Reed's Ruminations: A Blog by Dan Reed

Globally Interconnected, Globally Worried

I spent my childhood in a small town, where the human population (825) was substantially outnumbered by the wildlife. It was a place where time seemed to move slowly and events from the outside world percolated slowly into the local environment and rarely affected us immediately. The single individual who filled the role of reporter, editor, circulation manager, printer and advertizing executive of the local newspaper struggled each week to fill its pages with "news." After all, there were only so many deaths, marriages and births to report.

The slowmoving world of my youth has been eclipsed by instant communication, where news flows across the planet in milliseconds, from farflung sources to a globally distributed audience. It has all been made possible by the explosive growth of inexpensive computing systems, mobile communications, the worldwide fiber network, and the rise of cloud services and social networks. Today, there are few places on the planet where one can be truly incommunicado. (See The World Is Small.)

In a world of global interconnectedness, we are united not only by ubiquitous and nearly instantaneous communications but also by coupled economic systems. The European sovereign debt crisis , pressure on the Euro, the fractious debate over raising the United States' debt limit and the interdependence economies and global trade mean that we truly are residents of Marshall McLuhan's global village.

Although the free flow of information is a wonderous thing, the concomitant decline in social and economic hysteresis now means that single events can have global effects on a frighteningly small timescale. Sometimes this can be humorous (e.g., the latest news on an entertainer's social antics), other times it isnewsworthy (e.g., a world sporting event), and still other times, it is profound (e.g., a social or government revolution).

The rapid, worldwide response to news of economic uncertainty has been both newsworthy and worrisome. It has affected European, U.S. and Asian financial markets, with fear and uncertainty in each driving response in the others. Without doubt, it is an exercise in global crowd psychology and behavorial economics that has implications for individuals, families and their future.

In a world where information traveled by sailing ship or steamship, our economic markets were much less tightly coupled. Consequently, there was time for more reflection and deliberation, even if the global markets may not have been efficient in a market sense. I am not suggesting we return to that past. We cannot, nor would we wish to do so.

Like all complex systems, our global economic and social environment operates on multiple time scales. Some of these are amenable to human reflection, others are increasingly driven by real-time communication. It is important that we remain cognizant of the power and value of timely reflection and discussion and of the personal effects of our market actions. (See Disruptive Innovation: Changing Lives.)

What Really Matters

Over the years I have had the privilege and the good fortune to count the powerful, the rich, the learned and the famous – Presidents, billionaires and Nobel Laureates – among my colleagues and acquaintances. Some found themselves successful via fortunate circumstances, some were extraordinarily hardworking, and some were extremely gifted. Each affected me in a different way.

Yet none of them has ever impressed me as much as two exceptional people whose names you've never heard. That's no surprise. Their words never filled the newspaper headlines, their actions never graced the history books, nor did their work dominate the scientific literature. Nevertheless, they are my true saints and heroes – my grandparents.

Like millions of others, they were the unhonored, the unsung backbone of America. Indeed, people like them are the backbone of civilization. They taught me almost everything that matters about character, about honor and respect, and about love. Their names were Lora Estella McHenry and Sidney Harrison Frazier, and they were married one hundred years ago this week. This is a bit of their story, though it does not begin to do them justice.

Going Courting

Sidney was born in 1889 on the wrong side of the tracks – about ten miles by wagon from the tracks, in fact, in South Fork, Arkansas. (That's about ten miles from Mammoth Spring, where I grew up.) With a third grade education, he could read and write, but not well. Truth be told, just about everyone in the clay hills of northern Arkansas was lacking in education and dirt poor; it was all just a matter of degree.

Lora was born in 1891 in Pleasanton, Kansas, and her family moved to Arkansas when she was a girl. It was a bad economic choice. Her mother (my great grandmother) cried when she learned the cabin had no windows. Nevertheless, the family managed to preserve some semblance of the education and niceties they once knew.

Mostly Scottish-Irish descendents of settlers, both families lived hardscrabble lives, trying to eke out a living by the sweat of their brow. They were sharecroppers and some landowners, but everyone struggled. In later years, Sidney often talked of working from "can to cain't" (first light until too dark to see) for two bits a day, six days a week. That didn't leave much time for socializing, for Sunday was the day of rest and religion.

Every Saturday night, Sidney would walk five miles to the "musical" – fiddle and banjo and square dancing – then he'd walk home again. There, he fell in love with Lora, and looking at her photograph, it's easy for me to see why. She was a better woman than he deserved, and he knew it, but that didn't stop him from trying.

Their courtship blossomed via the mail, penny postcards tracing their growing love and marriage.

Hello, Lora

How are you? This leaves me all okay. You may meet with briter (sic) faces and with boys you think more true, but remember little darling, no one loves you as I do.

SHF

Hello, Sidney

How are you? I am all right, am going this evening to take another music lesson. I had an invitation to a party last night but did not go.

Lora McHenry

Think of me when far away.

Think of me when near.

Think of whose love for you is lasting and sincere.

It's a testament to that love that they both saved the cards, and there are many, for over seventy years. Today, they are among my most prized possessions.

Tough Times

Lora raised six children (seven if you count my grandfather, Sidney) through two World Wars and the Great Depression. He was a good time Charlie, always looking for a get rich scheme, none of which ever worked. He bid to carry the U.S. mail into the country and won, because nobody in their right mind would bid so low. He'd then drive along the route with a .22 across his lap, shooting squirrels for supper. He also sold Rawleigh products out of the back of his car, often selling alcohol-laced lemon extract by the case to old women who couldn't get moonshine.

It's a wonder they never starved, and they would have if it weren't for her. Through it all, she was the rock, the one absolute, on which the entire family depended.

Her daughters worshiped her, and her grandchildren adored her. Her sons would have beaten any man half to death who wronged her, and not a soul in town would have questioned the righteousness of such an act. My mother was the last the six, born a decade after the others, and I was her only child. (That's my mother in the middle between my grandparents in the photograph above.) That made me the youngest grandchild, the joy of their old age.

The last years of their lives together, my grandparents lived in a little three room house my grandfather and my grandmother's brother (my great uncle Jesse) built with their own hands. There was a barn and chicken coop, and a garden, always a garden. My parents and I lived diagonally across from them, and I could toddle and later walk down to see them. (The man I described in The Power of Plum Jelly lived just across the dirt road, and the vignette I related in A Taste of Sherbert took place just after this.)

Remembering My Grandparents

There are so many memories from those times: my grandfather sending me home staggering drunk (at age five) after he gave me a hot toddy to "cure" my cold; fetching a live chicken for Sunday dinner and fried chicken – unless you've seen a chicken with its head cut off, you will never truly understand the colloquialism; eating watermelon on the back porch and spitting the seeds into the backyard; marveling at the hole my grandfather shot in the living room linoleum while cleaning his gun; sitting between my grandparents in the '48 Ford pickup truck; and my grandmother working, always working, in the garden and in her beloved flower beds.

I cannot recall my grandmother ever owning more than three dresses, all handmade on her own sewing machine. Most of the time, she made them from the cloth from flour sacks. (She also made me a sheriff's vest, complete with white star, for me to be a wild west cowboy!) Two of the dresses were for every day, and the third was for Sunday church.

At home, she always wore an apron, not just to protect her dress, but as a basket to fill and carry with garden produce. Her knees were bad after years of work, so she'd stoop rather than squat to work in the garden. She'd fill it with green beans, tomatoes, okra, cucumbers and corn, then sit on the back porch to work, breaking beans, making dill pickles, slicing okra and cutting corn. After fifty years of use, her paring knife was worn and curved from the number of times my grandfather had sharpened it on the whetstone.

Then there were the "musicals." The little house would be filled to overflowing with family and friends, the windows thrown open, with people standing on the porch and in the yard. Between my grandfather's fiddle playing and the five string banjo, the story telling and the laughter, I would watch my grandmother fixing ice water and soft drinks in the kitchen. I saw a beautific smile on her face, and I knew she was happy.

Farewell Lora

I was seven years old when she died, felled by a second heart attack while making a pan of cornbread for my grandfather. It was fitting in a way, for she died as she lived, always working.

My mother fetched me from school that day and told me grandma was gone. When we got to the little house on the corner, I sat down on the rolling footstool he and she had made from an old wooden box. He'd put legs and rollers on it, and she had uphostered it in green and white vinyl.

I sat there looking up at him and saw something extraordinary, something that is burned into my memory to this day. My grandfather, this story telling, fun loving man, looked down at me with big sad eyes. It was then that I saw the dried tears on the inside of his bifocals, and I knew life would never be the same again.

The funeral was on a cold Sunday afternoon, and the small town church was packed, filled with more flowers and more people than I'd ever seen before, both ones I knew and ones who rarely darkened any church door. In the years to follow, I watched many a small town preacher struggle to say something good and uplifting about some of the less beloved of their congregations, but in her case, the preacher never hesitated. He talked about all the good things she had done, her love of family and how much she had sacrificed.

With a seven year old's theological certainty, I knew she was in heaven, and the preacher did too. The only question in his mind and mine was whether the rest of us were good enough to get there with her. With the bar set this high, the preacher and I both had some serious doubts, and he took some time to remind us that we'd best be walking the straight and narrow or it would be warm, powerful warm, in the hereafter.

Saint, it's not a word I use lightly, but she surely was in all the practical senses that really matter. It's not just the gauzy memory of age, but a word I saw in action every day of my young life, and one hundreds of people used unbidden when they talked about her. She asked for nothing, and gave all she could in return. Everyone wanted to be better around her.

Sidney's Lessons

My grandfather lived almost twenty years after my grandmother died. We spent many a day together, him too old for anyone to take seriously and me too young. He'd regale me with stories about people and places, many of them gone before I was born.

There was the Devil's Backbone, a hill so steep one had to back a Model T up it because the gravity feed could not keep the engine running driving forward. There on the Myatt was the place where my father was born. There was the old Kinchelow place, which burned down in '08.

Often, we'd go fishing, using crawdads, worms and even corn as bait, fishing for bream, sunfish and trout. (To this day, I cannot order étouffée without hearing my grandfather's voice saying, "Boy, that is bait, not dinner.") We fished the Myatt, English Creek, Warm Fork, and Spring River, and sometimes we'ed even catch fish, though that wasn't the purpose, and neither of us cared if we came home with a filled stringer or not.

Sitting deep in the country on the riverbank of places he'd known as a boy, my grandfather would talk and I would listen as he told tales of 80-plus years of living, the good times and the bad. He gave me bad advice about how to meet girls and good advice about marriage. (He was a small town Justice of the Peace after all, and he'd learned that if you'd been drinking since sundown Saturday night and getting married seemed like a good idea at 2 am Sunday morning – it really wasn't.)

As the years went by, our roles slowly and subtlely shifted. I spent more time driving and doing, but always, I listened. Years later, when I was a young man and he was almost gone, I reminded him of the day my grandmother died, and the tears I'd seen on his glasses. I asked him what he'd been thinking. He simply said, "I haven't been happy a single day in my life since then. There's never been anyone else like her." Then he started to cry. He didn't need to say anything else.

Looking back on it now, I also understand why my grandmother stoically endured so much hardship. My grandfather made her laugh, and for all his faults, he loved her with a deep and abiding passion. That was enough for her.

Reflections

Lora and Sidney; they lived in a world now gone. Yet that which was precious remains. They had a love that lasted, one that has crossed and touched generations.

I can still close my eyes and feel the gentle touch on my face as my grandmother kissed me and called me her "little sweet meat." I can hear my grandfather tell a story and punctuate it with an uproarious, "I laughed till I cried."

Make no mistake; there are saints and heroes among us. In my case, their names were Lora and Sidney. Yes, the Ph.D. is worth something, but this is what really matters.

On Licking the Cookies

All organizations and cultures develop their own idiosyncratic acronyms, abbreviations, lingo and metaphors. (Yes, there are probably a few similes and alliterations as well.) One need look no further than the social networks and Twitter to find a veriable cornucopia of such phrases and acronyms (e.g., LOL or OMG). The hacker community (the original one) also gifted us with the gems RTFM and UTSL.

I was once offered my first full time job in the software industry because I knew what JCL was needed to apply a PTF to BTAM. That's IBM speak for applying a software patch to telecommunications software. In this sense, Microsoft is not unique, for its worldwide employees have developed their own lexicon of metaphors and abbreviations, as well as appropriating others were useful. As a relative newcomer to the corporate world after twenty-five years in academia, several of these abbreviations, words and phrases immediately caught my ear.

Licking the Cookies

Not to be confused with the joy of double stuff Oreos or even licking the spoon, licking the cookies refers to claiming action or skill in an area but in a way that prevents anything from happening. It is intended to conjure an image of a cookie plate, where one licks the cookies then returns them to the plate, rendering them inedible by all. As the phrase suggests, you have not eaten the cookie (i.e., taken action) but you have prevented others from doing so either.

Cookie licking is endemic to any large organization or culture where multiple teams compete for credit and accomplishment. We have all seen this behavior in our organizations and occasionally been guilty of it ourselves. This is one of the more pernicious forms of non-collaborative, non-team play.

After understanding the phrase, I realized that subtle and not so subtle forms of cookie licking occur in academia as well. I have seen it in debates over academic directions, discussions of research priorities and in paper and grant proposal reviewing. Of course, academia has its own set of arcane phrases.

Eating Your Own Dog Food (aka Dogfooding)

Dogfooding is a hoary classic, well used and abused across the computing milieu. It refers to using early (alpha or beta) versions of a system you and others have developed before it is released, often as an informal tester. It's not haute cuisine or even nouveau cuisine; it's dog food, edible and nutritious, but neither elegant nor tasty.

Learnings

Finally, there are learnings, as in "Our learnings on this suggest optimization is our first priority." The first time I heard this linguistic oddity, I was nonplussed and puzzled, confused and uncertain, perhaps even mortified, but I was not chagrined. After hearing it several times, I finally asked if the speaker really meant insights, understanding, observation, or even experience. The answer, of course, was yes. Nobody I have yet asked, however, knows the origin of the usage, though I am sure the exegesis would be fascinating.

BFN, I am OOF.

Small Planet, Large Planet

I have been traveling in India and Europe. When traveling long distances, I am always remind of three travel truisms. The details vary with each trip and each destination, but the basic elements remain unchanged.

It's A Long Way To Tipperary

First, the planet is a big place, as anyone who has spent more than twenty-four hours in transit knows. The combination of a long, international flight, followed by a bleary eyed layover in an international airport, then a second, long, international flight, and finally, the inevitable taxi ride ride to one's destination really brings this home.

As I look back on over twenty five years of international travel, I think my longest time in transit, excepting flight cancelations, was a forty hour trip from Jakarta to Champaign, when I was at the University of Illinois (UIUC). My longest single flight was a non-stop from New York to Bangkok. (Trivia question: What is the longest regularly scheduled non-stop flight? Answer: Newark to Singapore.)

At subsonic speeds, there is simply no escape from the the mathematics of time and distance. I realize the economics and environmental issues surrounding supersonic transport (SST) doomed the Concorde. Despite the complexity, I still dream of the suborbital transport that is described so cavilierly in science fiction novels. A semi-ballistic suborbital flight could cross the Atlantic in less than an hour. Such is the stuff of dreams.

Email at 3 AM

The second truism of international travel is jet lag. No matter what your personal or business agenda, you can expect to awaken sometime in the wee hours of the morning. I have discovered one virtue in this. It is an opportunity to catch up on the inevitable deluge of email from the office, leveraging our now ubiquitious and inexpensive global communication infrastructure. (See The World Is Small.) After twenty minutes or so, I can go back to sleep.

The downside of jet lag, of course, is the desperate struggle to remain awake in the middle of the day. Hence, I never refuse an offer of coffee or tea when traveling internationally. It is both socially polite and practically helpful. (See Joe, Java, Espresso: Fueling Innovation.)

It's A Global Village

Finally, the world really is a global village. News travels fast, for we are ever more interconnected. Yet I love the diversity of cultures, architectures, cuisines and experiences and I bemoan some of the homogenization that interconnection has brought.

Perhaps even more importantly, people are the same everywhere, with hopes and dreams, fears and concerns, joys and sorrows. It's important to remember that, as we work together to solve the pressing problems of the 21^st century.

Now, I need a cup of Joe or a nap. Maybe both.

Works in Progress: MIA

N.B. I also write for the Communications of the ACM (CACM). The following essay recently appeared on the CACM blog.

My colleague and CACM's editor-in-chief, Moshe Vardi, has written thoughtfully and persuasively about the changing nature of the academic publication culture, sentiments I also expressed in an earlier Computing Research News (CRN) column entitled Publishing Quarks: Considering Our Culture. Both of us have bemoaned the rising tide of conference publications at the expense of archival journals. (See Moshe's CACM editorial, Conferences vs. Journals in Computing Research for his perspective.)

In a more recent CACM editorial, Moshe returned to publications and culture, discussing the transformation of informal workshops into what might best be called small conferences, with all the program committees, paper reviewing and formality that implies. Like Moshe, I remember attending an earlier genre of workshops, when I was a graduate student and a young assistant professor.

Workshops: Real Discussion

These earlier workshop venues were an opportunity to meet senior researchers in settings where extended conversations and social interactions were both possible and desirable. The atmosphere was informal, the posted agenda were at best a rough guideline, and the discussions were lively, with no objective other than sharing experiences, trading insights and generating ideas.

There were no published proceedings, nor in many cases did the presentations even involve use of overhead transparencies. Real chalk was sometimes used, and the agenda might well have been mimeographed. I realize these descriptions of meeting technology alone date me, and perhaps label me as a technological Neanderthal. For the record, we did not walk five miles barefoot, in the snow, to the workshop venue, nor was it uphill both ways.

In the spirit of fostering off the record conversations on new research directions, I once helped organize and host a Gordon research conference. It was an experience unlike any other I have had as either a program committee or conference general chair, one I heartily recommend we embrace more often in computing.

If you are unfamiliar with Gordon conferences, most are held at small colleges, with attendees housed in student dormitories. The conferences follow a strict format, with morning sessions, free afternoons for informal discussion, followed by evening sessions and (typically) a social event with liquid refreshment. The conference rules also prohibit publication, quotation or attribution of ideas exchanged at the meeting, and attendees are chosen from applicants to ensure diverse technical perspectives.

Technical Reports: Computing History

In that same spirit, I bemoan the seeming demise of the technical report, long a fixture in academic research circles. The technical report, or TR as it was often called, was a mechanism to record details that were too voluminous for a journal publication. Such details ranged from extended descriptions of the experimental infrastructure used to capture data to detailed derivations of the lemmas and theorems behind a key result. Yes, it may be "obvious to the reader" but it is certainly much clearer if the proofs of the preceding nine lemmas and three theorems are explained in depth. Likewise, an extended description of the research infrastructure increases the odds the experiment might be repeatable, an all too rare event in computing.

The TR was also often used to document the progress and technical context of an extended research project. Reading a series of TRs often introduced one to project rationales, approaches and milestones, as well as the then current technical state of the art. For seminal projects, these TRs now serve as an intellectual archeological dig, documenting the early days of our field.

Like the informal workshop, the TR has gone the way of the passenger pigeon. It is time we extracted a sample of cultural DNA from computing's history and engineered a new generation of contemplative, informal workshops. Perhaps we could even ban wireless devices to ensure participation. After gestation, ideas conceived at those workshops might even find their way into technical reports. Imagine that.

You Might Be A Computing Old Timer If …

The history of modern digital computing is unusual in one regard. Most of its advances have occurred during the professional lifetimes of many of its current practicioners. That has rightly put a premium on preserving some of our history while its early creators are still with us.

For those of us who came of age in the mainframe era, it is instructive (and sometimes humorous) to remember what has changed. This photograph shows me at the Computer History Museum posed by parts of ILLIAC IV.

Herewith, in the spirit of Jeff Foxworthy's humor, are a few tests to determine if you are a computing old timer.

1. If you ever saw an ASR-33 teletype repaired with only a screwdriver, wrench and oilcan. Personally, I disliked the ASR-33 because the keys were so stiff it felt as if one needed to pump iron before typing.
2. If you ever carried a S/360 assembly language reference card, but never used it because you had the instruction set committed to memory. I still have mine, along with my flowchart template.
3. If having your code all wet was a meteorological fact rather than a management observation on your (lack of) programming prowess. One afternoon, I was caught in a rainstorm while carrying the card deck for a parser across campus. I then spent most of evening with an iron, smoothing the cards so I could punch a new deck the next morning.
4. If you ever toggled absolute binary into the front panel because, well, a relocating assembler was for wimps. For me, it was playing with a Microdata system.
5. If you know the difference between an 026 and an 029 keypunch and had a preference for one or the other based on keyboard feel. I was 029 aficionado myself.
6. If you have ever whistled into an acoustic coupler, attempting to get a carrier signal. At 300 baud, I got close, but I could never quite pull it off.
7. If you remember when the first UNIX articles were published in the Bell System Technical Journal and when every computer vendor shipped their own operating system. IBM had MFT and MVT before SVS and MVS; DEC had TOPS-10 on the PDP-10, RSTS on the PDP-11, and VMS on the VAX. I loved most of them – to varying degrees.
8. If the numbers 780, 2314 and 6600 all have special meaning. I loved the VAX, though it was the apotheosis of CISC architecture with the polynomial evaluation instruction. The IBM 2314s always made me think of washing machines at the laundromat, and the CDC 6600, well, that was a work of art.
9. If you hear the word BUNCH and you think of Burroughs, UNIVAC, NCR, Control Data Corporation, and Honeywell rather than the Bradys. I loved the Burroughs B5500 stack architecture; it was elegant and obvious how subroutine linkage was implemented.
10. If a visit to the Computer History Museum is a stroll down the memory lane of your career.

No doubt about it, I am a computer old timer. I am sure many of you have your own, similar stories. I would love to hear some of them.

Technology Transfer: A Contact Sport

It is fall and football season in the United States. We are still playing soccer too – football everywhere else – but that is another story. American football has long been called a contact sport, meaning the players intentionally collide to move the ball toward the goal line. However, it remains a far cry from rugby, which seems indistinguishable from unarmed combat to my untrained eye.

How, one may wonder, does football relate to technology transfer? For that matter, what do I mean by the phrase technology transfer itself? There are broader definitions, but for the sake of discussion, let's define technology transfer as the mechanism via which research ideas are communicated to and adopted by companies and their product groups.

The success or failure of technology transfer depends on many factors, from the personalities and skills of the people involved, through the timing and appropriateness of the offering, to the risks and costs associated with the new idea. No single mechanism is guaranteed to succeed, though there are many mechanisms that are likely to fail.

Sharing the Love

Opening the technology transfer conversation with a product group by disparaging the current product or questioning the intelligence of the developers is unlikely to create a receptive audience for one's brilliant research result, no matter how scintillating and erudite the subsequent description may be. Nor will woeful obliviousness to the history that led to the current product design, for it is important to understand context and competition. Finally, neither will bad timing. Reporting a better way to engineer a product just before it is finished will accomplish nothing other than depressing the product team, though it may provide guidance for the next product generation.

One needs to build a long-term, productive and positive relationship between research and product development. It is about creating mutual benefit, sharing the love.

On the positive side, I have observed a continuum of mechanisms that facilitate the transfer of ideas. None is universally successful in isolation, and even in aggregate they may fail. However, the set is far more powerful than the elements, and all can benefit from true contact sport engagement.

Papers. These are the stock and trade of researchers, whether in academia or in government or corporate research laboratories. Yes, members of many product groups read research papers, but an abstract idea, even with supporting experimental data, is rarely the catalyst for uptake of a new idea. A well-written paper does, however, provide the technical details needed when an idea is ultimately adopted.

Demonstrations. These are the "science fair" instantiations of ideas, the early instances that are little more than mockups of the idea. They work on limited data, are constructed using laboratory rather than product components, and they are unreliable at best. However, their virtue is in allowing non-researchers to see and experience the idea in concrete form. Often, seeing really is believing, and a prototype can be convincing in ways that a paper is not.

Prototypes. Prototypes are the next stage, where the demonstration is sufficiently robust that it can be used routinely by individuals and groups other than the creators. The robustness allows product groups and developers to test the idea in more realistic conditions and contexts, and see how it fares relative to existing technologies.

Near Products. Near products are products in all but name, suitable for shipment with little more than cosmetic changes. Creating a near product can be effective if the product team is interested and willing but understaffed, or if they lack the specific technical skills needed to create a product quality instance of the idea.

Contact Engagement

Papers, demonstrations, prototypes and near products help, and they may sometimes be sufficient to transfer an idea into a product. However, they are pale shadows of the true contact sports, either direct embedding with the product team or long-term engagement and partnership. In the embedding model, researchers become members of the product team, working side by side on the product in the same environment as the product developers. Because the utility of so many new ideas depend on culture and context – things rarely written down – as well as personal trust and connections, contact engagement is often the most successful approach.

Remember, game plans, no matter how elaborate, rarely work without modification. The players on the field innovate and adapt. Technology transfer is a contact sport. It can be contentious at times, but the rewards for successful transfers are enormous, both in a sense of personal accomplishment and pride and in the long-term success of the companies involved.

The Love of Language

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

T.S. Elliot, The Hollow Men

I am a logophile (λογοπηιλε) – a lover of words. More than that, I am a lover of well crafted, erudite prose that captures and conveys nuance and subtlety. Such prose brings a smile to the lips, both the writer and the reader's reward for dutiful and diligent background research, thoughtful paragraphs that flow as mellifluously as a mountain stream, and phrases that delight with their craftsmanship.

The words matter, for they are the conduit of our ideas and experiences, of our hopes and fears, and of our passions and dreams. They bind us, yet they separate us, for none of us is truly their master.

Between the idea and the reality – the concept and its expression – falls the shadow.

Sunday Rituals

I have a Sunday ritual, practiced with great reverence and solemnity, that cleanses my soul and prepares me to face the viccisidues of the coming week with all the equanimity I can summon. This ritual involves both a large latte, made with freshly ground beans and frothed milk, and the New York Times. When traveling or in extremis, the Times of London or the Washington Post can be substituted. Under no circumstances, however, will a graven image such as the Podunk Picyune-Gazette be tolerated, for reading it is tantamout to drinking instant coffee, an abomination to the world and all right thinking individuals.

Armed with a massive latte, I spread the New York Times on the kitchen table. (As a non New Yorker, I have never mastered the art of newspaper oragami.) For me, it begins with the front page and its extended stories, then the Week in Review, the editorials and the op-eds. I dally over the obituaries and the wedding announcements, a voyeur inspecting the lives of others.

I scan the business section, seeking surcease for our economic sorrows, then linger over the travel section, thinking about the places I have been and those I have yet to visit. Finally, I turn to the Sunday Book Review, looking for new books to read, and the Sunday Magazine, wondering which topics will warrant extended stories. (And yes, I still miss William Safire's wit in the On Language column.)

I feast my soul on language, sated, albeit briefly, for the coming week.

Nuance Matters

Make no mistake, small words have huge effects. Both war and peace have hung on the interpretation of a single word or phrase. In such circumstances, creative ambiguity can be prized, allowing each party to apply their own, convenient interpretation. Often, though, such translingual ambiguity is simply the subject of embarrassment.

I am reminded of a conversation with a friend from graduate school. It was about 1980, and we were discussing the characteristics of dumb terminals (i.e., terminals with limited intelligence and connected by RS-232 connections to a remote computing system). Though not a native English speaker, he was quite proficient, rarely pausing to search for a word or phrase, even when conveying complex ideas.

Gesticulating enthusastically, my friend opined on the limitations of such devices, expressed his preferences and, as I recall, offered a few pejorative comments on certain vendors' products. It was a technical discussion filled with facts and analyses, similar to countless others held every day by computer scientists and engineers. He finally paused in mid-sentence, nonplussed by my uproarous laughter.

After gathering my composure, I explained that he had been railing about stupid terminals, rather than dumb terminals. Though superfically synonymous, the first was an inadvertant value judgement; the second was a technical term of art. Like all non-native speakers, he had been ensnared by an American idiom, with the inevitably amusing results. Both connotation and denotation matter.

Compare and Contrast

On occasion, I read newspaper stories where I have personal knowledge of the events and participants described in the story. Rarely do those stories capture all the details correctly. Even when the facts are correct, the tone, the implications and the nuance are either lost or subtlety incorrect. Years ago, I asked a reporter about this, and he readily acknowledged this was the case, noting that it was extraordinarily difficult to capture complexity.

If you have ever read multiple accounts of an international event, written by reporters from different cultures, countries and perspectives, you know this to be true. You may even have wondered if they were reporting the same events. Read thoughtfully, interpolate and extrapolate, seek complexity, seek understanding.

Simplify, Simplify, Simplify

Odds are that almost every adult American remembers a few lines from Thoreau's Walden, "Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify, simplify! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumbnail." When mixed with a bit of John Donne's Devotions upon Emergent Occasions ("No man is an island"), some musings from Cervantes' Don Quixote, and a dose of Shakespeare's Hamlet ("To be or not to be") it was a perfect storm of teenaged angst and ennui. (Truth in advertising: I have always preferred Macbeth for tragedy, but I realize that puts me in the minority.)

How, pray tell, doeth such musings inform technology and its societal implications? Perhaps it is all sound and fury, signifying nothing, but I think not. There are lessons here, if we but reflect and learn.

Multitasking and Thrashing

In an August 24, 2010 New York Times article, "Digital Devices Deprive Brain of Needed Downtime," Matt Richtel noted that when we multitask nearly continuously, we forfeit the downtime historically used to think and remember. He went on to quote a University of Michigan study, which "… found that people learned significantly better after a walk in nature than after a walk in a dense urban environment, suggesting that processing a barrage of information leaves people fatigued."

Last week, I found myself dealing with an important issue at work, dashing to the airport, and then being grateful the airplane at WiFi service so I could continue working. In the digital age, most of us are have multitasked, whether it be reading email at the grocery store (guilty), working on vacation (guilty) or bouncing among multiple electronic activities (guilty).

In that spirit, when did the operating system term multitasking enter the common vernacular to describe concurrent human activities? Perhaps we should make people more aware of another operating system term, the one that describes what happens when the number of tasks exceeds available processing capacity and the time slice assigned to each approaches zero. We call it thrashing. Unfortunately (or fortunately), one cannot get a brain hardware or operating system upgrade.

A Different Drummer

I am no technological Luddite or troglodyte. Far from it, I am a frequent blogger, social network denizen and a lover of electronic gadgets. I have always been – and always will be -- a passionate proponent of technology and its power to enrich and enable innovation and human discovery. Yet there are times when I think we need to step back, consider the social implications of these technologies and ask when and where they are best used to our advantage.

Had Thoreau had a smartphone, he would not have been texting his best bud, Ralph (Waldo Emerson), about the joys of solitude, nor would he have been tweeting or posting photos of his house construction. I am rather more confident he would have espoused the healing virtues of periodic digital seclusion and contemplation.

Tis true that no man is an island. Nearly all of us are connected by an electronic web of shared communications, social networks and intelligent devices. However, sometimes being an island of solitude – even for a few minutes – can be a blessing. Sometimes we need to disconnect, contemplate, remember and imagine – reinventing and discovering. This is no quixotic quest; it is what drives discovery.

Simplify, simplify, simplify, indeed.

I'd write more, but I need to catch up on my email.

Research Summers

N.B. This essay also appeared on the Communications of the ACM web blog.

I was a young assistant professor, attending an extended family event where one meets cousins, nieces, nephews, wives, husbands and people whose familial relationship you only vaguely understand. It was one of those times when one relaxes, enjoys family and makes small talk with people one sees only at such events. It was wedding or a holiday – I no longer recall the location or the details. One memorable aspect of the event remains, however.

A member of my extended family asked if I would be teaching during the upcoming summer. "No, I do not teach classes during the summer," I replied. A perplexed expression then played across the questioner's face, with the implied successor question very clear. What, pray tell, does a professor do in the summertime?

Lest I be viewed as an ivory tower dilettante with a questionable work ethic, I hastened to explain that I spent the summer devoting all my time to research. In turn, this prompted another question, "What does that mean?"

Realizing that I should have anticipated that response, I paused to consider my reply, with images of university life flashing through my mind. Did I explain grant proposal preparation and annual reports? Should I describe meetings with graduate students and reviewing thesis drafts? Or were descriptions of research conferences and hallway discussions more apt? Might recourse to memories of secondary school lectures on the scientific method and experiments do the trick? No, I decided. A more personal answer was required.

"In the summer, the government pays me to think. If I believe I have a good idea, I am supposed to write it down," I finally responded. It was the truth, encapsulating the fact that I had active research grants and that one of the tangible outputs of research is scientific publication. Yet, it was also a bit flippant, for it failed to capture all the nuance and complexity that academic research truly entails: the thrill of discovery, the camaraderie of a research team, the friendly intellectual competition, and the long hours of hard work.

After a moment's reflection, the family member smiled and asked jokingly, "How do I get one of those jobs?" "It's harder than it sounds," I replied.

Indeed it is. I am older and (I hope) a bit wiser now, and I would have given a much more nuanced answer. Research challenges us to pose new questions, choose research avenues carefully, and be frugal and wise stewards of the financial trust invested in us. It means nurturing each new generation of students in the ways and methods of discovery, shaping national and international research agendas, and serving society by transferring promising ideas. Finally, it means explaining why research is important.

And yes, it means thinking clearly about the future.