our imagination and a few word sketches from Harry to conjure the scenes of Gibson strikeouts, Cepeda hits, and Brock steals. It was a richness that filled my imagination, a memory of family happiness that lingers still.

Batting Triple Zero

The summer I turned ten, the community organized a summer Little League. I was excited, beyond excited – for the first time, we would be playing "real" baseball against teams from other area communities. Why, we even had actual uniforms and rubber baseball cleats!

Dreams of glory filled my head, inspired by those Cardinals broadcasts, the derring-do of schoolyard games, and the ghost runners who whispered of bases clearing home runs. In my imagination, the parents all stared open mouthed and the fielders' heads swiveled like marionettes to watch balls launched like 1960s rockets from my bat. Dreams they were, and alas, dreams they remained. I had the passion but, as I was soon to learn, not the skills.

Not only did I fail to make the starting lineup, I rarely played, whether as a mercy to my parents and me or to the other players and their parents I do not know. If the manager put me in, one could be confident the game was either irretrievably lost or inconceivably beyond losing. I was a bellwether indicator that even the most dedicated parents might want to close the cooler and start preparing to leave; this one was over.

I was a slow, left-handed player, so naturally they put me in right field. I was okay with right field; I had a strategy. I played, deep, deep right field, closer to the parking lot than to the action. Consequently, no budding Little League hitter ever hit one over my head. This made my task simple; run down hit balls, preferably while they were still rolling, and heave them in the direction of the infield.

My outfield strategy was born of observation, for I had seen one of my friends, swifter and more athletic than me, try, and fail, to catch a fly ball in centerfield. It looked like an easy catch, but he misjudged it, and the ball hit him squarely atop the head. Tears flowed, followed quickly by parental intervention, and later by laughter from all the players. I was determined to avoid that, and I did. Only later, did I realize I'd lived Peter, Paul and Mary's Right Field, absent the dandelions.

My hitting strategy was equally calculated but far less successful. Okay, let's not be circumspect about it – I batted triple zero for the season. Wearing thick glasses, I had both severe myopia and astigmatism, and I quickly learned to appreciate the truth of the baseball adage that you can't hit what you can't see.

Mind you, I was not staring down Hall of Fame pitchers with 96 MPH darting fastballs and a repertoire of breaking balls; these were fellow ten year olds for whom unqualified success was hitting the strike zone. Not that this mattered; I literally could not see the ball in flight, and the umpire's calls seem mystifyingly random to me.

The nadir came late in one game when I stepped out of the batters' box and grabbed some dirt to dry my sweaty hands, determined that this time, hope against hope, I was going to hit the ball. No doubt thinking that he had to work the next day, the umpire looked at me as the gloaming settled, and said, "Come on son, we need to finish this game." Nothing if not obedient to my elders, I promptly struck out yet again, putting an ignominious end to my baseball career.

Later that fall, my mother took me to the optometrist, where I was again fitted with new glasses. I was stunned to realize there were individuals, now including me, who could see individual leaves on trees. I had always seen them as brownish trunks surrounded by green blobs. I like to close my eyes and believe that with those glasses, I could have played in the fall classic and now be in Cooperstown. Maybe not.

On Cognitive Loading and Intellectual Hierophany

Lately, I have been thinking, and I have been thinking about thinking. Fear not, there is no infinite regress nor Münchhausen trilemma, for I am not thinking about thinking about thinking ad infinitum, Rather, I am writing about both thinking and thinking about thinking.

Thinking is an increasingly difficult task in a world where a torrent of invasive stimuli, each tailored for maximum emotional and cognitive addiction, overwhelms one's sensorium. Even under the best of circumstances, cogitation – the focused concentration of an educated intellect – is an all-consuming endeavor. To become one with a set of ideas, to examine them from multiple perspectives, to explore their interrelationships, and to understand their implications, is neither a task for the fainthearted nor for those given to momentary reflection betwixt the churning froth of daily life. To think deeply, to appreciate subtlety, and to understand nuance requires uninterrupted time. By uninterrupted, I mean many contiguous hours, a luxury rarely vouchsafed unsought.

Cognitive psychologists have long studied cognitive load, the total effort used in the working memory. To think deeply about any topic, one must first fill one's memory with the relevant information. Because each of us has a finite working memory, each distraction or interruption consumes a portion of that memory, displacing previously internalized information. We need time to fill our working memories, and the more complex the intellectual endeavor, the larger the cognitive load. To create new insights can require weeks, months, and sometimes years of focused contemplation. To have something worth saying, one must first truly understand, having traced the complete graph of causal chains, the intellectual Feynman diagrams glowing softly in the dark of the still unknown.

Seeking a Metaphor

Despite use of such terms as working memory and interrupts, I am not suggesting humans are biological computers; that lure of ill-advised analogies and metaphors has ensnared too many unwary embracers. However, the analogy is not without relevance, even if only as a cautionary tale. On this, I speak from personal experience.

One morning many years ago, a computer science colleague remarked that I looked tired. I replied that I had slept poorly, consumed by a dream-cum-nightmare. I then elaborated, explaining that I had dreamed I was a hard disk under heavy load, exhausted from seeking in response to random requests. My colleague laughed and then nodded sagely, recognizing my suffering from the consequences of Little's Law, frequent interrupts, and a long work queue. Beyond irretrievably confirming me as a geek, I leave any Freudian interpretation of my dreamy incarnation as an active, though inanimate object as an exercise for the reader, noting only that my nighttime dream embodied my frustration with the day.

Quiet, I Need to Think

We all know the importance of time and reflection; our social commentary and behavior embody it. The phrases "I need some time to think," and "I will work on it tonight when I have quiet time," all capture an intuitive understanding of the need for cognitive loading.

In an age when too much discourse has the enduring substance of cotton candy, the opportunity to speak does not imbue one with the responsibility to do so. Quiet is a virtue with many facets, as the perils of pontificating pundits and instant political and social commentary illustrate. There is undeniable value in reflection before acting or opining, however learned, wise, and experienced one may be. (See Contemplative Reflection and Instantaneous Communication.)

One of the lions of early 20^th century business, Thomas Watson, Sr. captured that ethos in IBM's simple motto, "THINK." In that same spirit, the corporate embrace of shared workspaces to stimulate collaboration and, collaterally, to reduce office space requirements, has been tempered by the realization that the increased interaction is not without cost, namely the displacement of critical working memory by office minutiae. The human guinea pigs in these corporate social experiments long ago recognized this intellectual tension, as demonstrated by the proliferation of office headphones to reduce extrinsic stimuli.

Personal Perspectives

For me, thinking deeply, whether creating complex software, writing extended documents, or pondering theorems, requires long hours to internalize relationships and dependencies. I need time to load my working memory, and free my mind from other concerns. Any distraction or interruption consumes precious time to recover, and the recompense for any discontinuity, however brief, can be ten-fold in lost time. Conversely, the rewards of cognitive continuity are emotionally extraordinary; it is an intellectual and emotional bliss sustainable until physiology demandingly intrudes and Morpheus takes me away. When truly engaged, I can work, fully immersed, for ten or more hours without pause.

I am not unique in my love of long form thinking, but all too often, even those who of us who treasure both the experience and its rewards, forget how daily life conspires to prevent it. We fritter time away in inconsequential tasks of no lasting value. Like most things of great worth, long form thinking requires commitment and dedication before its rewards are manifest in insight and in substantive and learned discourse.

Coda

As we grapple with the evolving and uncertain future of the American experiment, the stunning disavowal of fact-based argument, and the seeming repudiation of public higher education as a common good, the criticality of extended thinking – assiduously, diligently, cogently – has never been clearer.

Come now, let us reason together. Learned, shared insight is the true hierophany.

Idea Bandwagons

Does it ever seem that we are imagination challenged, bound to imitate or follow a popular idea or approach, whether successful or not? (At this point, I could insert a quasi-obligatory reference to lemmings plunging into the sea. For the record, lemmings do not commit mass suicide; that is a persistent urban myth.)

Once an idea gains traction, it often seems everyone adopts a "me too" approach. There is, of course, intellectual safety in following a crowd. After all, if "everyone" is doing it, then ipso facto it must be a good idea. Alas, not necessarily. In Gartner hype cycle parlance, this mimicry can happen early, during the "peak of inflated expectations," or later, riding the "slope of enlightenment," if the idea survives the dreaded "trough of disillusionment."

My AI friends still talk ruefully about the long and difficult AI winter that followed early, unrealistic expectations (e.g., human language translation in the 1960s). Funding became scarce and the community shrank. Today, of course, we are basking in the AI spring, when many early hopes and predictions are being realized in dramatic fashion, powered by new machine learning ideas, large volumes of data, and powerful computing systems. Despite AI's enormous success, we have not yet realized the dream of strong AI, though I retain fond hopes. And yes, I am an optimist; I do not share the fears expressed by some about strong AI. However, I digress – back to viral memes.

Uber, the ride sharing service, has spawned seemingly endless variants, all described in pitch decks as Uber for X – a new instance of the sharing economy. As Wired noted last year, Uber for X has been the headline of more than 400 news articles. If you are thinking that the Uber for homework opportunity (there are several startups) might not be the next, well Uber, you are almost certainly right. There is, as former Federal Reserve chair, Alan Greenspan, called it, some irrational exuberance.

Following the success of AirBnB, a new category of startups, somewhat whimsically called MaaS (Mom as a Service), has exploded. (Let me just state right now, I apologize to moms everywhere. You were right; we should have cleaned up our rooms.) These MaaS companies provide services such as cooking, cleaning, laundry, and food; among the best-known food examples are Grubhub (prepared food delivery) and Blue Apron (cooking ingredients delivery). As one who is culinary-challenged, I hope this segment fares well.

Because humans are involved, this faddish behavior is largely domain invariant. As such, it extends to research and scholarship as well. In the best cases, a triggering discovery stimulates the cognizant research community to shift directions and build a rich and robust intellectual infrastructure around a novel idea. The discovery of the CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing technique is a wonderful example; research groups worldwide quickly pivoted to investigate the technique and its applications. In other cases, a technology crosses a threshold (e.g., price or performance) and that quantitative change enables qualitatively new approaches to old problems. Field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), long a niche technology, are now the subject of intense research as AI accelerators.

Whether in startups or research, advantage often accrues to first movers, those who pioneer a new idea and explore its applications. Doing so requires imagination – the ability to step out of the incremental, "me to" mindset and take transformative intellectual (and often financial) risks. That is not easy, both because creative thinking is challenging and because failure is often punished. Now there's an opportunity – IaaS (Imagination as a Service). Let me get to work on that research proposal and pitch deck.

Livin’ Large on Three Cents a Bale

In the halls of academe, there is much talk of the need to impart financial literacy to our students, whether via formal education or informal tutelage. Avoid excessive student debt; understand credit card interest rates; plan and save for the future. These are all important lessons.

As a professor, I know that much can be taught and much can be learned in the classroom. I also know that some of the most valuable lessons are the practical ones, best learned experientially.

A dollar is not just an economics class lesson: medium of exchange, unit of account, and store of value – it can also be backbreaking labor in the hot sun, work done by fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, to provide for themselves and their families.

I learned this in the farm fields as a boy. It was a lesson beyond price, one for which I am thankful to this day.

Ozarks Childhood

I grew up in the northern Arkansas foothills of the Ozarks. There were red clay, dirt roads on three sides of my childhood house, only one room was heated, and I remember the family joy when we first got hot water. Even though I could see cows from the back porch, I was a "city boy," living in the incorporated environs, on streets with real names rather than just numbers, in a community with about 900 other souls.

Then, as now, about a third of the region's population lived below the Federal poverty line. There were few summer jobs available to enterprising teenage boys, because there were precious few jobs of any kind. Any fulltime jobs rightfully went to heads of households, even at (or below) the minimum wage, which rose from $1.60/hour to $2.00/hour in 1974. I knew many families living on the munificence of such a weekly paycheck, and even on the best of days, my family was not far from that sad state itself. A summer garden was not an organic, fresh produce luxury; it was a necessity. (See Just a Taste of Sherbet.) Health insurance, well, for most folks, that was a dream beyond imagining.

In the summers, I made a bit of money mowing lawns, but few in the community had the discretionary income to indulge in such an extravagance. Otherwise, I spent time with my grandfather, fishing for "red bellies" (sunfish) and rainbow trout and listening to the St. Louis Cardinals baseball games on the radio. During both, he would regale me with stories, all of which he remembered as true, and some of which actually were. Among them were tales of working on the farm for two bits a day, from "can to cain't" (from dawn until too dark to see). (See What Really Matters.)

Hauling Hay

Like my grandfather, my father grew up as a sharecropper, but by the time I was born, there were no row crops left in northern Arkansas. The land was too poor, and agricultural mechanization had rendered it unprofitable. Instead, timber was cleared from the hills, and those fortunate enough to own land now raised livestock on permanent pasture. Those cattle had to be fed in winter, and every summer, someone had to help the famers put hay away. As I got older, this created a new income opportunity – hauling baled hay from fields to barns.

Let's set the stage. It is 95-105 degrees Fahrenheit, with the sun shining and the humidity hovering near, oh, let's just call it southern outrageous. In other words, it was nothing special, just a typical Ozarks summer day. The hay cutting has already been windrowed for baling, and there are five of us at work. The farmer is driving the tractor, which powers and pulls the baler, ejecting two-string bales every fifteen feet or so. The farmer's wife is driving the two ton, flatbed truck, a teenaged stacker sits in the back, and two other teenaged boys are walking behind.

I can still see myself in my mind's eye. I am wearing heavy work gloves to keep the two-string bales, each of which weighs 40-75 pounds, depending on the type of hay, from cutting my hands to pieces. My job is to walk from bale to bale, pick them up, and lift them onto the truck bed for stacking. This was economic efficiency manifest – at three cents a bale, teenaged boys are far cheaper than a front loader.

Because I was not strong enough to lift the bales all day without touching my chest, I wore a long sleeved work shirt, which, despite the heat, was buttoned tightly to keep the hay from slicing my chest and arms. (At day's end, I discovered that the skin in the gap between my gloves and shirt was raw from repeated cuts.)

Each time the truck was filled, we drove from the field to the barn and began unloading. While tossing bales onto the growing tiers for stacking by my partner, I realized it was well over 110 degrees Fahrenheit in the barn loft, and I yearned for the breeze and the relative coolness of the open fields. During the rides to the barn, I grabbed my one-gallon plastic milk bottle and chugged ice water, thankful for the brief respite.

With sunset approaching, and after the last bale had been stacked in the barn, the farmer drove me home in his pickup truck and paid me in cash. I remember climbing slowly, painfully out of the truck, clutching my hard-earned six dollars.

That night, I could not sleep. It hurt every time I moved, and I coughed hay dust from my lungs, remembering how it had swirled in the barn's shadows all afternoon. In this world, respirators or masks were figments of an OSHA-fueled imagination.

I had thought I was in good physical condition for a teenaged boy, and I was. I had stacked lumber at the sawmill, working with grown men. I could play three hours of full court basketball in an un-air-conditioned gym, and not give it a second thought.

I was young and fit, and I thought hauling hay would be easy money; I was wrong.

Nevertheless, when another farmer came calling a few days later, I grabbed my work gloves and headed out the door. I needed the money, they needed help, and it paid three cents a bale.

Lessons Learned

Those days hauling hay as a teenager may have been among the most important educational lessons I have ever received, almost as important as understanding the power of plum jelly, and I carry them with me still.

I looked at my father with newfound respect; he worked hard at the sawmill in that hot sun every day to provide for us, and he never complained. He did what was right, not what was easy. I appreciated in a new and visceral way that there is dignity in honest work, no matter how difficult, and respect is due.

To this day, when I hold a dollar bill in my hands, I know it represents the fruits of real labor – three cents a bale – and I think carefully whether an item is really worth thirty bales. It is an emotional measure, another, personal medium of exchange.

Most importantly, I am thankful for the blessings I have received in this life and what so many have done for me. (See Transforming Lives Via Public Higher Education.)

I learned a lot, livin' large on three cents a bale.

Nature Cannot Be Fooled

If today's social media apps were wired to an old-fashioned audio VU meter, they would undoubtedly be pegged, deep in the red zone, the place where permanent hearing damage is imminent. (Insert obligatory image of an aging heavy metal rocker with hearing loss and artificial knees.) When coupled with the 24 hour news cycle, an amazing number of rumors, innuendos, retorts, memes, and yes, sometimes actual facts, buttressed by real evidence, echo and reverberate across the infosphere.

And in the "you can't make this stuff up" category, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four is now on Amazon's best seller list. One of my academic colleagues remarked wanly that he hoped it was selling as literature (doubleplusgood) and not as an instruction manual (doubleplusungood). I hope he is right.

The cacophony is enough to make one yearn for the good old days, when Uncle Walter and Huntley-Brinkley reported the news every night, and reputed Elvis and Bigfoot sightings were just supermarket tabloid fodder. D. B. Cooper and Mrs. Robinson, a nation turns its lonely eyes to you. And for those of you too young to remember either Elvis or D. B. sightings, think of them as an inside joke we played on ourselves, and take a stroll down memory lane. (See Elvis, D.B., and the Red Caddy.) Thank you, thank you very much!

Broadband Communications

Now where was I, before my shrinking attention span was seized by another shiny object? Ah yes, I was about to opine that the declining signal to noise ratio haunting our public discourse is a deeply worrisome trend that endangers us all. Narrowcasting ideas to like-minded individuals simply reinforces predispositions and stereotypes. Broadband communication, with rich information content and diverse perspectives, requires – wait for it -- broad bands. (See Contemplative Reflection and Instantaneous Communication for other thoughts on this.) More generally, the purpose of new information is to make one think, even if in my case it leads to the sound of grinding gears and the unsavory smell of burning rubber.

Complex, wicked problems are, by definition, not amenable to simple, stereotypical solutions and 15 second sound bites, no matter what anyone may tell you. Nature has a way of punishing hubris. That brings me to the parable in this little essay.

On O-Rings and the Facts

After the space shuttle Challenger exploded during launch, President Reagan convened the Rogers commission to determine the cause of the catastrophe, which had killed the crew, including a schoolteacher, on live television. It was quickly apparent that a solid rocket booster (SRB) failure was to blame, with the flexible O-rings joining the SRB sections being the primary culprit. The questions were obvious – how and why did this happen?

Ultimately, the commission determined that the risks of catastrophic failure for each space shuttle mission were much higher than initially believed; the space shuttle was not a "space truck," as had been hyped and advertised, but a complex, delicate instrument. When coupled with management problems and "go fever," mission failure and loss of life were inevitable.

The commission, as these things always do, included several notables in aerospace, engineering and management; one of them was the Nobel Prize winning Caltech physicist, Richard Feynman. Dick drove home the O-ring failure in his own, inimitable way. First, he placed a piece of the O-ring in a glass of ice water; then he waited. After the O-ring had chilled, he pulled it from the water and showed that it had lost flexibility, which would create a porous seal for the hot gases of the SRB. (Watch him explain it here.) In a classic understatement, he said this might have "some significance" for the problem.

Dick later observed, "Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." I have never forgotten this message, and the Rogers Commission report still sits on my bookshelf as a reminder.

It's a simple, but powerful lesson – the facts do matter, and no obfuscation or doublespeak can change that. This is especially true in science and engineering. In the end, there is no spin; there is no truthiness; and there are no alternative facts. There are just the facts, something Joe Friday understood. Nature is pretty particular about that.

And one more thing – Elvis has left the building, no matter what Twitter or the tabloids may suggest.

Research, Education, Engagement and Bovine Transport

It's been said many times. The accelerating pace of change is challenging extant social structures, economic mobility in the United States is declining, and many millennials may never experience the economic success of their parents. Globalization and automation are increasing manufacturing efficiency and output while requiring fewer workers with different skills. We face continuing global population growth and demographic shifts; sectarian forces are creating a global diaspora; environmental sustainability and climate change are existential threats; health care costs continue climbing while accessibility recedes; and social justice and equality remain elusive. Unsurprisingly, people are deeply worried about their future and that of their families, regardless of political persuasion. In turn, this stress has stirred the cauldron of political rhetoric, while reasoned debate, political compromise, and purposeful, strategic action have become ever more difficult.

As states continue to grapple with revenue shortfalls and mandatory spending commitments, others are publicly questioning the value of higher education as an essential public good. Meanwhile, the great recession has accelerated the decline in state funding for public universities, limiting their ability to respond, and forcing rises in tuition to help offset declining state support. Given these challenges, how do we in academe address the wicked problems now facing our global village?

Public University Roles and the Social Compact

By analogy with William Jevons' four functions of money, let me suggest that we in research universities have three functions, each of which matters in equal measure. First, we create new knowledge; that is the essence of research and scholarship, the defining attribute of a research university, one that distinguishes it from institutions focused solely on teaching. Second, we transmit knowledge and skills to a new generation; we educate and inform, not just with long-known facts but also with fresh insights from recent scholarship. Finally, we engage society with our knowledge and expertise; at our best, we address societal issues and challenges with new found capability that enlightens, empowers and improves the lives of others.

Though basic research, by definition, often lacks immediate or obvious applications, when we fail to communicate and demonstrate the importance of research via clear and telling examples of past success or future possibility, we abrogate our support. (That indispensable smartphone rests on decades of basic research in physics and computer science.) When we fail to connect education to the needs and opportunities of our citizens, we lose our relevance. (Those pharmacists, nurses, dentists and medical doctors trained by universities serve our communities.) Most dangerously, when we fail to engage society in times of need, we sacrifice our place of honor and respect. (Our partnerships on flood management and our support for business startups help ensure the well-being and economic success of our communities.)

And the Horse You Rode in On

Polls show that professors still rank far ahead of used car salespeople and members of Congress in both respect and trust, but we have slipped a few notches in the public's eye. Sometimes, our language and mien often give credence to those who believe academics are the very embodiment of the Ben Franklin adage, "He was so learned that he could name a horse in nine languages; so ignorant that he bought a cow to ride on."

When we take umbrage (a fine academic phrase, but one not commonly heard on any street non-adjacent to a university) at public questions and criticism, denigrating it as uninformed pique, we often confirm Franklin's caricature of one possessing knowledge but lacking wisdom. We must be willing to reflect on the reasons for criticism, engage in thoughtful discussion with our critics, and respond appropriately. As that old Scot, Rabbie Burns put it,

O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae mony a blunder free us,
An' foolish notion:
What airs in dress an' gait wad lea'e us,
An' ev'n devotion!

Collaborative Partnership: The Future

As academics, we must engage our stakeholders and partners in their context and address their legitimate problems and concerns, and we must do so honestly, humbly and thoughtfully. In so doing, we will help them and also help ourselves, educating one another. Solution to complex, wicked problems requires many insights, diverse perspectives, new ideas, and determined commitment. We in academia do not have all the answers, but we do have knowledge, skills and insights that are of value.

We begin by knowing ourselves, as Alexander Pope's timeless opening couplet from his Essay on Man suggests:

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan
The proper study of mankind is Man

We abandon academic hubris and a sense of entitlement. We talk less and listen more. We roll up our sleeves, get our hands dirty, and engage society. When we do, the true conversation begins.

Now excuse me, while I go mount my bovine steed, er horse, and head into town.

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