Knowing and Doing

The day was yesterday.

I am large, I contain multitudes.

The to-do list is a time capsule, containing missives and pleas to your future selves. ... Why is it not trivially easy to carry out items on your own to-do list? And the answer is: Because the one writing the list, and the one carrying it out are two different people.

Now I understand the problem... my to-do list is a form of time travel.

Open to Multitudes

It's the kind of culture that can tolerate rap music and extreme sports that can also create space for guys like Page and Brin and Google. That's one of our hidden strengths.

This is from economist Paul Romer, as quoted by Tyler Cowen. I agree. We need to try out lots of ideas to find the great ones.

Going to an Extreme

I'm not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.

Cormac McCarthy must live on the edge. This is one of those romantic notions that has never appealed to me. I've never been so driven -- nor felt like I wanted to be.

A Counterproposal

6. MAKE MANY SKETCHES

Join the best sketches to produce others and improve them until the result is satisfactory.

To make sketches is a humble and unpretentious approach toward perfection.

... says composer Arnold Schonberg, as quoted at peripatetic axiom. This is more my style.

Speaking of Perfection

My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That's heaven. That's gold and anything else is just a waste of time.

Again from Cormac McCarthy. Unlike McCarthy, I do not think that everything else is a waste of time. Yet I feel a kinship with his sense of a perfect day. To sit in a room, alone, with an open terminal. To write, whether prose or code. But especially code.

A couple of weeks back, Brian Foote tweeted:

Ward Cunningham: Pure Knowledge arbitrageurs will no longer gain by hoarding as knowledge increasingly becomes a plentiful commodity #oopsla

This reminds me of a "quought" of the day that I read a couple of years ago. Paraphrased, it asked marketers: What will you do when all of your competitors know all of the same things you do? Ward's message broadens the implication from marketers to any playing field on which knowledge drives success. If everyone has access to the same knowledge, how do you distinguish yourself? Your product? The future looks a bit more imposing when no one starts with any particular advantage in knowledge.

Ward's own contributions to the world -- the wiki and extreme programming among them -- give us a hint as to what this new future might look like. Hoarding is not the answer. Sharing and building together might be.

The history of the internet and the web tells us at the result of collaboration and open knowledge may well be a net win for all of us over a world in which knowledge is hoarded and exploited for gain in controlled bursts.

Part of the ideal of the academy has always been the creation and sharing of knowledge. But increasingly its business model has been exposed as depending on the sort of knowledge arbitrage that Ward warns against. Universities now compete in a world of knowledge more plentiful and open than ever before. What can they do when all of their customers have access to much of the same knowledge that they hope to disseminate? Taking a cue from Ward, universities probably need to be thinking hard about how they share knowledge, how they help students, professors, and industry build knowledge together, and how they add value in their unique way through academic inquiry.

A recent discussion on the XP mailing list discussed the relative merits of using physical cards for story planning versus a program, even something as simple as a spreadsheet. Someone had asked, "why not use a program?", and lots of XP aficionados explained why not.

I mostly agree with the explanations, but one undercurrent in the discussion bothered me. It is best captured in this comment:

The software packages are simulations. The board and cards are the real thing.

I was immediately transported twenty years back, to a set of old arguments against artificial intelligence. They went something like this... If we write a program to simulate a rainstorm, we will not get wet; it is just a simulation. By the same token, we can write a program to simulate symbol processing the way we think people do it, but it's not real symbol processing; it is just a simulation. We can write a program to simulate human thought, but it's not real; it's just simulated thought. Just as a simulated rainstorm will not make us wet, simulated thought can't enlighten us. Only human thought is real.

That always raised my hackles. I understand the difference between a physical phenomenon like rain and a simulation of it. But symbol processing and thought are something different. They are physical in our brains, but they manifest themselves in our interactions with the exterior world, including other symbol processors and thinkers. Turing's insight in his seminal paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence was to separate the physical instantiation of intelligent behavior from the behavior itself. The essence of the behavior is its ability to communicate ideas to other agents. If a program can carry on such communication in a way indistinguishable form how humans communicate, then on what grounds are we to say that the simulation is any less real than the real thing?

That seems like a long way to go back for a connection, but when I read the above remark, from someone whose work I greatly respect, it, too, raised my hackles. Why would a software tool that supports an XP practice be "only" a simulation and current practice be the real thing?

The same person prefaced his conclusion above with this, which explains the reasoning behind it:

Every software package out there has to "simulate" some definite subset of these opportunities, and the more of them the package chooses to support the more complex to learn and operate it becomes. Whereas with a physical board and cards, the opportunities to represent useful information are just there, they don't need to be simulated.

The current way of doing things -- index cards and post-it notes on pegboards -- is a medium of expression. It is an old medium, familiar, comfortable, and well understood, but a medium nonetheless. So is a piece of software. Maybe we can't express as much in our program, or maybe it's not as convenient to say what we want to say. This disadvantage is about what we can say or say easily. It's not about reality.

The same person has the right idea elsewhere in his post:

Physical boards and cards afford a much larger world of opportunities for representing information about the work as it is getting done.

Ah... The physical medium fits better into how we work. It gives us the ability to easily represent information as the work is being done. This is about work flow, not reality.

Another poster gets it right, too:

It may seem counterintuitive for those of us who work with technology, but the physical cards and boards are simply more powerful, more expressive, and more useful than electronic storage. Maybe because it's not about storage but communication.

The physical medium is more expressive, which makes it more powerful. More power combined with greater convenience makes the physical medium more useful. This conclusion is about communication. It doesn't make the software tool less real, only less useful or effective.

You will find that communication is often the bottom line when we are talking about software development. The agile approaches emphasize communication and so occasionally reach what seems to be a counterintuitive result for a technical profession.

I agree with the XP posters about the use of physical cards and big, visible boards for displaying them. This physical medium encourages and enhances human communication in a way that most software does not -- at least for now. Perhaps we could create better software tools to support our work? Maybe computer systems will evolve to the point that a live display board will dynamically display our stories, tasks, and status in a way that meshes as nicely with human workflow and teamwork as physical displays do now. Indeed, this is probably possible now, though not as inexpensively or as conveniently as stash of index cards, a cheap box of push pins, and some cork board.

I am open to a new possibility. Framing the issue as one of reality versus simulation seems to imply that it's not possible. I think that perspective limits us more than it helps us.

I know all about the idea of "writing to learn". It is one of the most valuable aspects of this blog for me. When I first got into academia, though, I was surprised to find how many books in the software world are written by people who are far from experts on the topic. Over the years, I have met several serial authors who pick a topic in conjunction with their publishers and go. Some of these folks write books that are successful and useful to people. Still the idea has always seemed odd.

In the last few months, I've seen several articles in which authors talk about how they set out to write a book on a topic they didn't know well or even much at all. Last summer, Alex Payne wrote this about writing the tapir book:

I took on the book in part to develop a mastery of Scala, and I've looked forward to learning something new every time I sit down to write, week after week. Though I understand more of the language than I did when I started, I still don't feel that I'm on the level of folks like David Pollak, Jorge Ortiz, Daniel Spiewak, and the rest of the Scala gurus who dove into the language well before Dean or I. Still, it's been an incredible learning experience ...

Then today I ran across Noel Rappin's essay about PragProWriMo:

I'm also completely confident in this statement -- if you are willing to learn new things, and learn them quickly, you don't need to be the lead maintainer and overlord to write a good technical book on a topic. (Though it does help tremendously to have a trusted super-expert as a technical reference.)

Pick something that you are genuinely curious about and that you want to understand really, really well. It's painful to write even a chapter about something that doesn't interest you.

This kind of writing to learn is still not a part of my mentality. I've certainly chosen to teach courses in order to learn -- to have to learn -- something I want to know, or know better. For example, I didn't know any PHP to speak of, so I gladly took on a 5-week course introducing PHP as a scripting language. But I have a respect for books, perhaps even a reverence, that makes the idea of publishing one on a subject I am not expert in unpalatable. I have to much respect for the people who might read it to waste their time.

I'm coming to learn that this probably places an unnecessary limit on myself. Articles like Payne's and Rappin's remind me that I can study something and become expert enough to write a book that is useful to others. Maybe it's time to set out on that path.

Getting people to take this step is one good reason to heed the call of Pragmatic Programmers Writing Month (PragProWriMo), which is patterned after the more generic NaNoWriMo (NaNoWriMo). Writing is like anything else: we can develop a habit that helps us to produce material regularly, which is a first and necessary step to ever producing good material regularly. And if research results on forming habits is right, we probably need a couple of months of daily repetitions to form a habit we can rely on.

So, whether it's a book or blog you have in mind, get to writing.

(Oh, and you really should click through the link in Rappin's essay to Merlin Mann's Making the Clackity Noise for a provocative -- if salty -- essay on why you should write. From there, follow the link to Buffering, where you will find a video of drummer Sonny Payne playing an extended solo for Count Basie's orchestra. It is simply remarkable.)

I went last night to see a talk by Aaron Schurman, co-founder and CEO of Phantom EFX. Phantom is a homegrown local company that makes video games. The talk told the story of their latest and most ambitious release, Darkest of Days, a first-person shooter game built around historic narratives and a time-travel hook.

Phantom got its start with casino games. They started from scratch, with no training in software development. Part of the team did have background in graphic design, which gave them a foundation to build on. In the last decade, they have became serious players in the market, with several top-selling titles.

I'm am not a "computer gamer" and rarely ever play the sort of games that are so popular with students these days. But as a computer scientists, I am interested in them as programs. Nearly every game these days requires artificial intelligence, both to play the game and, in character-based games, to provide realistic agents in the simulated world. My background in AI made me a natural local resource to the company when they were getting started. As a result, I have had the good fortune to be a long-time friend of the company.

Aaron's talk was like the game; it had something for almost everyone: history, creative writing, art, animation, media studies, and computer science. The CS is not just AI, of course. A game at this level of scale is a serious piece of software. The developers faced a number of computational constraints in filling a screen with a large number of realistic humans and while maintaining the frame rate required for an acceptable video experience. There were also software development challenges, such as building for multiple platforms in sync and working with contractors distributed across the globe. There is a lot to be learned by conducting a retrospective of this project.

Aaron spoke a lot about the challenges they faced. His response was the sort you expect from people who succeed: Don't be dismayed. Do you think you are too small or too poor to compete with the big boys? Don't be dismayed. You can find a way, even if it means rolling your own gaming engine because the commercial alternatives are too expensive. Don't know how to do something? Don't be dismayed. You simply don't know yet. Work hard to learn. Everyone can do that.

The practical side of me is glad that we are so close to a company like this and have connections. We've recently begun exploring ways to place our students at Phantom EFX for internships. I love the idea of running an iPhone development class to port some of the company's games to that market. This is a great opportunity for the students, but also for professors!

The dreamer in me was inspired by this talk. I am always impressed when I meet people, especially former students, who have a vision to build something big. This sort of person accepts risks and works hard. The return on that investment can be huge, both monetarily and spiritually. I hope more of our students take stories like this to heart and realize that entrepreneurship offers an alternative career path when they have ideas and are willing to put their their work hours toward something that they really care about.

At its bottom, this is the story of small-town Iowa guys staying in small-town Iowa and building a new tech company. Now they have Hollywood producers knocking on their doors, bidding to option their script and concept for a major motion picture. Not a bad way to make a living.

I've been working on a jumble of administrative duties all week long, with an eye toward the weekend. While cleaning up some old files, I ran across three items that struck me as somehow related, at least in the context of the last few days.

Listen to Your Conscience

Here's a great quote from an old article by John Gruber:

If you think your users would be turned off by an accurate description of something, that doesn't mean you should do it without telling them. It means means you shouldn't be doing whatever it is you don't want to tell them about.

This advice applies to so many different circumstances. It's not bulletproof, but it's worth being the first line of thought whenever your conscience starts to gnaw at you.

Listen With Your Heart

And here's a passage on writing from the great Joni Mitchell:

You could write a song about some kind of emotional problem you are having, but it would not be a good song, in my eyes, until it went through a period of sensitivity to a moment of clarity. Without that moment of clarity to contribute to the song, it's just complaining.

This captures quite nicely one of the difficulties I have with blogging about being a department head: I rarely seem to have that moment of clarity. And I need them, even if I don't intend to blog about the experience.

Somebody Must Be Listening

One piece of nice news... I recently received a message saying that Knowing and Doing has been included in a list of the top 100 blogs by professors on an on-line learning web site. There are a lot of great blogs on that list, and it's an honor to be included among them. I follow a dozen or so of those blogs closely. One that some of my readers might not be familiar with is Marginal Revolution, which looks at the world through the lens of an economist.

If I could add only one blog to that list, right now it would be The Endeavour, John Cook's blog on software, math, and science. I learn a lot from the connections he makes.

In any case, it's good to know that readers find some measure of value here, too. I'll keep watching for the moments of clarity about CS, software development, teaching, running, and life that signal a worthwhile blog entry.

After my long run yesterday, I was both sorer and more tired ('tireder'?) than after last Sunday's big week and fast long run. Why? I cut my mileage last week from 48 miles to 38, and my long run from 22 miles to 14. I pushed hard only during Wednesday's track workout. Shouldn't last week have felt easy, and shouldn't I be feeling relatively rested after an easy long run yesterday?

No, I shouldn't. The expectation I should is a mental illusion that running long ago taught me was an impostor. It's hard to predict how I will feel on any day, especially during training, but the best predictor isn't what I did this week, but last; not today, but yesterday.

Intellectually, this should not surprise us. The whole reason we train today is to be better -- faster, strong, more durable -- tomorrow. My reading of the running literature says that it takes seven to ten days for the body to integrate the effects of a specific workout. It makes sense that the workout can be affecting our body in all sorts of ways during that period.

This is good example of how running teaches us a lesson that is true in all parts of life:

We are what and who are we are today because of what we did yesterday.

This is true of athletic training. It is true of learning and practice more generally. What we practice is what we become.

More remarkable than that this true in my running is that I can know and write about habit of mind as an intellectual idea without making an immediate connection to my running. I often find in writing this blog that I come back around on the same ideas, sometimes in a slightly different form and sometimes in much the same form as before. My mind seems to need that repetition before it can internalize these truths as universal.

When I say that I am living with yesterday, I am not saying that I can live anywhere but in this moment. That is all I have, really. But it is wise to be mindful that tomorrow will find me a product of what I do today.

Reader and occasional writer that I am, Michael Nielsen's Six Rules for Rewriting seemed familiar in an instant. I recognize their results in good writing, and even when I don't practice them successfully in my own writing I know they would often make it better.

Occasional programmer that I am, they immediately had me thinking... How well do they apply to refactoring? Programming is writing, and refactoring is one of our common forms of rewriting... So let's see.

First of all, let's acknowledge up front that a writer's rewriting is not identical to a programmer's refactoring. First of all, the writer does not have automated tests to help her ensure that the rewrite doesn't break anything. It's not clear to me exactly what not breaking anything means for a writer, though I have a vague sense that it is meaningful for most writing.

Also, the term "refactoring" does not refer to any old rewrite of a code base. It has a technical meaning: to modify code without changing its essential functionality. There are rewrites of a code base that are not refactoring. I think that's true of writing in general, though, and I also think that Nielsen is clearly talking about rewrites that do not change the essential content or purpose of a text. His rules are about how to say the same things more effectively. That seems close enough to our technical sense of refactoring to make this exercise worth an effort.

Striking

Every sentence should grab the reader and propel them forward.

Can we say that every line of code should grab the reader and propel her forward?! I certainly prefer to read programs in which every statement or expression tells me something important about what the program is and does. Some programming languages make this harder to do, with boilerplate and often more noise than signal.

Perhaps we could say that every line of code should propel the program forward, not get in the way of its functionality? This says more about the conciseness with which the programmer writes, and fits the spirit of Nielsen's rule nicely.

Every paragraph should contain a striking idea, originally expressed.

Can we say that every function or class should contain a striking idea, originally expressed? Functions and classes that do not usually get in the reader's way. In programming, though, we often write "helpers", auxiliary functions or classes that assist another in expressing an essential, even striking, idea. The best helpers capture an idea of deep value, but it's may be the nature of decomposition that we sometimes create ones that are striking only in the context of the larger system.

The most significant ideas should be distilled into the most potent sentences possible.

Yes! The most significant ideas in our programs should be distilled into the most potent code possible: expressions, statements, functions, classes, whatever the abstractions our language and style provide.

Style

Use the strongest appropriate verb.

Of course. Names matter. Use the strongest, most clearly named primitives and library functions possible. When we create new functions, give them strong, clear names. This rule applies to our nouns, too. Our variables and classes should carry strong names that clearly name their concept. No more "manager" or "process" nouns. They avoid naming the concept. What do those objects do?

This rule also applies more broadly to coding style. It seems to me that Tell, Don't Ask is about strength in our function calls.

Beware of nominalization.

In code, this guideline prescribes a straightforward idea: Don't make a class when a function will do. You Aren't Gonna Need It.

Meta

None of the above rules should be consciously applied while drafting material.

Anyone who writes a lot knows how paralyzing it can be to worry about writing good prose before getting words down onto paper, or into an emacs buffer. Often we don't know what to write until we write it; why try to write that something perfect before we know what it is?

This rule fits nicely with most lightweight approaches to programming. I even encourage novice programmers to write code this way, much to the chagrin of my more engineering-oriented colleagues. Don't be paralyzed by the blank screen. Write freely. Make something work, anything on the path to a solution, and only then worry about making it right and fast. Do the simplest thing that will work. Only after your code works do you rewrite to make it better.

Not all rewriting is refactoring, but all refactoring is rewriting. Write. Pass the test. Refactor.

Many people find that refactoring provides the most valuable use of design patterns, as a target toward which one moves the code. This is perhaps a more important use of patterns than initial design, at which time many of us tend to overdesign our programs. Joshua Kerievsky's Refactoring to Patterns book makes shows programmers how to do this safely and reliably. I wonder if there is any analogue to this book in the writing world, or if there even could be such a book?

I once wrote a post on writing in an agile style, and rewriting played a key role in that idea. Some authors like rewriting more than writing, and I think you can say the same thing of many, many programmers. Refactoring brings a different kind of joy, at getting something right that was before almost right -- which is, of course, another way of saying not yet right.

I recall once talking with a novelist over lunch about tools for writers. Yet even the most humble word processor has done so much to change how authors write and rewrite. One of the comments on Nielsen's entry asks whether new tools for writing have changed the way writers think. We might also ask whether new tools -- the ability to edit and rewrite so much more easily and with so much less= technical effort -- has changed the product created by most writers. If not, could it?

New tools also change how we rewrite code. The refactoring browser has escaped the confines of the Smalltalk image and now graces IDEs for Java, C++, and C## programmers; indeed, refactoring tools exist for so many languages these days. Is that good or bad? Many of my colleagues lament that the ease of rewriting has led to an endemic sloppiness, to a rash of random programming in which students keep making seemingly random changes to their code until something compiles. Back in the good old days, we had to think hard about our code before we carved it into clay tablets... It seems clear to me that making rewriting and refactoring easier is a huge win, even as it changes how we need to teach and practice writing.

In retrospect, a lot of Nielsen's rules generalize to dicta we programmers will accept eagerly. Eliminate boilerplate. Write concise, focused code. Use strong, direct, and clear language. Certainly when we abstract the tasks to a certain level, writing and rewriting really are much the same in text and code.

While prepping for my software engineering course last summer, I was re-reading some old articles by Philip Greenspun on teaching, especially an SE course focused on building on-line communities. One of the talks he gives is called Online Communities. This talk builds on the notion that "online communities are at the heart" of most successful applications of the Internet". Writing in 2006, he cites amazon.com, AOL, and eBay as examples, and the three years since have only strengthened his case. MySpace seems to have passed its peak yet remains an active community. I sit hear connected with friends from grade school who have been flocking to Facebook in droves, and Twitter is now one of my primary sources for links to valuable professional articles and commentary.

As a university professor, the next two bullets in his outline evoke both sadness and hope:

• the mournful history of applying technology to education: amplifying existing teachers
• the beauty of online communities: expanding the number of teachers

Perhaps we existing faculty are limited by our background, education, or circumstances. Perhaps we simply choose the more comfortable path of doing what has been done in the past. Even those of us invested in doing things differently sometimes feel like strangers in a strange land.

The great hope of the internet and the web is that it lets many people teach who otherwise wouldn't have a convenient way to reach a mass audience except by textbooks. This is a threat to existing institutions but also perhaps an open door on a better world for all of us.

Yesterday evening, in between volleyball games, I had a chance to do some reading. I marked several one-liners to blog on. I planned a disconnected list of short notes, but after I started writing I realized that they revolve around a common theme: change.

Over the last few months, Kent Beck has been blogging about his experiences creating a new product and trying to promote a new way to think about his design. In his most recent piece, Turning Skills into Money, he talks about how difficult it can be to create change in software service companies, because the economic model under which they operates actually encourages them to have a large cohort of relatively inexperienced and undertrained workers.

The best line on that page, though, is a much-tweeted line from a comment by Niklas Bjørnerstedt:

A good team can learn a new domain much faster than a bad one can learn good practices.

I can't help thinking about the change we would like to create in our students through our software engineering course. Skills and good practices matter. We cannot overemphasize the importance of proficiency, driven by curiosity and a desire to get better.

Then I ran across Jason Fried's The Next Generation Bends Over, a salty and angry lament about the sale of Mint to Intuit. My favorite line, with one symbolic editorial substitution:

Is that the best the next generation can do? Become part of the old generation? How about kicking the $%^& out of the old guys? What ever happened to that?

I experimented with Mint and liked it, though I never convinced myself to go all the way it. I have tried Quicken, too. It seemed at the same time too little and too much for me, so I've been rolling my own. But I love the idea of Mint and hope to see the idea survive. As the industry leader, Intuit has the leverage to accelerate the change in how people manage their finances, compared to the smaller upstart it purchased.

For those of us who use these products and services, the nature of the risk has just changed. The risk with the small guy is that it might fold up before it spreads the change widely enough to take root. The risk with the big power is that it doesn't really get it and wastes an opportunity to create change (and wealth). I suspect that Intuit gets it and so hold out hope.

Still... I love the feistiness that Fried shows. People with big ideas and need not settle. I've been trying to encourage the young people with whom I work, students and recent alumni, to shoot for the moon, whether in business or in grad school.

This story meshed nicely with Paul Graham's Post-Medium Publishing, in which Graham joins in the discussion of what it will be like for creators no longer constrained by the printed page and the firms that have controlled publication in the past. The money line was:

... the really interesting question is not what will happen to existing forms, but what new forms will appear.

Change will happen. It is natural that we all want to think about our esteemed institutions and what the change means for them. But the real excitement lies in what will grow up to replace them. That's where the wealth lies, too. That's true for every discipline that traffics in knowledge and ideas, including our universities.

Finally, Mark Guzdial ruminates on what changes CS education. He concludes:

My first pass analysis suggests that, to make change in CS, invent a language or tool at a well-known institution. Textbooks or curricula rarely make change, and it's really hard to get attention when you're not at a "name" institution.

I think I'll have more to say about this article later, but I certainly know what Mark must be feeling. In addition to his analysis of tools and textbooks and pedagogies, he has his own experience creating a new way to teach computing to non-majors and major alike. He and his team have developed a promising idea, built the infrastructure to support it, and run experiments to show how well it works. Yet... The CS ed world looks much like it always has, as people keep doing what they've always been doing, for as many reasons as you can imagine. And inertia works against even those with the advantages Mark enumerates. Education is a remarkably conservative place, even our universities.

A few years ago I blogged when my university colleague Roy Behrens won a faculty excellence award in his home College of Humanities and Fine Arts. That entry, Teaching as Subversive Inactivity, taught me a lot about teaching, though I don't yet practice it very well. Later, I blogged about A Day with Camouflage Scholars, when I had the opportunity to talk about how a technique of computer science, steganography, related to the idea of camouflage as practiced in art and the military. Behrens is an internationally recognized expert on camouflage who organized an amazing one-day international conference on the subject here at my humble institution. To connect with these scholars, even for a day, was a great thrill. Finally, I blogged about Feats of Association when Behrens gave a mesmerizing talk illustrating "that the human mind is a connection-making machine, an almost unwilling creator of ideas that grow out of the stimuli it encounters."

As you can probably tell, I am a big fan of Behrens and his work. Today, I had a new chance to hear him speak, as he gave a talk associated with his winning another award, this time the university's Distinguished Scholar Award. After hearing this talk, no one could doubt that he is a worthy recipient, whose omnivorous and overarching interest in camouflage reflects a style of learning and investigation that we could all emulate. Today's talk was titled "Unearthing Art and Camouflage" and subtitled my research on the fence between art and science. It is a fence that more of us should try to work on.

The talk wove together threads from Roy's study of the history and practice of camouflage with bits of his own autobiography. It's a style I enjoyed in Kurt Vonnegut's Palm Sunday and have appreciated at least since my freshman year in college, when in an honors colloquium at Ball State University I was exposed to the idea of history from the point of view of the individual. As someone who likes connections, I'm usually interested in how accomplished people come to do what they do and how they make the connections that end up shaping or even defining their work.

Behrens was in the first generation of his family to attend college. He came from a small Iowa town to study here at UNI, where he first did research in the basement of the same Rod Library where I get my millions. He held his first faculty position here, despite not having a Ph.D. or the terminal degree of discipline, an M.F.A. After leaving UNI, he earned an M.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design. But with a little lucky timing and a publication record that merited consideration, he found his way into academia.

From where did his interest in camouflage come? He was never interested in military, though he served as a sergeant in the Vietnam-era Marine Corps. His interest lay in art, but he didn't enjoy the sort of art in which subjective tastes and fashion drove practice and criticism. Instead, he was interested in what was "objective, universal, and enduring" and as such was drawn to design and architecture. He and I share an interest in the latter; I began mu undergraduate study as an architecture major. A college professor offered him a chance to do undergraduate research, and his result was a paper titled "Perception in the Visual Arts", in which he first examined the relationship between the art we make and the science that studies how we perceive it. This paper was later published in major art education journal.

That project marked his first foray into perceptual psychology. Behrens mentioned a particular book that made an impression on him, Aspects of Form, edited by Lancelot Law Whyte. It contained essays on the "primacy of pattern" by scholars in both the arts and the sciences. Readers of this blog know of my deep interest in patterns, especially in software but in all domains. (They also know that I'm a library junkie and won't be surprised to know that I've already borrowed a copy of Whyte's book.)

Behrens noted that it was a short step from "How do people see?" to "How are people prevented from seeing?" Thus began what has been forty years of research on camouflage. He studies not only the artistic side of camouflage but also its history and the science that seeks to understand it. I was surprised to find that as a RISD graduate student he already intended to write a book on the topic. At the time, he contacted Rudolf Arnheim, who was then a perceptual psychologist in New York, with a breathless request for information and guidance. Nothing came of that request, I think, but in 1990 or so Behrens began a fulfilling correspondence with Arnheim that lasted until his death in 2007. After Arnheim passed away, Behrens asked his family to send all of his photos so that Behrens could make copies, digitize them, and then return the originals to the family. They agreed, and the result is a complete digital archive of photographs from Arnheim's long professional life. This reminded me of Grady Booch's interest in preservation, both of the works of Dijkstra and of the great software architectures of past and present.

While he was at RISD, Behrens did not know that the school library had 455 original "dazzle" camouflage designs in its collection and so missed out on the opportunity to study them. His ignorance of these works was not a matter of poor scholarship, though; the library didn't realize their significance and so had them uncataloged on a shelf somewhere. In 2007, his graduate alma mater contacted him with news of the items, and he has now begun to study them, forty years later.

As grad student, Behrens became in interested in the analogical link between (perceptual) figure-ground diagrams and (conceptual) Venn diagrams. He mentioned another book that helped him make this connection, Community and Privacy, by Serge Chermayeff and Christopher Alexander, whose diagrams of cities and relationships were Venn diagrams. This story brings to light yet another incidental connection between Behrens's work and mine. Alexander is, of course, the intellectual forebear of the software patterns movement, through his later books Notes On The Synthesis Of Form, The Timeless Way Of Building, A Pattern Language, and The Oregon Experiment.

UNI hired Behrens in 1972 into a temporary position that became permanent. He earned tenure and, fearing the lack of adventure that can come from settling down to soon, immediately left for the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He worked there ten years and earned his tenure anew. It was at UW-M where he finally wrote the book he had begun planning in grad school. Looking back now, he is embarrassed by it and encouraged us not to read it!

At this point in the talk, Behrens told us a little about his area of scholarship. He opened with a meta-note about research in the era of the world wide web and Google. There are many classic papers and papers that scholars should know about. Most of them are not yet on-line, but one can at least find annotated bibliographies and other references to them. He pointed us to one of his own works, Art and Camouflage: An Annotated Bibliography, as an example of what is now available to all on the web.

Awareness of a paper is crucial, because it turns out that often we can find it in print -- even in the periodical archives of our own libraries! These papers are treasures unexplored, waiting to be rediscovered by today's students and researchers.

Camouflage consists of two primary types. The first is high similarity, as typified by figure-ground blending in the arts and mimicry in nature. This is the best known type of camouflage and the type most commonly seen in popular culture.

The second is high difference, or what is often called figure disruption. This sort of camouflage was one of the important lessons of World War I. We can't make a ship invisible, because the background against which it is viewed changes constantly. A British artist named Norman Wilkinson had the insight to reframe the question: We are not trying to hide a ship; we are trying to prevent the ship from being hit by a torpedo!

(Redefining one problem in terms of another is a standard technique in computer science. I remember when I first encountered it as such, in a graduate course on computational theory. All I had to do was find a mapping from a problem to, say, 3-SAT, and -- voilá! -- I knew a lot about it. What a powerful idea.)

This insight gave birth to dazzle camouflage, in which the goal came to be break an image into incoherent or imperceptible parts. To protect a ship, the disruption need not be permanent; it needed only to slow the attackers sufficiently that they were unable to target it, predict its course, and launch a relatively slow torpedo at it with any success.

Behrens offered that there is a third kind of camouflage, coincident disruption, that is different enough to warrant its own category. Coincident disruption mixes the other two types, both blending into the background and disrupting the viewer's perception. He suggested that this may well be the most common form of camouflage found in nature using the Gabon viper, pictured here, as one of his examples of natural coincident disruption.

Most of Behrens' work is on modern camouflage, in the 20th century, but study in the area goes back farther. In particular, camouflage was discussed in connection to Darwin's idea of natural selection. Artist Abbott Thayer was a preeminent voice on camouflage in the 19th century who thought and wrote on both blending and disruption as forms in nature. Thayer also recommended that the military use both forms of camouflage in combat, a notion that generated great controversy.

In World War I, the French ultimately employed 3,000 artists as "camoufleurs". The British and Americans followed suit on a smaller scale. Behrens gave a detailed history of military camouflage, most of which was driven by artists and assisted by a smaller number of scientists. He finds World War II's contributions less interesting but is excited by recent work by biologists, especially in the UK, who have demonstrated renewed interest in natural camouflage. They are using empirical methods and computer modeling as ways to examine and evaluate Thayer's ideas from over a hundred years ago. Computational modeling in the arts and sciences -- who knew?

Toward the end of his talk, Behrens told several stories from the "academic twilight zone", where unexpected connections fall into the scholar's lap. He called these the "unsung delights of researching". These are stories best told first hand, but they involved a spooky occurrence of Shelbyville, Tennessee, on a pencil he bought for a quarter from a vending machine, having the niece and nephew of Abbott Thayer in attendance at a talk he gave in 1987, and buying a farm in Dysart, Iowa, in 1992 only then to learn that Everett Warner, whom he had studied, was born in Vinton, Iowa -- 14 miles away. In the course of studying a topic for forty years, the strangest of coincidences will occur. We see these patterns whether we like to or not.

Behrens's closing remarks included one note that highlights the changes in the world of academic scholarship that have occurred since he embarked on his study of camouflage forty years ago. He admitted that he is a big fan of Wikipedia and has been an active contributor on pages dealing with the people and topics of camouflage. Social media and web sites have fundamentally changed how we build and share knowledge, and increasingly they are being used to change how we do research itself -- consider the Open Science and Polymath projects.

Today's talk was, indeed, the highlight of my week. Not only did I learn more about Behrens and his work, but I also ended up with a couple of books to read (the aforementioned Whyte book and Kimon Nicolaïdes's The Natural Way to Draw), as well as a couple of ideas about what it would mean for software patterns to hide something. A good way to spend an hour.

An Addition to My News Aggregator

Thanks to John Cook, I came across the blog of Dan Meyers, a high school math teacher. Cook pointed to an entry with a video of Meyer speaking pecha kucha-style at OSCON. One of the important messages for teachers conveyed in this five minutes is Be less helpful. Learning happens more often when people think and do than when they follow orders in a well-defined script.

While browsing his archive I came across this personal revelation about the value of the time he was spending on his class outside of the business day:

I realize now that the return on that investment of thirty minutes of my personal time isn't the promise of more personal time later. ... Rather it's the promise of easier and more satisfying work time now.

Time saved later is a bonus. If you depend on that return, you will often be disappointed, and that feeds the emotional grind that is teaching. Kinda like running in the middle. I think it also applies more than we first realize to reuse and development speed in software.

Learning and Doing

One of the underlying themes in Meyers's writing seems to be the same idea in this line from Gerd Binnig, which I found at Physics Quote of Day:

Doing physics is much more enjoyable than just learning it. Maybe 'doing it' is the right way of learning ....

Programming can be a lot more fun than learning to program, at least the way we often try to teach it. I'm glad that so many people are working on ways to teach it better. In one sense, the path to better seems clear.

Knowing and Doing

One of the reasons I named by blog "Knowing and Doing" was that I wanted to explore the connection between learning, knowing, and doing. Having committed to that name so many years ago, I decided to stake its claim at Posterous, which I learned about via Jake Good. Given some technical issues with using NanoBlogger, at least an old version of it, I've again been giving some thought to upgrading or changing platforms. Like Jake, I'm always tempted to roll my own, but...

I don't know if I'll do much or anything more with Knowing and Doing at Posterous, but it's there if I decide that it looks promising.

A Poignant Convergence

Finally, a little levity laced with truth. Several people have written to say they liked the name of my recent entry, Sometimes, Students Have an Itch to Scratch. On a whim, I typed it into Translation Party, which alternately translates a phrase from English into Japanese and back until it reaches equilibrium. In only six steps, my catchphrase settles onto:

Sometimes I fear for the students.

Knowing how few students will try to scratch their own itches with their new-found power as a programmer, and how few of them will be given a chance to do so in their courses on the way to learning something valuable, I chuckled. Then I took a few moments to mourn.

An excerpt from an interview at Gaping Void:

Some days, the work is tedious, labour-intensive and as repetitive as a production line in a factory. ... The key is having a good infrastructure. ...

But none of it works without discipline. Early on in my career, I was told that success demanded one thing above all others: turning up. Turning up every bloody day, regardless of everything.

This was said by artist Hazel Dooney, but it could just as well been said by a programmer -- or a university professor. One thing I love about the agile software world is its willingness to build new kinds of tools to support the work of programmers. Isn't it ironic? Valuing people over tools makes having the right tools even more important.

I have been reading David Ogilvy's Confessions of an Advertising Man. I have found it to be quite enjoyable. It is a slim volume, written charmingly in a style we don't see much anymore. It is about not only advertising but also leading a team, creating and guiding an organization, and running a business. There are elements of all these is my job as department head, and even as a faculty member. Many of Ogilvy's essons won't surprise you; he recommends the old-fashioned virtues. Hard work. Quality. Fairness. Honesty. Integrity. High standards. Candor.

Ogilvy describes how to build and run a great agency, but at heart he is a great believer in the individual, especially when it comes to creative acts:

Some agencies pander to the craze for for doing everything in committee. They boast about "teamwork" and decry the role of the individual. But no team can write an advertisement, and I doubt whether there is a single agency of any consequence which is not the lengthened shadow of one man.

I sometimes wonder whether greatness can be achieved by a group of competent or even above-average individuals, or if an outstanding individual is an essential ingredient. In an advertising agency, there are the somewhat distinct acts of creating campaigns and running the agency. Perhaps the latter is more amenable to being led by a team. But even when it comes to great works, I am aware that teams have produced excellent software. How much of that success can be attributed to the vision and leadership of one individual on the team, I don't know.

As I mentioned at the top of a recent entry, a university task force I chaired submitted its final report at the beginning of July. After working so long with this group, I am feeling a little seller's remorse. Did we do a good enough job? If acted upon, will our recommendations effect valuable change? Can they be acted upon effectively at a time of budget uncertainties? The report we wrote does not advocate revolutionary change, at least not on the surface. It is more about creating structures and practices that will support building trust and communication. In a community that has drifted in recent years and not always had visionary leadership, these are prerequisites to revolutionary changes. Still, I am left wondering what we might have done more or differently.

The report is most definitely the product of a committee. I suspect that several of the individuals in the group might well have been able to produce something as good or better by working solo, certainly something with sharper edges and sharper potential -- at higher risk. Others on the group could not have done so, but that was not the nature of their roles. In the end, the committee rounded off the sharp edges, searched for and found common ground. The result is not a least common denominator, but it is no longer revolutionary. If that sort of result is what you need, a committee is not your best agent.

Part of my own remorse comes back to Ogilvy's claim. Could I have led the group better? Could I have provided a higher vision and led the group to produce a more remarkable set of recommendations? Did I cast a long enough shadow?

~~~~

The shadows of summer are lengthening. One of the reasons that I have always liked living in the American Midwest is the changing of the seasons. Here we have not four seasons but eight, really, as the blending of summer to autumn, or winter to spring, each has its own character. Academia, too, has its seasons, and they are part of what attracted me to professional life at a university. From the outside looking in, working in industry looked like it could become monotonous. But the university offers two semesters and a summer, each with a brand new start, a natural life, and a glorious end. Whatever monotony we experience happens at a much larger time scale, as these seasons come and go over the years.

Like the weather, academia has more than the obvious seasons we name. We have the break between semesters over Christmas and New Year's Day, a short period of change. When school ends in May, it is like the end of the year, and we have a period of changing over to a summer of activity that is for many of us much different than the academic year. And finally, we have the transition between summer and the new academic year. For me, that season begins about now, on the first day of August, as thoughts turn more and more to the upcoming year, the preparation of classes, and the return of students. This is a change that injects a lot of energy into our world and saves us from any monotony we might begin to feel.

So, as the long shadows of summer begin to fall, we prepare for the light of a new year. What sort of shadow will I cast?

Seth Godin says:

People will not pay for by-the-book rewrites of news that belongs to all of us. People will not pay for yesterday's news, driven to our house, delivered a day late, static, without connection or comments or relevance. Why should we?

Universities may not be subject to the same threats as newspapers, due in some measure to

• their ability to aggregate intellectual capital and research capacity,
• their privileged status in so many disciplines as the granters of required credentials, and
• frankly, the lack of maturity, initiative, and discipline of their primary clientele.

But Godin's quote ought to cause a few university professors considerable uneasiness. In the many years since I began attending college as an undergrad, I have seen courses at every level and at every stop that fall under the terms of this rebuke.

After writing that two UNI CS grads had recently defended their doctoral dissertations, I heard about the possibility of a third. Turns out it was more than a possibility... Last Friday, Chris Johnson defended and has since submitted the final version of his dissertation to the University of Tennessee. His work is in the area of scientific visualization, with a focus on computation-intensive simulations. For the last few years, Chris has been working out of Ames, Iowa, and we may be lucky enough to have him remain close by.

The summer bonanza grows. Congratulations, Chris!

What a summer for UNI CS alumni in academia! In the last few weeks, Andrew Drenner and Ryan Dixon both defended their Ph.D. dissertations, at the University of Minnesota and UC-Santa Barbara, respectively. Currently Andrew is currently working with a robotics start-up spun off from his research lab, and Ryan is enjoying a short break before starting full-time at Apple next month.

I had the great fortune to work with Andrew and Ryan throughout their undergraduate years, in several courses and projects each. Some students are different from the rest, and these guys distinguished themselves immediately not only by their creativity and diligence but also by their tremendous curiosity. When a person with deep curiosity also has the desire to work hard to find answers, stand back. It is neat to see them both expanding what we know about topics they were working on as undergrads. Indeed, Ryan's project at Apple is very much in the spirit of his undergrad research project, which I was honored to supervise.

Congratulations, gentlemen! Many of your friends and family may think that this means you are no longer students. But you are really joining a new fraternity of students. We are honored to have you among us.

Sketchbooks are not about being a good artist,
they're about being a good thinker.
-- Jason Santa Maria

Five years ago today, I started this blog as a sort of sketchbook for words and ideas. I didn't know just what to expect, so I'm not surprised that it hasn't turned out as I might have guessed. Thinking out loud and writing things down can be like that. Trying to explain to myself and anyone who would what was happening as I lived life as a computer scientist and teacher have been a lot of fun.

In the beginning, I was preparing to teach a course on agile software development and planning to run my second marathon. These topics grew together in my mind, almost symbiotically, and the result was a lot of connections. The connections were made firmer by writing about them. They also gave me my first steady readership, as occasionally someone would share a link with a friend.

Things have changed since 2004. Blogging was an established practice in a certain core demographic but just ready to break out among the masses. Now, many of the bloggers whose worked I cherished reading back then don't write as much as they used to. Newer tools such as Twitter give people a way to share links and aphorisms, and many people seem to live in the Twittersphere now. Fortunately, a lot of people still take the time to share their ideas in longer form.

Even though I go through stretches where I don't write much, my blog has become an almost essential element of how I go about life now. Yesterday's entry is a great example of me writing to synthesize experience in a way I might not otherwise. I had a few thoughts running around my head. They were mostly unrelated but somehow... they wanted to be connected. So I started writing, and ended up somewhere I may not have taken the time to go if I hadn't had to write complete sentences and say things in a way my friends would understand. That is good for me. For you readers? I hope so. A few of you keep coming back.

Five years down the road, I am no longer surprised by how computer science, writing, and running flow together. First, they are all a part of who I am right now, and our minds love to make connections. But then there is something common to all activities that challenge us. With the right spirit, we find that they drive us to seek excellence, and the pursuit of excellence -- whether we are Roger Federer, reaching the highest of heights, or Lance Armstrong, striving to reach those heights yet again, or just a simple CS professor trying to reach his own local max -- is a singular experience.

Last week, I ran across a quote from Natalie Goldberg on Scott Smith's blog. I first mentioned Goldberg during my first month as a blogger. This quote ties running to writing to habit:

If you run regularly, you train your mind to cut through or ignore your resistance. You just do it. And in the middle of the run, you love it. When you come to the end, you never want to stop. And you stop, hungry for the next time. That's how writing is, too.

The more I blog, the more I want to write. And, in the face of some troubles over the last year, I wake up hungry to run.

A few years ago, I read a passage from Brian Marick that I tucked away for July 9, 2009:

I've often said that I dread the day when I look back on the me of five years ago without finding his naivete and misconceptions faintly ridiculous. When that day comes, I'll know I've become an impediment to progress.

Just last month, Brian quick-blogged on the same theme: continuing to grow enough that the me of five years ago looks naive, or stepping away from the stage. After five years blogging, my feeling on this is mixed. I look back and see some naivete, yes, but I often see some great stuff. "I thought that?" Sometimes I'm disappointed that a great idea from back then hasn't become more ingrained in my practices of today, but then I remember that it's a lot easier to think an idea than to live it. I do see progress, though. I also see new themes emerging in my thoughts and writing, which is a different sort of progress altogether.

I do take seriously that you are reading this and that you may even make an effort to come back to read more later. I am privileged to have had so many interactions with readers over these five years. Even when you don't send comments and links, I know you are there, spending a little of your precious time here.

So I think I'll stay on this stage a while longer. I am just a guy trying to evolve, and writing helps me along the way.

As I mentioned last time, this week I am getting back to some regular work after mostly wrapping up a big project, including cleaning off my desk. It is cluttered with a lot of loose paper that the Digital Age had promised to eliminate. Some is my own fault, paper copies of notes and agendas I should probably find a way to not to print. Old habits dies hard.

But I also have a lot paper sent to me as department head. Print-outs; old-style print-outs from a mainframe. The only thing missing from a 1980s flashback is the green bar paper.

Some of these print-outs are actually quite interesting. One set is of grade distribution reports produced by the registrar's office, which show how many students earned As, Bs, and so on in each course we offered this spring and for each instructor who taught a course in our department. This sort of data can be used to understand enrollment figures and maybe even performance in later courses. Some upper administrators have suggested using this data in anonymous form as a subtle form of peer pressure, so that profs who are outliers within a course might self-correct their own distributions. I'm ready to think about going there yet, but the raw data seems useful, and interesting in its own right.

I might want to do more with the data. This is the first time I recall receiving this, but in the fall it would be interesting to cross-reference the grade distributions by course and instructor. Do the students who start intro CS in the fall tend to earn different grades than those who start in the spring? Are there trends we can see over falls, springs, or whole years? My colleagues and I have sometimes wondered aloud about such things, but having a concrete example of the data in hand has opened new possibilities in my mind. (A typical user am I...)

As a programmer, I have the ability to do such analyses with relatively straightforward scripts, but I can't. The data is closed. I don't receive actual data from the registrar's office; I receive a print-out of one view of the data, determined by people in that office. Sadly, this data is mostly closed even to them, because they are working with an ancient mainframe database system for which there is no support and a diminishing amount of corporate memory here on campus. The university is in the process of implementing a new student information system, which should help solve some of these problems. I don't imagine that people across campus will have much access to this data, though. That's not the usual M.O. for universities.

Course enrollment and grade data aren't the only ones we could benefit from opening up a bit. As a part of the big project I just wrapped up, the task force I was on collected a massive amount of data about expenditures on campus. This data is accessible to many administrators on campus, but only through a web interface that constrains interaction pretty tightly. Now that we have collected the data, processed almost all of it by hand (the roughness of the data made automated processing an unattractive alternative), and tabulated it for analysis, we are starting to receive requests for our spreadsheets from others on campus. These folks all have access to the data, just not in the cleaned-up, organized format into which we massaged it. I expressed frustration with our financial system in a mini-rant a few years ago, and other users feel similar limitations.

For me, having enrollment and grade data would be so cool. We could convert data into information that we could then us to inform scheduling, teaching assignments, and the like. Universities are inherently an information-based institutions, but we don't always put our own understanding of the world into practice very well. Constrained resources and intellectual inertia slow us down or stop us all together.

Hence my wistful hope while reading Tim Bray's "Hello-World" for Open Data. Vancouver has a great idea:

• Publish the data in a usable form.
• License it in a way that turns people loose to do whatever they want, but doesn't create unreasonable liability risk for the city.
• See what happens. ...

Would anyone on campus take advantage? Maybe, maybe not. I can imagine some interesting mash-ups using only university data, let alone linking to external data. But this isn't likely to happen. GPA data and instructor data are closely guarded by departments and instructors, and throwing light on it would upset enough people that any benefits would probably be shouted down. But perhaps some subset of the data the university maintains, suitably anonymized, could be opened up. If nothing else, transparency sometimes helps to promote trust.

I should probably do this myself, at the department level, with data related to schedule, budget, and so on. I occasionally share the spreadsheets I build with the faculty, so they can see the information I use to make decisions. This spring, we even discussed opening up the historic formula used in the department to allocate our version of merit pay.

(What a system that is -- so complicated that that I've feared making more than small editorial changes to it in my time as head. I keep hoping to find the time and energy to build something meaningful from scratch, but that never happens. And it turns out that most faculty are happy with what we have now, perhaps for "the devil you know" reasons.)

I doubt even the CS faculty in my department would care to have open data of this form. We are a small crew, and they are busy with the business of teaching and research. It is my job to serve them by taking as much of this thinking out of our way. Then again, who knows for sure until we try? If the cost of sharing can be made low enough, I'll have no reason not to share. But whether anyone uses the data that might not even be the real point. Habits change when we change them, when we take the time to create new ones to replace the old ones. This would a good habit for me to have.

Where did the title of my previous entry come from? Two more quick hits tell a story.

Factoid of the Day

On a walk the other night, my daughter asked why we called variables x. She is reviewing some math this summer in preparation to study algebra this fall. All I could say was, "I don't know."

Before I had a chance to look into the reason, one explanation fell into my lap. I was reading an article called The Shakespeare of Iran, which I ran across in a tweet somewhere. And there was an answer: the great Omar Khayyam.

Omar was the first Persian mathematician to call the unknown factor of an equation (i.e., the x) shiy (meaning thing or something in Arabic). This word was transliterated to Spanish during the Middle Ages as xay, and, from there, it became popular among European mathematicians to call the unknown factor either xay, or more usually by its abbreviated form, x, which is the reason that unknown factors are usually represented by an x.

However, I can't confirm that Khayyam was first. Both Wikipedia and another source also report the Arabic language connection, and the latter mentions Khayyam, but not specifically as the source. That author also notes that "xenos" is the Greek word for "unknown" and so could be the root. However, I also haven't found a reference for this use of x that predates Khayyam, either. So may be.

My daughter and I ended up with as much of a history lesson as a mathematical terminology lesson. I like that.

Quote of the Day

Yesterday afternoon, the same daughter was listening in on a conversation between me and a colleague about doing math and science, teaching math and science, and how poorly we do it. After we mentioned K-12 education and how students learn to think of science and math as "hard" and "for the brains", she joined the conversation with:

Don't ask teachers, 'Why?' They don't know, and they act like it's not important.

I was floored.

She is right, of course. Even our elementary school children notice this phenomenon, drawing on their own experiences with teachers who diminish or dismiss the very questions we want our children to ask. Why? is the question that makes science and math what they are.

Maybe the teacher knows the answer and doesn't want to take the time to answer it. Maybe she knows the answer but doesn't know how to answer it in a way that a 4th- or 6th- or 8th-grader can understand. Maybe he really doesn't know the answer -- a condition I fear happens all too often. No matter; the damage is done when the the teacher doesn't answer, and the child figures the teacher doesn't know. Science and math are so hard that the teacher doesn't get it either! Better move on to something else. Sigh.

This problem doesn't occur only in elementary school or high school. How often do college professors send the same signal? And how often do college professors not know why?

Sometimes, truth hits me in the face when I least expect it. My daughters keep on teaching me.

Quick hits, for different values of x, of course, but also different values of "the day" I encountered them. I'm slow, and busier than I'd like.

Tweet of the Day

Courtesy of Glenn Vanderburg:

Poor programmers will move heaven and earth to do the wrong thing. Weak tools can't limit the damage they'll do.

Vanderburg is likely talking about professional programmers. I have experienced this truth when working with students. At first, it surprised me when students learning OOP would contort their code into the strangest configurations not to use the OO techniques they were learning. Why use a class? A fifty- or hundred-line method will do nicely.

Then, students learning functional programming would seek out arcane language features and workarounds found on the Internet to avoid trying out the functional patterns they had used in class. What could have been ten lines of transparent Scheme code in two mutually recursive functions became fifteen or more of the most painfully tortured C code wrapped in a thin veil of Scheme.

I've seen this phenomenon in other contexts, too, like when students take an elective course called Agile Software Development and go out of their way to do "the wrong thing". Why bother with those unit tests? We don't really need to try pair programming, so we? Refactor -- what's that?

This feature of programmers and learners has made me think harder trying to help them see the value in just trying the techniques they are supposed to learn. I don't succeed as often as I'd like.

Comic of the Day

Hammock dwellers, unite!

If only. If only. When does summer break start?

I like to solve the Celebrity Cipher in my daily paper. Each puzzle is a mixed alphabet substitution cipher on a quote by someone -- a "celebrity", loosely considered -- followed by the speaker's name, sometimes prefixed with a title or short description. Lately I've been challenging myself to solve the puzzle in my head, without writing any letters down, even once I'm sure of them. Crazy, I know, but this makes the easier puzzles more challenging now that I have gotten pretty good at solving them with pen in hand.

(Spoiler alert... If you like to do this puzzle, too, and have not yet solved the June 22 cipher, turn away now. I am about to give the the answer away!)

Yesterday I was working on a puzzle, and this was the speaker phrase:

IWHNN TOXFZRXNYHO NXKJHSSA YXOYXEBUHO

I had looked at the quote itself for a couple of minutes and so was operating on an initial hypothesis that YWH was the word the. I stared at the speaker for a while... IWHNN would be IheNN. Double letters to end the third word, which is probably the first name. N could be s, or maybe l. s... That would be the first letter of the first name.

And then I saw it, in whole cloth:

Chess grandmaster Savielly Tartakower

Please don't think less of me. I'm not a freak. Really.

How very strange. I have no special mental powers. I do have some experience solving these puzzles, of course, but this phrase is unusual both in the prefix phrase and in the obscurity of the speaker. Yes, I once played a lot of chess and did know of Tartakower, a French-Polish player of the early 20th century. But how did I see this answer?

The human brain amazes me almost every day with its ability to find, recognize, and impose patterns on the world. Practice and exposure to lots and lots of data is one of the ways it learns these patterns. That is part of how I am able to solve these ciphers most days -- experience makes patterns appear to me, unbidden by conscious thought. There may be other paths to mastery, but I know of no other reliable substitute for practice.

What about the rest of the puzzle? From the letter pairs in the speaker phrase, I was able to reconstruct the quote itself with little effort:

Victory goes to the player who makes the next-to-last mistake.

Ah, an old familiar line. If we follow this quote to its logical conclusion, it offers good advice for much of life. You never know which mistake will be the next-to-last, or the last. Keep playing to win. If you learn from your mistakes, you'll start to make fewer, which increases the probability that your opponent will make the last mistake of the game.

Even when in non-adversarial situations, or situations in which there is no obvious single adversary, this is a good mindset to have. People who embrace failure persist. They get better, but perhaps more importantly they simply survive. You have to be in the game when your opportunity comes -- or when your opponent makes the ultimate mistake.

Like so many great lines, Tartakower's is not 100% accurate in all cases. As an accomplished chessplayer, he certainly knew that the best players can lose without ever making an obvious mistake. Some of my favorite games of all time are analyzed in My Sixty Memorable Games, by Bobby Fischer himself. It includes games in which the conquered player never made the move that lost. Instead, the loser accreted small disadvantages, or drifted off theme, and suddenly the position was unfavorable. But looking back, Fischer could find no obvious improvement. Growing up, this fascinated me -- the loser had to make a mistake, right? The winner had make a killer move... Perhaps not.

Even still, the spirit of Tartakower's advice holds. Play in this moment. You never know which mistake will be the next-to-last, or the last. Keep playing.

At this time of year, when I look back over the past twelve months of performing tasks that do not come naturally to me, and looking ahead to next year's vision and duties, this advice gives me comfort.

The first: Our local paper carries a parenting advice column by John Rosemond, an advocate of traditional parenting. In Wednesday's column, a parent asked how to handle a child who refuses to eat his dinner. Rosemond responded that the parents should calmly, firmly, and persistently expect the child to eat the meal -- even if it meant that the child went hungry that night by refusing.

[Little Johnny] will survive this ordeal -- it may take several weeks from start to finish -- with significantly lower self-esteem and a significantly more liberal palette, meaning that he will be a much happier child.

If you know Rosemond, you'll recognize this advice.

I couldn't help thinking about what happens when we adults learn a new programming style (object-oriented or functional programming), a new programming technique (test-driven development, pair programming), or even a new tool that changes our work flow (say, SVN or JUnit). Calm, firm, persistent self-discipline or coaching are often the path to success. In many ways, Rosemond's advice works more easily with 3- or 5-year-olds than college students or adults, because the adults have the option of leaving the room. Then again, the coach or teacher has less motivation to ensure the change sticks -- that's up to the learner.

I also couldn't help thinking how often college students and adults behave like 3- and 5-year-olds.

The second: Our paper also carries a medical advice column by a Dr. Gott, an older doctor who harkens back to an older day of doctor-patient relations. (There is a pattern here.) In Wednesday's column, the good doctor said about a particular diagnosis:

There is no laboratory or X-ray test to confirm or rule out the condition.

My first thought was, well, then how do we know it exists at all? This a natural reaction for a scientist -- or pragmatist -- to have. I think this means that we don't currently have a laboratory or X-ray test for the presence or absence of this condition. Or there may be another kind of test that will tell us whether the condition exists, such as a stress tests or an MRIs.

Without any test, how can we know that something is? We may find out after it kills the host -- but then we would need a post-mortem test. While the patient lives, there could be a treatment regimen that works reliably in face of the symptoms. This could provide the evidence we need to say that a particular something was present. But if the treatment fails, can we rule out the condition? Not usually, because there are other reasons that the treatment fails.

We face a similar situation in software with bugs. When we can't reproduce a bug, at least not reliably, we have a hard time fixing it. Whether we know the problem exists depends on which side of the software we live... If I am the user who encounters the problem, I know it exists. If I'm the developer, then maybe I don't. It's easy for me as developer to assume that there is something wrong with the user, not my lovingly handcrafted code. When the program involves threading or a complex web of interactions among several systems, we are more inclined to recognize that a problem exists -- but which problem? And where? Oh, to have a test... I can only think of two software examples of reliable treatment regimens that may tell us something was wrong: rebooting the machine and reinstalling the program. (Hey to Microsoft.). But those are such heavy-handed treatments that they can't give us much evidence about a specific bug.

There is, of course, the old saying of TDD wags: Code without a test doesn't exist. Scoff at that if you want, but it is a very nice guideline to live by.

To close, here are my favorite new phrases from stuff I've been reading:

• from the Xark article quoted in my previous article: forward into the now


• from the David Allen book quoted in How To Be Invincible: creative discomfort for progress

Expect to see these jewels used in an article sometime soon.

(Warning: This is longer than my usual entry.)

In recent weeks I have found myself reading with a perverse fascination some of the abundant articles about the future of newspapers and journalism. Clay Shirky's Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable has received a deserving number of mentions in most. His essay reminds us, among other things, that revolutions change the rules that define our world. This means that living through a revolution is uncomfortable for most people -- and dangerous to the people most invested in the old order. The ultimate source of the peril is lack of imagination; we are so defined by the rules that we forget they are not universal laws but human constructs.

I'm not usually the sort of person attracted to train wrecks, but that's how I feel about the quandary facing the newspaper industry. Many people in and out of the industry like to blame the internet and web for the problem, but it is more complicated than that. Yes, the explosion of information technology has played a role in creating difficulties for traditional media, but as much as it causes the problems, I think it exposes problems that were already there. Newspapers battle forces from all sides, not the least of which is the decline -- or death? -- of advertising, which may soon be known as a phenomenon most peculiar to the 20th century. The web has helped expose this problem, with metrics that show just how little web ads affect reader behavior. It has also simply given people alternatives to media that were already fading. Newspapers aren't alone.

This afternoon, I read Xark's The Newspaper Suicide Pact and was finally struck by another perverse thought, a fear because it hits closer to my home. What if universities are next? Are we already in a decline that will become apparent only later to those of us who are on the inside?

Indications of the danger are all around. As in the newspaper industry, money is at the root of many problems. The cost of tuition has been rising much faster than inflation for a quarter of a century. At my university, it has more than doubled in the 2000s. Our costs, many self-imposed, rise at the same time that state funding for its universities falls. For many years, students offset the gap by borrowing the difference. This solution is bumping into a new reality now, with the pool of money available for student loans shrinking and the precipitous decline in housing equity for many eroding borrowing ability. Some may see this as a good thing, as our students have seen a rapid growth in indebtedness at graduation, outpacing salaries in even the best-paying fields. Last week, many people around here were agog at a report that my state's university grads incur more student loan debt than any other state's. (We're #1!)

Like newspapers, universities now operate in a world where plentiful information is available on-line. Sometimes it is free, and other times its is much less expensive than the cost of taking a course on the subject. Literate, disciplined people can create a decent education for themselves on-line. Perhaps universities serve primarily the middle and lower tier of students, who haven't the initiative or discipline to do it on their own?

I have no numbers to support these rash thoughts, though journalists and others in the newspaper industry do have ample evidence for fear. University enrollments depend mostly on the demographics of their main audience: population growth, economics, and culture. Students also come for a social purpose. But I think the main driver for many students to matriculate is industry's de facto use of the college degree as the entry credential to the workplace. In times of alternatives and tight money, universities benefit from industry's having outsourced the credentialing function to them.

The university's situation resembles the newspaper's in other ways, too. We offer a similar defense of why the world needs us: in addition to creating knowledge, we sort it, we package it for presentation, and we validate its authenticity and authority. If students start educating themselves using resources freely or cheaply available outside the university, how will we know that they are learning the right stuff? Don't get most academics started on the topic of for-profits like Kaplan University and the University of Phoenix; they are the university's whipping boy. The news industry has one, too: bloggers.

Newspaper publishers talk a lot these days about requiring readers to pay for content. In a certain sense, that is what students do: pay universities for content. Now, though, the web gives everyone access to on-line lectures, open-source lecture notes, the full text of books, technical articles, and ... the list goes on. Why should they pay?

Too many publishers argue that their content is better, more professional, and so stand behind "the reasonable idea that people should have to pay for the professionally produced content they consume". Shirky calls this a "post-rational demand", one that asks readers to behave in a way "intended to restore media companies to the profitability ordained to them by God Almighty" -- despite living in a world where such behaviors are as foreign as living in log cabins and riding horses for transportation. Is the university's self-justification as irrational? Is it becoming more irrational every year?

Some newspapers decide to charge for content as a way to prop up their traditional revenue stream, print subscriptions. Evidence suggest that this not only doesn't work (people inclined to drop their print subscriptions won't be deterred by pay walls) but that it is counter-productive: the loss of on-line visitors causes a decline in web advertising revenue that is much greater than the on-line reader revenue earned. Again, this is pure speculation, but I suspect that if universities try to charge for their on-line content they will see similar results.

The right reason to charge for on-line content is to create a new revenue stream, one that couldn't exist in the realm of print. This is where creative thinking will help to build an economically viable "new media". This is likely the right path for universities, too. My oldest but often most creative-thinking colleague has been suggesting this as a path for my school to consider for a few years. My department is working on one niche offering now: on-line courses aimed at a specific audience that might well take them elsewhere if we don't offer them, and who then have a smoother transition into full university admission later. We have other possibilities in mind, in particular as part of a graduate program that already attracts a large number of people who work full time in other cities.

But then again, there are schools like Harvard, MIT, and Stanford with open course initiatives, placing material on-line for free. How can a mid-sized, non-research public university compete with that content, in that market? How will such schools even maintain their traditional revenue streams if costs continue to rise and high quality on-line material is readily available?

In a middle of a revolution, no one knows the right answers, and there is great value in trying different ideas. Most any school can start with the obvious: lectures on-line, increased use of collaboration tools such as wikis and chats and blogs -- and Twitter and Facebook, and whatever comes next. These tools help us to connect with students, to make knowledge real, to participate in the learning. Some of the obvious paths may be part of the solution. Perhaps all of them are wrong. But as Shirky and others tell us, we need to try all sorts of experiments until we find the right solution. We are not likely to find it by looking at what we have always done. The rules are changing. The reactions of many in the academy tell a sad story. They are dismissive, or simply disinterested. That sounds a lot like the newspapers, too. Maybe people are simply scared and so hole up in the bunker constructed out of comfortable experience.

Like newspapers, some institutions of higher education are positioned to survive a revolution. Small, focused liberal arts colleges and technical universities cater to specific audiences with specific curricula. Of course, the "unique nationals" (schools such as Harvard, MIT, and Stanford) and public research universities with national brands (schools such as Cal-Berkeley and Michigan) sit well. Other research schools do, too, because their mission goes beyond the teaching of undergraduates. Then again, many of those schools are built on an economic model that some academics think is untenable in the long run. (I wrote about that article last month, in another context.)

The schools most in danger are the middle tier of so-called teaching universities and low-grade research schools. How will they compete with the surviving traditional powers or the wealth of information and knowledge available on-line? This is one reason I embrace our president's goal of going from good to great -- focusing our major efforts on a few things that we do really well, perhaps better than anyone, nurturing those areas with resources and attention, and then building our institution's mission and strategy around this powerful core. There is no guarantee that this approach will succeed, but it is perhaps the only path that offers a reasonable chance to schools like ours. We do have one competitive advantage over many of our competitors: enough research and size to offer students a rich learning environment and a wide range of courses of study, but small enough to offer a personal touch otherwise available only at much smaller schools. This is the same major asset that schools like us have always had. When we find ourselves competing in a new arena and under different conditions, this asset must manifest itself in new forms -- but it must remain the core around which we build..

One of the collateral industries built around universities, textbook publishing, has been facing this problem in much the same way as newspapers for a while now. The web created a marketplace with less friction, which has made it harder for them to make the return on investment to which they had grown accustomed. As textbook prices rise, students look for alternatives. Of course, students always have: using old editions, using library copies, sharing. Those are the old strategies -- I used them in school. But today's students have more options. They can buy from overseas dealers. They can make low-cost copies much more readily. Many of my students have begun to bypass the the assigned texts altogether and rely on free sources available on-line. Compassionate faculty look for ways to help students, too. They support old editions. They post lecture notes and course materials on-line. They even write their own textbooks and post them on-line. Here the textbook publishers cross paths with the newspapers. The web reduces entry costs to the point that almost anyone can enter and compete. And publishers shouldn't kid themselves; some of these on-line texts are really good books.

When I think about the case of computer science in particular, I really wonder. I see the wealth of wonderful information available on line. Free textbooks. Whole courses taught or recorded. Yes, blogs. Open-source software communities. User communities built around specific technologies. Academics and practitioners writing marvelous material and giving it away. I wonder, as many do about journalists, whether academics will be able to continue in this way if the university structure on which they build their careers changes or disappears? What experiments will find the successful models of tomorrow's schools?

Were I graduating from high school today, would I need a university education to prepare for a career in the software industry? Sure, most self-educated students would have gaps in their learning, but don't today's university graduates? And are the gaps in the self-educated's preparation as costly as 4+ years paying tuition and taking out loans? What if I worked the same 12, 14, or 16 hours a day (or more) reading, studying, writing, contributing to an open-source project, interacting on-line? Would I be able to marshall the initiative or discipline necessary to do this?

In my time teaching, I have encountered a few students capable of doing this, if they had wanted or needed to. A couple have gone to school and mostly gotten by that way anyway, working on the side, developing careers or their own start-up companies. Their real focus was on their own education, not on the details of any course we set before them.

Don't get me wrong. I believe in the mission of my school and of universities more generally. I believe that there is value in an on-campus experience, an immersion in a community constructed for the primary purpose of exploring ideas, learning and doing together. When else will students have an opportunity to focus full-time on learning across the spectrum of human knowledge, growing as a person and as a future professional? This is probably the best of what we offer: a learning community, focused on ideas broad and deep. We have research labs, teams competing in a cyberdefense and programming contests. The whole is greater than the sum of parts, both in the major and in liberal education.

But for how many students is this the college experience now, even when they live on campus? For many the focus is not on learning but on drinking, social life, video games... That's long been the case to some extent, but the economic model is changing. Is it cost-effective for today's students, who sometimes find themselves working 30 or more hours a week to pay for tuition and lifestyle, trying to take a full load of classes at the same time? How do we make the great value of a university education attractive in a new world? How do we make it a value?

And how long will universities be uniquely positioned to offer this value? Newspapers used to be uniquely positioned to offer a value no one else could. That has changed, and most in the industry didn't see it coming (or did, and averted their eyes rather than face the brutal facts).

I'd like also to say that expertise distinguishes the university from its on-line competition. That has been true in the past and remains true today, for the most part. But in a discipline like computer science, with a large professional component attracts most of its students, where grads will enter software development or networking... there is an awesome amount of expertise out in the world. More and more of those talented people are now sharing what they know on-line.

There is good news. Some people still believe in the value of a university education. Many students, and especially their parents, still believe. During the summer we do freshman orientation twice a week, with an occasional transfer student orientation thrown into the mix. People come to us eagerly, willing to spend out of their want or to take on massive debts to buy what we sell. Some come for jobs, but most still have at least a little of the idealism of education. When I think about their act in light of all that is going on in the world, I am humbled. We owe them something as valuable as what they surrender. We owe them an experience befitting the ideal. This humbles me, but it also Invigorates and scares me, too.

This article is probably more dark fantasy than reality. Still, I wonder how much of what I believe I really should believe, because it's right, and how much is merely a product of my lack of imagination. I am certain that I'm living in the middle of a revolution. I don't know how well I see or understand it. I am also certain of this: I don't want someone to be writing this speech about universities in a few years with me in its clueless intended audience.

Brian Marick tweeted about his mini-blog post Pay me until you're done, which got me to thinking. The idea is something like this: Many agile consultants work in an agile way, attacking the highest-value issue they can in a given situation. If the value of the issues to work on decreases with time, there will come a point at which the consultant's weekly stipend exceeds the value of the work he is doing. Maybe the client should stop buying services at that point.

My first thought was, "Yes, but." (I am far too prone to that!)

First, the "yes": In the general case of consulting, as opposed to contract work, the consultant's run will end as his marginal effect on the company approaches 0. Marick is being honest about his value. At some point, the value of his marginal contribution will fall below the price he is charging that week. Why not have the client end the arrangement at that point, or at least have the option to? This is a nice twist on our usual thinking.

Now for the "but". As I tweeted back this feels a bit like Zeno's Paradox. Marick the consultant covers not half the distance from start to finish each week, but the most valuable piece of ground remaining. With each week, he covers increasingly less valuable distance. So our consultant, cast in the role of Achilles, concedes the race and says, okay, so stop paying me.

This sounds noble, but remember: Achilles would win the race. We unwind Zeno's Paradox when we realize that the sum of an infinite series can be a finite number -- and that number may be just small enough for Achilles to catch the tortoise. This works only for infinite series that behave in a particular way.

Crazy, I know, but this is how the qualification of the "yes" arose in my mind. Maybe, the consultant helps to create a change in his client that changes the nature of the series of tasks he is working on. New ideas might create new or qualitatively different tasks to do. The change created may change the value of an existing task, or reorder the priorities of the remaining tasks. If the nature of the series changes, it may cause the value of the series to change, too. If so, then the client may well want to keep the consultant around, but doing something different than the original set of issues would have called for.

Another thought: Assume that the conditions that Marick described do hold. Should the compensation model be revised? He seems to be assuming that the consultant charges the same amount for each week of work, with the value of the tasks performed early being greater than that amount and the value of the tasks performed later being less than that amount. If that is true,then early on the consultant is bringing in substantially more value than he costs. If the client pulls the plug as soon as the value proposition turns in its favor, then the consultant ends up receiving less than the original contract called for yet providing more than average value for the time period. If the consultant thinks that is fair, great. What if not? Perhaps the consultant should charge more in the early weeks, when he is providing more value, than in later week? Or maybe the client could pay a fee to "buy out" the rest of the contract? (I'm not a professional consultant, so take that into account when evaluating my ideas about consultant compensation...)

And another thought: Does this apply to what happens when a professor teaches a class? In a way, I think it does. When I introduce a new area to students, it may well be the case that the biggest return on the time we spend (and the biggest bang for the students' tuition dollars) happens in the first weeks. If the course is successful, then most students will become increasingly self-sufficient in the area as the semester goes on. This is more likely the case for upper-division courses than for freshmen. What would it be like for a student to decide to opt out of the course at the point where she feels like she has stopped receiving fair value for the time being spent? Learning isn't the same as a business transaction, but this does have an appealing feel to it.

The university model for courses doesn't support Marick's opt-out well. The best students in a course often reach a point where they are self-sufficient or nearly so, and they are "stuck". The "but" in our teaching model is that we teach an audience larger than one, and the students can be at quite different levels in background and understanding. Only the best students reach a point where opting out would make sense; the rest need more (and a few need a lot more -- more than one semester can offer!).

The good news is that the unevenness imposed by our course model doesn't hurt most of those best students. They are usually the ones who are able to make value out of their time in the class and with the professor regardless of what is happening in the classroom. They not only survive the latency, but thrive by veering off in their own direction, asking good questions and doing their own programming, reading, thinking outside of class. This way of thinking about the learning "transaction" of a course may help to explain another class of students. We all know students who are quite bright but end up struggling through academic courses and programs. Perhaps these students, despite their intelligence and aptitude for the discipline, don't have the skills or aptitude to make value out of the latency between the point they stop receiving net value and the end of the course. This inability creates a problem for them (among them, boredom and low grades). Some instructors are better able to recognize this situation and address it through one-on-one engagement. Some would like to help but are in a context that limits them. It's hard to find time for a lot of one-on-one instruction when you teach three large sections and are trying to do research and are expected to meet all of the other expectations of a university prof.

Sorry for the digression from Marick's thought experiment, which is intriguing in its own setting. But I have learned a lot from applying agile development ideas to my running. I have found places where the new twist helps me and others where the analogy fails. I'm can't shake the urge to do the same on occasion with how we teach.

Everyone is trying to accomplish something big,
not realizing that life is made up of little things.
-- Frank A. Clark

Instead of trying to be the best, simply do your best.

Trying to be the best can turn into an ego trap: "I am better than you." In fact, the goal of being the best is often driven by ego. If it doesn't work out, this goal can become a source of finding fault and tearing oneself down. "I am not good enough." I should probably say "when", rather than "if". When your goal is to be the best, there always seems to be someone out there who does some task better. The result is like a cruel joke: trying to be the best may make you feel like you are never good enough.

In more prosaic sense, trying to be the best can provide a convenient excuse for being mediocre. When you realize that you'll never be as good as a particular someone, it's easy to say, "Well, why bother trying to be the best? I can spend my time doing something else.." This is a big problem when we decide to compare ourselves to the best of the best -- Lebron James, Haile Gebreselassie, or Ward Cunningham. Who among us can measure up to those masters? But it's also a problem when we compare ourselves to that one person in the office who seems to get and do everything right. Another cruel joke: trying to be the best ultimately gives us an excuse not to try to get better.

Doing your best is something that you can do any time or any place. You can succeed, no matter who else is involved. As time goes by, you are likely going to get better, as you develop your instincts. This means that every time you do your best you'll be in a different state, which adds a freshness to every new task you take on. Even more, I think that there is something about doing our best that causes us to want to get better; we are energized by the moment and realize that what we are doing now isn't the best we could do.

I've never met Lebron James or Haile Gebreselassie, but I've had the good fortune to meet and work with Ward Cunningham. He is a very bright guy, but he seems mostly to be a person who cares about other people and who has a strong drive to do interesting work -- and to get better. It's good to see that the folks we consider the best are... human. I've met enough runners, programmers, computer scientists, and chessplayers who are a lot better than I, and most of them are simply trying to do their best. That's how they got to be so good.

Some of you may say this is a distinction without a difference, but I have found that the subtle change in mindset that occurs when I shift my sights from trying to be the best to trying to do my best can have a huge effect on my attitude and my happiness. That is worth a lot. Again, though, there's more. The change in mindset also affects how I approach my work, and ultimately my effectiveness. Perhaps that's the final lesson, not a cruel joke at all: Doing your best is a better path to being better -- and maybe even the best -- than trying to the best.

(This entry is a riff on a passage from David Allen's Ready for Anything, from which I take the entry's title. Allen's approach to getting things done really does sync well with agile approaches to software development.)

I had a few free minutes tonight with no big project at the front of my mind, so I decided to clean up my blog-ideas folder. Maybe one of the ideas would grab my imagination and I would write. But this is what grabbed my attention instead, a line in my main ideas.txt file:

(leftovers from last year's SIGCSE -- do them!?)

You have heard of code smells. This is a blog smell.

I have two entries still in the hopper from SIGCSE 2008 listed in my conference report table of contents: "Rediscovering the Passion and Beauty", on ways to share our passion and awe with others, and "Recreating the Passion and Beauty", because maybe it's just not that much fun any more. Both come from a panel discussion on the afternoon of Day 2, and both still seem worth writing, even after fourteenth months.

The question in the note to myself in the ideas file lets a little reality under the curtain... Will I ever write them? As conference report, they probably don't offer much, and the second entry has been preempted a bit by Eric Roberts giving a similar talk in other venues, and posting his slides on the web. But timeliness of the conference report isn't the only reason I write; the primary reason is to think about the ideas. The writing both creates the thinking and records it for later consideration. In this regard, they still hold my interest. Not all old ideas do.

When I first started this blog, I never realized how much my blogging would exhibit the phenomenon I call the Stack of Ideas. Sometimes an entry is a planned work, but more often I write what needs to be written based on where I am in my work. Hot ideas will push ideas that recently seemed hot onto the back burner. Going to a conference only makes the problem worse. The sessions follow one after another, and each one tends to stir me up so much as to push even the previous session way back in my mind. I have subfolders for hot ideas and merely recent ideas, and I do pull topics from them -- "hot" serving up ideas more reliably than "recent".

This is one risk of having more ideas than time. Of course, ideas are like most everything else: a lot of them are bunk. I suspect that many of my ideas are bunk and that the Stack of Ideas does me and my readers the Darwinian service of pushing the worst down, down, down out of consciousness. When I look back at most of the ideas that haven't made the cut yet, they feel stale. Are they just old, or were they not good enough? It's hard to say. Like other Darwinian processes, this one probably isn't optimal. Occasionally a good idea may lose out only because it wasn't fit for the particular mental environment in which it found itself. But all in all, the process seems to get things mostly right. I just hope the good ideas come back around sometime later. I think the best ones do.

This is one of the reasons that academics can benefit from keeping a blog. A lot of ideas are bunk. Maybe the ones that don't get written shouldn't be written. For the ideas that make the cut, writing this sort of short essay is a great way to think them through, make them come to life in words that anyone can read, and then let them loose into the world. Blog readers are great reviewers, and they help with the good and bad ideas in equal measure. What a wonderful opportunity blogging offers: an anytime, anyplace community of ideas. Most of us had little access to such a community even ten years ago.

I must say this, though. Blogging is of more value to me than just as a technical device. It can also offer an ego boost. There is nothing quite like having someone I met several years ago at SIGCSE or OOPSLA tell me how much they enjoy reading my blog. Or to have someone I've never met come up to me and say that they stumbled across my blog and find it useful. Or to receive e-mail saying, "I am a regular reader and thought you might enjoy this..." What a joy!

Will those old SIGCSE 2008 entries ever see the light of day? I think so, but the Stack of Ideas will have its say.

There is a scene in the television show "Two and a Half Men" in which neurotic Alan has a major meltdown in a bookstore. He decided to use some newly-found free time to better himself through reading the classics. He grabs some books from one shelf, say, Greek drama, and then from another, and another, picking up speed as he realizes that there aren't enough hours in a day or a lifetime to read all that is available. This pushes him over the edge, he makes a huge scene, and his brother is embarrassed in front of the whole store.

I know that feeling this time of year. When I check books out from the university library, the due date is always next May, at the end of finals week for spring semester. Over the year, I run into books I'd like to read, new and old, in every conceivable place: e-mail, blogs, tweets, newspapers, ... With no particular constraint other than a finite amount of shelf space -- and floor space, and space at home -- I check it out.

Now is the season of returning. I gather up all the books on my shelves, and on my floors, and in my home. For most of my years here, I have renewed them. Surely I will read them this summer, when time is less rare, or next year, on a trip or a break. At the beginning of the last couple of Mays, though, I have been trying to be more honest with myself and return books that have fallen so far down the list as to be unlikely reads. Some are far enough from my main areas of interest or work that they are crowded out by more relevant books. Others are in my area of interest but trumped by something newer or more on-point.

Now, as I walk to the library, arms full, to return one or two or six, I often feel like poor, neurotic Alan. So many book, so little time! How can I do anything but fall farther and farther behind withe each passing day? Every book I return is like a little surrender.

I am not quite as neurotic as Alan; at least I've never melted down in front of the book drop for all my students to see. I recognize reality. Still, it is hard to return almost any book unread.

I've had better habits this year, enforcing on myself first a strict policy of returning two books for every new one I checked out, then backsliding to an even one-for-one swap. As a result, I have far fewer books to return or new. Still, this week I have surrendered Knuth's Selected Papers on Analysis of Algorithms, David Berlinski's The Advent of the Algorithm, and Jerry Weissman's Presenting to Win. Worry not; others will take their place, both old (Northcote Parkinson, Parkinson's Law) and new: The Passionate Programmer and Practical Programming. The last of these promises an intro to programming for the 21st century, and I am eager to see how well they carry off the idea.

So, in the end, even if something changed radically to make the life of a professor less attractive, I agree with Learning Curves on the real reason I will never give up my job: the library.

My in-flight and bedtime reading for my ChiliPLoP trip was William Stafford's Writing the Australian Crawl, a book on reading and especially writing poetry, and how these relate to Life. Stafford's musings are crashing into my professional work on the trip, about solving problems and writing programs. The collisions give birth to disjointed thoughts about software, programming, and art. Let's see what putting them into words does to them, and to me.

Intention endangers creation.

An intentional person is too effective to be a good guide in the tentative act of creating.

I often think of programming as art. I've certainly read code that felt poetic to me, such as McCarthy's formulation of Lisp in Lisp (which I discussed way back in an entry on the unity of data and program. But most of the programs we write are intentional: we desire to implement a specific functionality. That isn't the sort of creation that most artists do, or strive to do. If we have a particular artifact in mind, are we really "creating"?

Stafford might think not, and many software people would say "No! We are an engineering discipline, not an artistic one." Thinking as "artists", we are undisciplined; we create bad software: software that breaks, software that doesn't serve its intended purpose, software that is bad internally, software that is hard to maintain and modify.

Yet many people I know who program know... They feel something akin to artistry and creation.

How can we impress both sides of this vision on people, especially students who are just starting out? When we tell only one side of the story, we mislead.

Art is an interaction between object and beholder.

Can programs be art? Can a computer system be art? Yes. Even many people inclined to say 'no' will admit, perhaps grudgingly, that the iPod and the iPhone are objects of art, or at least have elements of artistry in them. I began writing some of these notes on the plane, and all around me I see iPods and iPhones serving people's needs, improving their lives. They have changed us. Who would ever have thought that people would be willing to watch full-length cinematic films on a 2" screen? Our youth, whose experiences are most shaped by the new world of media and technology, take for granted this limitation, as a natural side effect of experiencing music and film and cartoons everywhere.

Yet iPods aren't only about delivering music, and iPhones aren't just ways to talk to our friends. People who own them love the feel of these devices in their hands, and in our lives. They are not just engineered artifacts, created only to meet a purely functional need. They do more, and they are more.

Intention endangers creation.

Art reflects and amplifies experience. We programmers often look for inspirations to write programs by being alert to our personal experience and by recognizing disconnects, things that interrupt our wholeness.

Robert Schumann said, To send light into the darkness of men's hearts -- such is the duty of the artist. Artists deal in truth, though not in the direct, assertional sense we often associate with mathematical or scientific truth. But they must deal in truth if they are to shine light into the darkness of our hearts.

Engineering is sometimes defined as using scientific knowledge and physical resources to create artifacts that achieve a goal or meet a need. Poets use words, not "physical resources", but also shapes and sounds. Their poems meet a need, though perhaps not a narrowly defined one, or even one we realize we had until it was met in the poem. Generously, we might think of poets as playing a role somewhat akin to the engineer.

How about engineers playing a role somewhat akin to the artist? Do engineers and programmers "send light into the darkness of men's hearts"? I've read a lot of Smalltalk code in my life that seemed to fill a dark place in my mind, and my soul, and perhaps even my heart. And some engineered artifacts do, indeed, satisfy a need that we didn't even know we had until we experienced them. And in such cases it is usually experience in the broadest sense, not the mechanics of saving a file or deleting our e-mail. Design, well done, satisfies needs users didn't know they had. This applies as well to the programs we write as to any other artifact that we design with intention.

I have more to write about this, but at this time I feel a strong urge to say "Yes".

This is the idea behind biction:

(The hard part of writing isn't the writing; it's the thinking.)
-- William Zinsser

s/writing/programming/*

This line comes from Zinsser's recent article, Visions and Revisions, in which he describes the writing and rewriting of On Writing Well over the course of thirty years. I read On Writing Well a decade or so ago, in one of its earlier editions. It is my favorite book on the craft of writing.

In real life there is no such thing as algebra.

-- Fran Lebowitz

At this time next week, I will be on my way to ChiliPLoP for a working session. Readers here know how much I enjoy my annual sojourn to this working conference, but this year I look forward to it with special fervor.

First, my day job the last few months -- the last year, really -- has been heavier than usual with administrative activities: IT task force, program review, budget concerns. These are all important tasks, with large potential effects on my university, my department, and our curriculum and faculty. But they are not computer science, and I need to do some computer science.

Second, I am still in a state of hopeful optimism that my year-long Running Winter is coming to an end. I put in five runs this week and reached 20 miles for the first time since October. The week culminated this morning in a chilly, hilly 8 miles on a fresh dusting of snow and under a crystal clear blue sky. ChiliPLoP is my favorite place to run away from home. I never leave Carefree without being inspired, unless I am sick and unable to run. Even if I manage only two short runs around town, which is what I figure is in store, I think that the location will do a little more magic for me.

Our hot topic group will be working at the intersection of computer science and other disciplines, stepping a bit farther from mainstream CS than it has in recent years. We all see the need to seek something more transformative than incremental, and I'd like to put into practice some of the mindset I've been exploring in my blog the last year or so.

The other group will again be led by Dave West and Dick Gabriel, and they, too, are thinking about how we might re-imagine computer science and software development around Peter Naur's notion of programming as theory building. Ironically, I mentioned that work recently in a context that crosses into my hot topic's focus. This could lead to some interesting dinner conversation.

Both hot topics' work will have implications for how we present programming, software development, and computer science to others, whether CS students are professionals in other disciplines. Michael Berman (who recently launched his new blog) sent a comment on my Sweating the Small Stuff that we need to keep in mind whenever we want people to learn how to do something:

I think that's an essential observation, and one that needs to be designed into the curriculum. Most people don't learn something until they need it. So trying to get students to learn syntax by teaching them syntax and having them solve toy problems doesn't teach them syntax. It's a mistake to think that there's something wrong with the students or the intro class -- the problem is in the curriculum design.

I learned algebra when I took trig, and trig when I took calculus, and I learned calculus in my physics class and later in queueing theory and probability. (I never really learned queueing theory.)

One of the great hopes of teaching computation to physicists, economists, sociologists, and anyone else is that they have real problems to solve and so might learn the tool they need to solve them. Might -- because we need to tell them a story that compels them to want to solve them with computation. Putting programming into the context of building theories in an applied discipline is a first step.

(Then we need to figure out the context and curriculum that helps CS students learn to program without getting angry...)

When I was first asked to consider writing a blog piece for the Ada Lovelace Day challenge, I wasn't sure I wanted to. I don't usually blog with any particular agenda; I just write whatever is in my mind at the time, itching to get out. This was surely a topic I have thought and written about before, and it's one that I have worked on with people at my university and across the state. I think it is in the best interest of computer science to be sure that we are not missing out on great minds who might be self-selecting away from the discipline for the wrong reasons. So I said yes.

Soon afterwards, ACM announced Barbara Liskov as the winner of the Turing Award. I had written about Fran Allen when she won the Turing Award, and here was another female researcher in programming languages whose work I have long admired. I think the Liskov Substitution Principle is one of the great ideas in software development, a crucial feature of object-oriented programming, of any kind of programming, really. I make a variant of the LSP the centerpiece of my undergraduate courses on OOP. But Liskov has done more -- CLU and encapsulation, Thor and object-oriented databases, the idea of Byzantine fault tolerance in distributed computing, ... It was a perfect fit for the challenge.

But my first thought, Adele Goldberg, would not leave me. That thought grew out of my long love affair with Smalltalk, to which she contributed, and out of a memory I have from my second OOPSLA Educators' Symposium, where she gave a talk on learning environments, programming, and language. Goldberg isn't a typical academic Ph.D.; she is versatile, having worked in technical research, applications, and business. She has made technical contributions and contributions to teaching and learning. She helped found companies. In the end, that's the piece I wanted to write.

So, if my entry on Goldberg sounds stilted or awkward, please cut me a little slack. I don't write on assigned topics much any more, at least not in my blog. I should probably have set aside more time to write that entry, but I wrote it much as I might write any other entry. If nothing else, I hope you can find value in the link to her Personal Dynamic Media article, which I was so happy to find on-line.

At this point, one other person has written about Goldberg for the Lovelace Day challenge. That entry has links to a couple of videos, including one of Adele demonstrating a WIMP interface using an early implementation of Smalltalk. A nice piece of history. Mark Guzial mentions Adele in his Lovelace Day essay, but he wrote about three women closer to home. One of his subjects is Janet Kolodner, who did groundbreaking research on case-based reasoning that was essential to my own graduate work. I'm a fan!

I have spent nearly every working minute this week sitting in front of this laptop, preparing a bunch of documents for an "academic program assessment" that is being done campus-wide at my university. Unfortunately, that makes this week Strike Two.

Last October: no OOPSLA for me.

This week: no SIGCSE for me.

The next pitch arrives at the plate in about a month... Will there be no ChiliPLoP for me?

That would be an inglorious Strike Three indeed. It would break my equivalent of DiMaggio's streak: I have never missed a ChiliPLoP. But budget rescissions, out-of-state travel restrictions, and work, work, work are conspiring against me. I intend to make my best effort. Say a little prayer.

I hope that you can survive my missing SIGCSE, as it will mean no reports from the front. Of course, you will notice two missing links on my 2008 report, so I do have some material in the bullpen!

Missing SIGCSE was tougher than usual, because this year I was to have been part of the New Teaching Faculty Roundtable on the day before the conference opened. I was looking forward to sharing what little wisdom I have gained in all my years teaching -- and to stealing as many good ideas as I could from the other panelists. Seeing all of the firepower on the roster of mentors, I have no doubts that the roundtable was a great success for the attendees. I hope SIGCSE offers the roundtable again next year.

Part of my working day today was spent in Cedar Rapids, an hour south of here. Some of you may recall that Cedar Rapids was devastated by flooding last summer, when much of the eastern part of the state was under 500-year flood waters. I surprised and saddened to see that so much of the downtown area still suffers the ill effects of the water. The public library is still closed while undergoing repair. But I was heartened to see a vibrant city rebuilding itself. A branch library has been opened at a mall on the edge of town, and it was buzzing with activity.

You know, having a library in the mall can be a good thing. It is perhaps more a part of some people's lives than a dedicated building in the city, and it serves as a nice counterpoint to the consumption and noise outside the door. Besides, I had easy access to excellent wireless service out in mall area even before the library opened, and easy access to all the food I might want whenever I needed to take a break. Alas, I really did spend nearly every working minute this week sitting in front of this laptop, so I worked my way right up to dinner time and a welcome drive home.

And we decided to innovate our way through this downturn, so that we would be further ahead of our competitors when things turn up.

"This downturn" was the dot.com bust. The speaker was Steve Jobs. The innovations were the iPod and iTunes. Seems to have worked out fine.

My agile friends are positioned well to innovate through our current downturn, as are the start-ups that other friends and former students run. It is something of a cliché but true nonetheless. Recessions can be a good time for people and organizations that are able -- and willing -- to adapt. They can be an opportunity as much as a challenge.

I hope that the faculty and staff of my university can approach these troubled budget times with such an attitude. In five years, we could be doing a much better job for our students, our state, and our respective academic disciplines.

Tweet of the Day

Haskell is a human-readable program compression format.
-- Michael Feathers

Maybe we should write a generator that produces Haskell.

Non-Tech Blog of the Day

Earlier in my career I worked hard to attract attention. ... The problem with this approach is that eventually it all burns down to ashes and no one knows a thing more about software development than they did before.
-- Kent Beck

Seek truth. You will learn to focus your life outside your own identity, and it makes finding out you're wrong not only acceptable, but desirable.

... so many meetings and budget discussion. A week in which I do no computer science is as bad as a week in which I do not run.

I did play hooky while attending a budget meeting yesterday. I took one of our department laptops so that I could upgrade Ruby, install Bluecloth, and play with a new toy. But that's bit-pushing, not computer science.

Why all the budget talk? Working at a public university offers some shelter from changing economic winds and tends to level changes out over time. But when the entire economy goes down, so do state revenues. My university is looking at a 9% cut in its base budget for next year. That magnitude of change means making some hard choices. Such change creates uneasy times among the faculty, and more work planning for changes and contingencies among department heads.

There is some consolation in being on the front line, knowing that I can shield the faculty from much of the indecision. I also have opportunities to argue against short-sighted responses to the budget cuts and to suggest responses that will help the university in the long term. There is nothing like a sudden lack of revenue to help you focus on what really matters!

Still, I'd rather be writing a program or working on a tough CS problem.

I need a better memory.

Last time, I wrote about being surprised by an interview request. But more than a year ago I read about a similar problem and one solution:

As a science journalist, I can tell you the best thing to do, as an academic getting interviewed and wanted to guide the interview somewhat, is to have analogies cocked, locked and loaded.... [R]eporters go nuts for pre-thought-out analogies/explanations because it's quotable material, and could in fact be the center of the article.... So cranking them out before you speak with someone is a great way to maintain some control of what reporters quote you on.

As in so many things, preparation pays off.

Of course, this isn't quite the same problem. Talking about one's own research or teaching is different than talking about department business or someone else's project. But that is one of the responsibilities that comes with chairing the department -- speaking about the wider interests of the department.

The bigger issue here is, how to convert what I read into learning. The passage above stuck out enough that I filed it away for eighteen months. But it doesn't do me any good sitting in a text file somewhere.

The phone rings.

"Hi, I'm [local radio personality]. I'd like to interview you about the grant your department received from State Farm."

"Um, sure." Quick -- compose yourself.

"So, what is this grant all about?"

A short game of Twenty Questions ensued. This was a first for me: a cold call from a radio station requesting an interview. Fortunately the interview was conducted off-line; my answers were recorded and will be used to produce a finished piece later.

I have done phone interviews before, some of which I have discussed here. But those were arranged in advance, so I had time to prepare specific comments and to get into the right frame of mind. to answer questions in that context. Also, my previous interviews have always been for my own personal work, which I know at a different level than I know my department work. Even though I wrote the grant proposal in question, it was collective work, not mine, and that shows in how well I feel the project.

A quick word about the grant... State Farm Insurance is based a few hours' drive from here and hires many of our best software engineering students into its systems development division. Through its foundation, State Farm supports universities with grants to support educational work. A few years ago, one of these grants helped us to build our first computational cluster and begin using it in our bioinformatics program, and to support a number of computational science projects on campus. The fact that an insurance company would fund this kind of work shows that it has a long-term view of education, which we at the university appreciate.

We recently received a new grant to purchase two quad-socket, quad-core servers and integrate their use into our architecture, systems, and programming courses. The world is going multi-core, and we would like to give our students some of the experiences they will need to contribute.

Anyway, I now have a new set of skills to work on: the pop interview. Or I at least need to develop a mind quick enough to say, "Hey, can I call you back in five?"

At the Rebooting Computing Summit, one exercise called for us to interview each other and then report back to the group about the person we interviewed. The reports my partner and I gave, coupled with some self-reported experiences later in the day, reminded me of a pattern I've experienced in other contexts. Here is a rough first draft. Let me know what you think.

Second-Hand Story

When we need to know a person's story, our first tendency is often to ask him to tell us. After all, he know it best, because he lived it. He has had a chance to reflect on it, to reconsider decisions, and to evaluate what the story "means".

This approach can disappoint us. Sometimes, the person is too close to the experience and attaches accidental emotions and details. Sometimes, even though he has had a chance to reflect on his experience, he hasn't reflected enough -- or perhaps not at all! Telling the story may be the first time he has thought about some of those experiences in a long time. While trying to tell the story and summarize its meaning at the same time, the storyteller may reach for an easily-found answer. The result can be trite, convenient, or self-protective. Maybe the person is simply too close to an experience to see its true meaning.

Therefore, ask the person to tell his story to someone else, focusing on "just the facts". Then, ask the interviewer to tell the story, perhaps in summary form. Let the interviewer and the listeners look for patterns and themes.

The interviewer has distance and an opportunity to listen objectively. She is less likely to impose well-rehearsed personal baggage over the story.

The result can still be trite. If the listener does not listen carefully, or is too eager to stereotype the story, then the resulting story may well be worse than the original, because it is not only sanitized but sanitized by someone without intimate connection to it.

It can be refreshing to hear someone else tell your own story, to draw conclusions, to summarize what is most important. A good listener can pick up on essential details and remove the shroud of humility or disappointment that too often obscures your own view. You can learn something about yourself!

This technique depends on two people's ability to tell a story, not one. The original story-teller must be open, honest, and willing to describe situations more than evaluate them too much. (A little evaluation is unavoidable and also useful. The listener learns something about the story-teller from that party of the story, too.) The interviewer must be a careful listener and have a similar enough background to be able to put the story into context and form reasonable abstractions about it.

Examples. I found the interviewer's reports at the Rebooting Computing summit to be insightful, including the ones that Joe Carthy and I gave on one another. Hearing someone else "tell my story" let me hear it more objectively than if I had told it myself. Occasionally I felt let like chiming in to correct or add something, but I'm not sure than anything I said could have done a better job introducing myself to the rest of the group. Something Joe said during his interview of me made me think more about just how my non-CS profs helped lead me into CS, something I had never thought much about before that.

Later that day, we heard several self-reported stories, and those stories -- told by the same people who had reported on others earlier -- sounded flat and trite. I kept thinking, "What's the real story?" Maybe someone else could have told it better!

Related Ideas. I am reminded of several techniques I learned as an architecture major while studying Betty Edwards's Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain:

• drawing a chair by looking at the negative space around it
• drawing a picture of Igor Stravinsky upside down, in order to trick the visualization mechanism in our minds that jump right to stereotypes
• drawing a paper wad, which matched no stereotyped form already in our memories

This pattern and these exercises are all examples of techniques for indirect learning. This is is perhaps the first time I realized just how well indirect learning can work in a social setting.

As always, my report on the Rebooting Computing Summit left out some of the random thoughts and events that made my trip. Here are a few.

•   When I was growing up I learned that the prefixes "Mc" and "O'" indicated "son of" when used in names such as McDonald and O'Herlihy. I always wondered who the original ancestors were -- the Donalds and Herlihys. (Even then, I was concerned with the base case...) One of my favorite grad school profs was named Bill McCarthy, but I had never met a Carthy. Now I have... One of my table mates at the summit was Joe Carthy of Dublin! Joe shared some valuable insights on teaching computing.

•   In my report, I wrote of my vision for the future of computing, in which children will routinely walk to the computer and write a program.... "Walk to the computer" -- that is so 1990s! Today's children carry their technology in their hands.

•   During one of his messages, Peter Denning showed the familiar quote, "Insanity is doing the same thing over again, expecting different results," as a motivation to change. But I think there is more to it than that. I was reminded of a recent Frazz comic, in which the precocious Caulfield pointed out that the world is always changing, so it is also insanity to do the same thing over again, expecting the same results. The world is changing around computing and computing education. There is no particular reason to think that doing the same old things better will get us anywhere useful.

•   At one point, Alan Kay said that part of what is wrong with computing is that too many of us "fool around", rather than working to change the world. This, he said, is a feature of a popular culture, not a serious one. First, we had real guitar. Then came air guitar. And now we have Guitar Hero. He is, of course, right, and written occasionally of being shamed at coming up short when measured against his vision.

Later that evening, my roommate Robert Duvall discussed whether Guitar Hero might have some positives, by motivating some of the people who play it to learn to play a real guitar. I don't have a good feel for the culture around Guitar Hero, so I'll have to wait and see. New technologies often interact with younger generations in ways that we old folks can't predict. (My prurient side wants to say that Guitar Hero can't be all bad if it gives us Heidi Klum playing air guitar in her privates.)

•   A Creative Interlude

On the second day of the summit, each table was asked to communicate to the rest of the groups its vision of the future of CS. The facilitators encouraged us to express our vision creatively, via role play or some other non-bullet list medium. One group did a neat job on this, with one ham performer playing the central role in a number of vignettes showing where the computing of tomorrow will have taken us.

This is the sort of exercise for which I am ill-equipped to excel alone, but I am able to do all right if I am in a group. My table decided to gang-write a song -- doggerel, really. With Christmas still close in our memory, we chose the tune to the familiar carol "Angels We Have Heard On High", in part, I think, for its soaring "Gloria"s. The result was "Everyone Now Loves CS".

Our original plan was for Susan Horwitz to sing our creation, as she does this sort of thing in many of her classes and so is used to the attention. A few of us toyed with the idea of playing air guitar in the background, but I'm glad we opted not to; the juxtaposition of our performance with Alan Kay's remarks later that afternoon would have been unfortunate indeed! About five minutes before the performance Susan informed us that we would be singing as a group. So we did. My students should not expect a reprise.

My conference history now includes singing and acting. I don't imagine that dance is in my future, but you never know.

A student wrote to tell me that I had been Reddited again, this time for my entry reflecting on this semester's final exam. I had fun reading the comments. Occasionally, I found myself thinking about how a poster had misread my entry. Even a couple of other posters commented as much. But I stopped myself and remembered what I had learned from writers' workshops at PLoP: they had read my words, which must stand on their own. Reading over a thread that discusses something I've written feels a little bit like a writers' workshop. As an author, I never know how others might interpret what I have written until I hear or read their interpretation in their own words. Interposing clarifying words is a tempting but dangerous trap.

Blog comments, whether on the author's site or on a community site such as Reddit, do tend to drift far afield from the original article. That is different from a PLoP workshop, in which the focus should remain on the work being discussed. In the case of my exam entry, the drift was quite interesting, as people discussed accumulator variables (yes, I was commenting on how students tend to overuse them; they are a wonderful technique when used appropriately) and recursion (yes, it is hard for imperative thinkers to learn, but there are techniques to help...). Well worth the read. But I could also see that sometimes a subthread comes to resemble an exchange in the children's game Telephone. Unless every commenter has read the original article -- in this case, mine -- the discussion tends to drift monotonically away from the content of the original as it loses touch with each successive post. Frankly, that's all right, too. I just hope that I am not held accountable for what someone at the end of the chain says I wrote...

Last month my wife and I had the good fortune to see a Broadway touring company perform the Tony Award-winning Movin' Out, a musical created by Twyla Tharp from the music of Billy Joel. I've already mentioned that I am a big fan of Billy Joel, so the chance to listen to his songs for two hours was an easy sell. Some of you may recall that I also wrote an entry way back called Start with a Box that was inspired by a wonderful chapter from Twyla Tharp's The Creative Habit. So even if I knew nothing else about Tharp, Movin' Out would have piqued my interest.

This post isn't about the show, but my quick review is: Wow. The musicians were very good -- not imitating Joel, but performing his music in a way that felt authentic and alive. (Yes, I sang along, silently to myself. My wife said she saw my lips moving!) Tharp managed somehow to tell a compelling story by stitching together a set of unrelated songs written over the long course of Joel's career. I know all of these songs quite well, and occasionally found myself thinking, "But that's not what this song means...". Yet I didn't mind; I was hearing from within the story. And I loved the dance itself -- it was classical even when modern, not abstract like Merce Cunningham's Patterns in Space and Sound. My wife knows dance well, and she was impressed that the male dancers in this show were actually doing classical ballet. (In many performances, the men are more props than dancers, doing lifts and otherwise giving the female leads a foil for their moves.)

Now I see that Merlin Mann is gushing over Tharp and The Creative Habit. Whatever else I can say, Mann is a great source of links... He points us to a YouTube video of Tharp talking about "failing well", as well as the first chapter of her book available on line. Now you can read a bit to see if you want to bother with the whole book. I echo Mann's caveat: we both liked the first chapter, but we liked the rest of the book more.

Since my post three years ago on The Creative Habit, I've been meaning to return to some of the other cool ideas that Tharp writes about in this book. Seeing Movin' Out caused me to dig out my notes from that summer, and seeing Mann's posts has awakened my desire to write some of the posts I have in mind. The ideas I learned in this book relate well to how I write software, teach, and learn.

Here is a teaser that may connect with agile software developers and comfort students preparing for final exams:

The routine is as much a part of the creative process as the lightning bolt of inspiration, maybe more. And this routine is available to everyone.

Oddly, this quote brings to mind an analogy to sports. Basketball coaches often tell players not to rely on having a great shooting night in order to contribute to the team. Shooting is like inspiration; it comes and it goes, a gift of capricious gods. Defense, on the other hand, is always within the control of the player. It is grunt work, made up of effort, attention, and hustle. Every player can contribute on defense every night of the week.

For me, that's one of the key points in this message from Tharp: control what you can control. Build habits within which you work. Regular routine -- weekly, daily, even hourly -- are the scaffolding that keep you focused on making something. What's better, everyone can create and follow a routine.

While I sit and wait for the lightning bolt of inspiration to strike, I am not producing code, inspired or otherwise. Works of inspiration happen while I am working. Working as a matter of routine increases the chances that I will be producing something when the gods smile on me with inspiration. And if they don't... I will still be producing something.

... and a week of time away from work and worries.

There is still something special about an early morning run on fresh snow. The world seems new.

November has been a bad month for running, with my health at its lowest ebb since June, but even one three-mile jog brings back a good feeling.

I can build a set of books for our home finances based on the data I have at hand. I do not have to limit myself to the way accountants define transactions. Luca Pacioli was a smart guy who did a good thing, but our tools are better today than they were in 1494. Programs change things.

S-expressions really are a dandy data format. They make so many things straightforward. Some programmers may not like the parens, but simple list delimiters are all I need. Besides, Scheme's (read) does all the dirty work parsing my input.

After a week's rest, I imagine something like one of those signs from God:

That "sustainable pace" thing...
I meant that.

-- The Agile Alliance

I'd put Kent or Ward's name in there, but that's a lot of pressure for any man. And they might not appreciate my sense of humor.

The Biblical story of creation in six days (small steps) with feedback ("And he saw that it was good.") and a day of rest convinces me that God is an agile developer.

Just this weekend I learned about Ashleigh Brilliant, a cartoonist and epigrammist. From little I've seen in a couple of days, his cartoons remind me of Hugh MacLeod's business-card doodles Gaping Void -- only with a 1930s graphic style and language that is more likely SFW.

This Brilliant cartoon, #3053, made it into my Agile Development Hall of Fame on first sight:

Doing it wrong fast means that we have a chance to learn sooner, and so have a chance to be less wrong than yesterday.

This lesson was fresh in my mind over the weekend from a small dose of programming. I was working on the financial software I've decided to write for myself, which has me exploring a few corners of PLT Scheme that I don't use daily. As a result, I've been failing more frequently than usual. The best failures come rat-a-tat-tat, because they are often followed closely by an a-ha! Sunday, just before I learned of Brilliant's work, I felt one of those great releases when, for the first time, my code gave me an answer I did not already know and had not wanted to compute by hand: our family net worth. At that moment I was excited to verify the result manually (I'll need that test later!) and enjoy all the wrong wrong work that had brought me to this point. Brilliant has something.

I have posted all of my reports from the 2008 SECANT workshop. In sum, SECANT is a worthwhile community-building effort. It brings together such a mix: academia and industry, different disciplines, and different kinds of schools, from large Big Ten and other R-I universities down to small liberal arts colleges. This one of the reasons why I love OOPSLA, but this venue provides a smaller, more intimate setting. (Of course, while SECANT lies at the intersection of computing -- and especially programming -- OOPSLA's domain is really Everything Programming, which is even better.)

The workshop was again a great source of ideas and inspiration for me. This seems like a good use of a relatively small amount of money by NSF. The onus is now on us participants... Will we do the work to grow the community? To develop courses and materials? To transform our institutions and disciplines. A tall order.

As for being done with my reports, I feel a small measure of pride. Sure, last year, I posted my final workshop report only five days after the workshop ended, and this year I'm at eleven days. But my report on SIGCSE -- from March -- is still incomplete, with two entries on top: a general description of a panel on bringing the joy and wonder back to CS, and a more detailed report on one of the presentations from that panel, by Eric Roberts.

Is there a statute of limitations on blog entries? Has my coupon to post on that panel session expired? If I were Kent Beck, I'd probably call this long delay a "blog smell" and write a pattern!

For me, blogging suffers from a stack-of-ideas phenomenon. I have ideas, and they get pushed onto the to-blog list. Sometimes, I have more ideas than time to write, and some ideas get pushed deep in the stack before I get a chance to write them up. Time passes... And then I look back at the list of ideas, and most feel stale, or at least no longer have their original hold on my mind. I currently have three levels of "blog ideas" folders, and each one contains a bunch of ideas that I remember wanting to write now -- but which now I feel no desire to write. Sounds like it's time for a little rm -r *.*

Going to a conference only makes the stack-of-ideas problem worse. The sessions follow one upon another, and each one tends to stir me up so much that I push even the previous session way back in my mind. That's one advantage of a 1.5-day workshop over a several day conference like SIGCSE or OOPSLA: the scale does not overflow my small brain.

Do readers care about any of this? Is SIGCSE stale for them? Perhaps, and I figure anyone who was wondering what went on in Portland has likely found the information elsewhere, and in any case moved on. But the topic of the unwritten entry may not be stale yet, so hope remains.

To return to the beginning of this blog, on the end of my SECANT reports: I hope you get as much from reading them as I did writing them.

[A transcript of the SECANT 2008 workshop: Table of Contents]

As always, at this workshop I have heard lots of one-liners and one-off comments that will stick with me after the event ends. This entry is a place for me to think about them by writing, and to share them in case they click with you, too.

The buzzword of this year's workshop: infiltration. Frontal curricular assaults often fail, so people here are looking for ways to sneak new ideas into courses and programs. An incremental approach creates problems of its own, but agile software proponents understand its value.

College profs like to roll their own, but high-school teachers are great adapters. (And adopters.)

Chris Hoffman, while describing his background: "When you reach my age, the question becomes, 'What haven't you done?' Or maybe, 'What have you done well?'"

Lenny Pitt: "With Python, we couldn't get very far. Well, we could get as far as we wanted, but students couldn't get very far." Beautiful. Imagine how far students will get with Java or Ada or C++.

Rubin Landau: "multidisciplinary != interdisciplinary". Yes! Ideas that transform a space do more than bring several disciplines into the same room. The discipline is new.

It's important to keep in mind the relationship between modeling and computing. We can do model without computing. But analytical models aren't feasible for all problems, and increasingly the problems we are interested in fall into this set.

Finally let me re-run an old rant by linking to the original episode. People, when you are second or third or sixth, you look really foolish.

On my drive to Purdue today, I listened to the first 3/4 of Caleb Carr's novel, "Killing Time". This is not a genre I read or listen to often, so it's hard for me to gauge the book's quality. If you are inclined, you can read reviews on-line. At this point, I would say that it is not a very good book, but it delivered fine escapism for a car ride on a day when I needed a break more than deep thought. But it did get me to thinking about... computer science. The vignette that sets up the novel's plot is based on a typical use case for Photoshop, or a homework assignment in a media computation CS1 course.

Carr describes a world controlled by "information barons", a term intended to raise the specter of the 19th century's rail barons and their control of wealth and commerce. The central feature of his world in 2023 is deception -- the manipulation of information, whether digital or physical, to control what people think and feel. The novel's opening involves the role a doctored video plays in a presidential assassination, and later episodes include doctored photos, characters manufactured via the data planted on the internet, the encryption of data on disk, and real-time surveillance of encrypted communication.

If students are at all interested in this kind of story, whether for the science fiction, the intrigue, or the social implications of digital media and their malleability, then we have a great way to engage them in computing that matters. It's CSI for the computer age.

Carr seems to have an agenda on the social issues, and as is often the case, such an agenda interferes with the development of the story. His characters are largely cut-outs in service of the message. Carr paints a dystopian view striking for its unremitting focus on the negatives of digital media and the science's increasing understanding of the world at a molecular level. The book seems unaware that biology and chemistry are helping us to understand diseases, create new drugs, and design new therapies, or that computation and digital information create new possibilities in every discipline and part of life. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that Carr starts with these promises as his backdrop and chooses to paint a world in which everything that could go wrong has. That makes for an interesting story but ultimately an unsatisfying thought experiment. For escapism, that may be okay.

After my previous entry, I couldn't help but wonder whether I would have the patience to read this book. I have to think not. How many pages? 274 pages -- almost slender compared to Perec's book. Still, I'm glad I'm listening and not reading.

I leave today to attend the second SECANT workshop at Purdue. This is the sort of trip I like: close enough that I can drive, which bypasses all the headaches and inconveniences of flight, but far enough away that it is a break from home. My conference load has been light since April, and I can use a little break from the office. Besides, the intersection of computer science and the other sciences is an area of deep interest, and the workshop group is a diverse one. It's a bit odd to look forward to six hours on the road, but driving, listening to a book or to music, and thinking are welcome pursuits.

As I was checking out of the office, I felt compelled to make two public confessions. Here they are.

First, I recently ran across another recommendation for Georges Perec's novel, Life: A User's Manual. This was the third reputable recommendation I'd seen, and as is my general rule, after the third I usually add it to my shelf of books to read. As I was leaving campus, I stopped by the library to pick it up for the trip. I found it in the stacks and stopped. It's a big book -- 500 pages. It's also known for its depth and complexity. I returned the book to its place on the shelf and left empty-handed. I've written before of my preference for shorter books and especially like wonderful little books that are full of wisdom. But these days time and energy are precious enough resources that I have to look at a complex, 500-page book with a wary eye. It will make good reading some other day. I'm not proud to admit it, but my attention span isn't up to the task right now.

Second, on an even more frivolous note, there is at the time of this writing no Diet Mountain Dew in my office. I drank the last one yesterday afternoon while giving a quiz and taking care of pre-trip odds and ends. This is noteworthy in my mind only because of its rarity. I do not remember the last time the cupboard was bare. I'm not a caffeine hound like some programmers, but I don't drink coffee and admit some weakness for a tasty diet beverage while working.

I'll close with a less frivolous comment, something of a pattern I've been noticing in my life. Many months ago, I wrote a post on moving our household financial books from paper ledgers and journals into the twentieth century. I fiddled with Quicken for a while but found it too limiting; my system is a cross between naive home user and professional bookkeeping. Then I toyed with the idea of using a spreadsheet tool like Numbers to create a cascaded set o journals and ledgers. Yet at every turn I was thinking that I'd want to implement this or that behavior, which would strain the limits of typical spreadsheets. Then I came to my computer scientist's senses: When in doubt, write a program. I'd rather spend my time that way anyway, and the result is just what I want it to be. No settling. This pattern is, of course, no news at all to most of you, who roll your own blogging software and homework submission systems, even content management systems and book publishing systems, to scratch your own itches. It's not news to me, either, though sometimes my mind comes back to the power slowly. The financial software will grow slowly, but that's how I like it.

As a friend and former student recently wrote, "If only there were more time..."

Off to Purdue.

I don't know if "reddited" is a word like "slashdotted" yet, but I can say that yesterday's post, No One Programs Any More, has reached #1 on Reddit's programming channel. This topic seems to strike a chord with a lot of people, both in the software business and in other technology pursuits. Here are my favorite comments so far:

I can't think of a single skill I've learned that has had more of an impact on my life than a semi-advanced grasp of programming.

This person received some grief for ranking learning how to program ahead of, say, learning how to eat, but I know just what the commenter means. Learning to program changes one's mind in the same way that learning to read and write. Another commenter agreed:

It's amazing how after a year of programming at university, I began to perceive the world around me differently. The way I saw things and thought about them changed significantly. It was almost as if I could feel the change.

Even at my advanced age, I love when that feeling strikes. Beginning to understand call/cc felt like that (though I don't think I fully grok it yet).

My favorite comment is a bit of advice I recommend for you all:

I will not argue with a man named Eugene.

Reddit readers really are smart!

I'm on the road to a recruiting event in Des Moines. The event is for girls who are interested in math and science. For me, the real treat is a chance to meet Mae Jemison the first woman of color to travel in space, on the space shuttle Endeavour in 1992. She's surely going to do a better selling math and science to these students than I could! (Note after the talk: She did. Perhaps the best way to summarize her message is, "We have choices to make.")

A few short items have been asking me to write them:

• At the risk of living too public a life where my students can see, I will say that the personality of my current class of students is not one that gives me a lot of energy. They are either still wary or simply disinterested. This happens every once in a while, and I'll try to find a way to create more energy in the room. In any case, it's nice at least to have a student or two who are like this.

• Kevin Rutherford has been working on a little software tool called reek, a smell detector for Ruby code.

That is what I would like to be doing right now, with either Ruby or Scheme being fine as a source language. Every time I teach programming languages I get the itch to dive deeply back into the refactoring pool. This is the primary drawback of administrative work and the primary indicator that I am probably not suited for a career in administration.

Short of working on such a cool project, blogging about interesting ideas is the next best thing.

• But consider this advice on writing:

If you have so many ideas, prove it to the world and start blogging. There is nothing like a blog to help you realize you have nothing new to say.

That post is really about why not to write a book. For many people, writing a book is a way to gain or demonstrate authority. Several of my friends and family have asked when I plan to write a book, and for at least a few their desire for me is grounded in the great respect that have for the value of a book. But I think that the author of the post is correct that writing a book is an outdated way to gain authority.

The world still needs great books such as, well, Refactoring, and one day I may sit down to write one. But I have to have something to say that should best be said in a book.

Perhaps we should take this author's advice with caution. She wrote a book and markets it with a blog!

• That piece also contains the following passage:

... self-respect comes from having some sort of vision for one's life and heading in that direction. And there is no one who can give you that vision -- you have to give it to yourself, and before you can feel like you have direction, you have to feel lost -- and lost is okay.

Long-time readers of this blog know that getting lost is not only okay but also demonstrates and exercises the imagination. Sometimes we get lost inside code just so that we can learn a new code base intimately.

• Finally, Seth Godin offers an unusual way to get things done:

Assemble your team (it might be just you) ... and focus like your hair is on fire. ... Do nothing except finish the project.

I need a Friday or a Monday at the office to try this out on a couple of major department projects. I was already planning a big sprint this weekend on a particularly persistent home project, and now I have a more provocative way to rev my engine.

One of my most senior colleagues has recently become enamored of Facebook. One of his college buddies started using it to share pictures, so my colleague created an account. Within minutes, he had a friend request -- from a student in one of his classes. And they kept coming... He now has dozen of friends, mostly undergrads at our school but also a few former students and current colleagues.

Earlier this week, he stopped me in the hall to report that during his class the previous hour, a student in the class had posted a message on his own Facebook page saying something to the effect, "I can't keep my eyes open. I have to go to sleep!" How does the prof know? Because they are Facebook friends, of course.

Did the student think twice about posting such a message during class? I doubt it. Was he so blinded by fatigue or boredom that he forgot the prof is his friend and so would see the message? I doubt it. Is he at all concerned in retrospect, or even just a little sheepish? I doubt it. This is standard operating procedure for a college set that opens the blinds on it life, day by day and moment by moment.

We live in a new world. Our students live much more public lives than most of us did, and today's network technology knocks down the well that separates Them from Us.

This can be a good thing. My colleague keeps his Facebook page open in the evenings, where his students can engage him in chat about course material and assignments. He figures that his office hours are now limited only by the time he spends in front of a monitor. Immediate interaction can make a huge difference to a student who is struggling with a database problem or a C syntax error. The prof does not mind this as an encroachment on his time or freedom; he can close the browser window and draw the blinds on office hours anytime he wants, and besides, he's hacking or reading on-line most of the time anyway!

I'm uncertain what the potential downsides of this new openness might be. There's always a risk that students can become too close to their professors, so a prof needs to take care to maintain some semblance of a professional connection. But the demystification of professors is probably a good thing, done right, because it enables connections and creates an environment more conducive to learning. I suppose one downside might be that students develop a sense of entitlement to Anytime, Anywhere access, and professors who can't or don't provide could be viewed negatively. This could poison the learning environment on both sides of the window. But it's also not a new potential problem. Just ask students about the instructors who are never in their offices for face-to-face meetings or who never answer e-mail.

I've not had experience with this transformation due to Facebook. I do have a page, created originally for much the same reason as my colleague's. I do have a small number of friends, including undergrads, former students, current colleagues, a grade-school buddy, and even my 60+ aunt. But I use Facebook sparingly, usually for a specific task, and rarely have my page open. I don't track the comments on my "wall", and I don't generally post on others'. It has been useful in one particular case, though, reconnecting me with a former student whose work I have mentioned here. That has been a real pleasure. (FYI, the link to his old site seems to be broken now.)

However, I do have limited experience with the newly transparent wall between me and my students, through blogs. It started when a few students -- not many -- found my blog and began to read it. Then I found the blogs of a few recent students and, increasingly, current students. I don't have a lot of time to read any blogs these days, but when I do read, I read some of theirs. Blogs are not quite as immediate as the Twitter-like chatter to be found in Facebook, but they are a surprisingly candid look into my students' lives and minds. Struggles they have with a particular class or instructor; personal trials at home; illness and financial woes -- all are common topics in the student blogs I read. So, too, are there joys and excitement and breakthroughs. Their posts enlighten me and humble me. Sometimes I feel as if I am privy to far too much, but mostly I think that the personal connection enriches my relationship both with individual students and with the collective student body. What I read certainly can keep me on a better path as I play the role of instructor or guide.

And, yes, I realize that there is a chance that the system can be gamed. Am I being played by a devious student? It's possible, but honestly, I don't think it's a big issue. The same students who will post in full view of their instructor that they want to sleep through class without shame or compunction are the ones who are blogging. There is a cultural ethic at play, a code by which these students live. I feel confident in assuming that their posts are authentic, absent evidence to the contrary for any given blogger.

(That said, I appreciate when students write entries that praise a course or a professor. Most students current students are circumspect enough not to name names, but there is always the possibility that they refer to my course. That hope can psyche me up some days.)

To be fair, we have to admit that the same possibility for gaming the system arises when professors blog. I suppose that I can say anything here in an effort to manipulate my students' perceptions or feelings. I might also post something like this, which reflects my take on a group of students, and risk affecting my relationship with those students. One of my close friends sent me e-mail soon after that post to raise just that concern.

For the same reasons I give the benefit of the doubt to student bloggers, I give myself the benefit of the doubt, and the same to the students who read this blog. To be honest, writing even the few entries I manage to write these days takes a lot of time and psychic energy. I have too little of either resource to spend them disingenuously. There is a certain ethic to blogging, and most of us who write do so for more important purposes than trying to manipulate a few students' perceptions. Likewise, I trust the students who read this blog to approach it with a mindset of understanding something about computer science and just maybe to get a little sense of what their Dear Old Professor tick.

I know that is the main reason I write -- to figure out how I tick, and maybe learn a few useful nuggets of wisdom along the way. Knowing that I do so in a world much more transparent than the one I inhabited as a CS student years ago is part of the attraction.

Last time I mentioned a Supreme Court justice's thoughts on how universal access to legal case data changes the research task associated with the practice of the law. Justice Roberts's comments brought to mind two thoughts, one related to the law and one not.

As a graduate student, I worked on the representation and manipulation of legal arguments. This required me to spend some time reading legal journals for two different purposes. First, I needed to review the literature on applying computers to legal tasks, ad in particular how to represent knowledge of statute and cases. Second, I needed to find, read, and code cases for the knowledge base of my program. I'm not that old, but I'm old enough that my research preceded the Internet Age's access to legal cases. I went to the campus library to check out thick volumes of the Harvard Law Review and other legal collections and journals. These books became my companions for several months, as I lay on the floor of my study and pored over them.

When I could not find a resource I needed on campus, I rode my bike to the Michigan State Law Library in downtown Lansing to use law reviews in its collection. I was not allowed to take these home, so I worked through them one at a time in carols there. I was quite an anomalous sight there, in T-shirt and shorts with a bike helmet at my side!

I loved that time, reading and learning. I never considered studying the law as a profession, but this work was a wonderful education in a fascinating domain where computing can be applied. My enjoyment of the reading almost certainly extending my research time in grad school by a couple of months.

The second thought was of the changes in chess brought about by the application of simple database technology. I've written about chess before, but not about computing applications to it. Of course, the remarkable advances in chess-playing computers that came to a head in Hitech and Deep Thought have now reached the desktop in the form of cheap and amazingly strong programs. This has affected chess in so many ways, from eliminating the possibility of adjournments in most tournaments to providing super-strong partners for every player who wants to play, day or night. The Internet does the same, though now we are never sure if we are playing against a person or a person sitting next to a PC running Fritz.

But my thoughts turned to the same effect Justice Roberts talked about, the changes created by opening databases on how players learn, study, and stay abreast of opening theory. If you have never played tournament chess, you may not be aware of how much knowledge of chess openings has been recorded. Go to a big-box bookstore like Amazon or Barnes and Noble or Borders and browse the library of chess titles. (You can do that on-line now, of course!) You will see encyclopedias of openings like, well, the Encyclopedia of Chess Openings; books on classes of openings, such as systems for defending against king pawn openings; and books upon books about individual openings, from the most popular Ruy Lopez and Sicilian Defense to niche openings like my favorites, Petroff's Defense and the Center Game.

In the olden days of the 1980s, players bought books on their objects of study and pored over them with the same vigor as legal theorists studying law review articles. We hunted down games featuring our openings so that we could play through them to see if there was a novelty worth learning or if someone had finally solved an open problem in a popular variation. I still have a binder full of games with Petroff's Defense, cataloged using my own system, variation by variation with notes by famous players and my own humble notes from unusual games. My goal was to know this opening so well that I could always get a comfortable game out of the opening, against even stronger players, and to occasionally get a winning position early against a player not as well versed in the Petroff as I.

Talk about a misspent youth.

Chessplayers these days have the same dream, but they rarely spend hours with their heads buried inside opening books. These days, it is possible to subscribe to a database service that puts at our fingertips, via a computer keyboard, every game played with any opening -- anywhere in the recorded chess world, as recently as the latest update a week ago. What is the study of chess openings like now? I don't know, having grown up in the older era and not having kept up with chess study in many years. Perhaps Justice Roberts feels a little like this these days. Clerks do a lot of his research, and when he needs to do his own sleuthing, those old law reviews feel warm and inviting.

I do know this. Opening databases have so changed chess practice, from grandmasters down to patzers like me, that the latest issue of Chess Life, the magazine of U.S. Chess, includes a review of the most recent revision of Modern Chess Openings -- the opening bible on which most players in the West once relied as the foundation of broad study -- whose primary premise is this: What role does MCO play in a world where computer database is king? What is the use of this venerable text?

From our gamerooms to our courtrooms, applications of even the most straightforward computing technology have changed the world. And we haven't even begun to talk about programs.

The Parade magazine insert to my Sunday paper contained an interview with legendary bluesman B.B. King that included this snippet:

There's never a day goes by that I don't miss having graduated and gone to college. If I went now, I would major in computers and minor in music. I have a laptop with me all the time, so it's my tutor and my buddy.

CS and music are, of course, a great combination. Over the years, I've had a number of strong and interesting students whose backgrounds included heavy doses of music, from alt rock to marching band to classical. But B.B. King is from a different universe. Maybe I can get this quote plastered on the walls of all the local haunts for musicians.

I wonder what B.B. calls his laptop?

Not really. But they do protect their marks.

A couple of years ago, I received a polite request from the lawyers of a well-known retired cartoonist, asking that I not use one of his cartoons. Today, I received a polite request from the lawyers of a well-known business author and speaker, asking:

Please make sure to include [a statement acknowledging our registered trademark] on each page that our trademarked term appears. Additionally, we respectfully request that every time you use our mark in the body of your work of commentary that you capitalize the first letter of each word in the mark and directly follow the mark with the ® symbol so that it reads as "... ®"

Google does change the landscape for many, many things. This is a good thing; it reduces friction in the market and the law.

One result for me is that I now know that the ® symbol is denoted by entity number 174 or entity name reg. I've used © occasionally, but rarely ®.

That said, I'm not too keen on having to capitalize two common words every time I use them in an article. I think I either need to write those articles without using the code phrase, or simply stop quoting books that are likely to trademark simple phrases. The latter rules out most thin business trade books, especially on management and marketing. That's not much of a loss, I suppose.

Fall semester is just around the corner. Students will begin to arrive on campus next week, and classes start a week from Monday. I haven't been able to spend much time on my class yet and am looking forward to next week, when I can.

What I have been doing is clearing a backlog of to-dos from the summer and handling standing tasks that come with the start of a new semester and especially a new academic year. This means managing several different to-do lists, crossing priorities, and generally trying to get things done.

As I look at this mound of things to do I can't help being reminded of something Jeff Patton blogged a month or so ago: two secrets of success in software development, courtesy of agile methods pioneer Jim Highsmith: start sooner, and do less.

Time ain't some magical quantity that I can conjure out of the air. It is finite, fixed, and flowing relentlessly by. If I can't seem to get done on time, I need to start sooner. If I can't seem to get it all done, I need to do less. Nifty procedures and good tools can help only so much.

I need to keep this in mind every day of the year.

Oh, and to you students out there: You may not be able to do less work in my class, but you can start sooner. You may have said so yourself at the end of last semester. Heck, you may even want to do more, like read the book...

I recently started reading The Art of Possibility, by Roz and Ben Zander, and it brought to mind a pattern I have seen many times in literature and in life. Early on, the Zanders explain that this book is "not about making incremental changes that lead to new ways of doing things based on old beliefs". It is "geared toward causing a total shift of posture [and] perceptions"; it is "about transforming your entire world".

That's big talk, but the Zanders are not alone in this message. When talking to companies about creating new products, reaching customers, and running a business, Guy Kawasaki uses the mantra Revolution, Then Evolution. Don't try to get better at what you are doing now, because you aren't always doing the right things. But also don't worry about trying to be perfect at doing something new, because you probably won't be. Transform your company or your product first, then work to get better.

This pattern works in part because people need to be inspired. The novelty of a transformation may be just what your customers or teammates need to rally their energies, when "just" trying to get better will make them weary.

It also works despite running contrary to our fixation these days with "evolving". Sometimes, you can't get there from here. You need a mutation, a change, a transformation. After the transformation, you may not be as good as you would like for a while, because you are learning how to see the world differently and how to react to new stimuli. That is when evolution becomes useful again, only now moving you toward a higher peak than was available in the old place.

I have seen examples of this pattern in the software world. Writing software patterns was a revolution for many companies and many practitioners. The act of making explicit knowledge that had been known only implicitly, or the act of sharing internal knowledge with others and growing a richer set of patterns, requires a new mindset for most of us. Then we find out we are not very good, so we work to get better, and soon we are operating in a world that we may not have been able even to imagine before.

Adopting agile development, especially a practice-laden approach such as XP, is for many developers a Revolution, Then Evolution experience. So are major lifestyle changes such as running.

Many of you will recognize an old computational problem that is related to this idea: hill climbing. Programs that do local search sometimes get stuck at a local maximum. A better solution exists somewhere else in the search space, but the search algorithm makes it impossible for the program to get out of the neighborhood of the local max. One heuristic for breaking out of this circumstance is occasionally to make a random jump somewhere else in the search space, and see where hill climbing leads. If it leads to a better max, stay there, else jump back to the starting point.

In AI and computer science more generally, it is usually easier to peek somewhere else, try for a while, and pop back if it doesn't work out. Most individuals are reluctant to make a major life change that may need to be undone later. We are, for the most part, beings living in serial time. But it can be done. (I sometimes envy the freer spirits in this world who seem built for this sort of experimentation.) It's even more difficult to cause a tentative radical transformation within an organization or team. Such a change disorients the people involved and strains their bonds, which means that you had better well mean it when you decide to transform the team they belong to. This is a major obstacle to Revolution, Then Evolution, and one reason that within organizations it almost always requires a strong leader who has earned everyone's trust, or at least their respect.

As a writer of patterns, I struggle with how to express the context and problem for this pattern. The context seems to be "life", though there are certainly some assumptions lurking underneath. Perhaps this idea matters only when we are seeking a goal or have some metric for the quality of life. The problem seems to be that we are not getting better, despite an effort to get better. Sometimes, we are just bored and need a change.

Right now, the best I can say from my own experience is that Revolution, Then Evolution applies when it has been a while since I made long-term progress, when I keep finding myself revisiting the same terrain again and again without getting better. This is a sign that I have plateaued or found a local maximum. That is when it is time to look for a higher local max elsewhere -- to transform myself in some way, and then begin again the task of getting better by taking small steps.

[Update: Added a linked to my interview at Confessions of a Science Librarian.]

Some months, I go through stretches when I write a lot. I started this month with a few substantive posts and a few light posts in the span of a week. Back in November 2007, I wrote twice as many posts as the typical month and more than any month since my first few months blogging. That month, I posted entries eleven days in a row, driven by a burst of thoughts from time spent at a workshop on science and computer science. This month, I had the fortune to read some good articles and the chance to skip real work, think, and write. Sometimes, the mood to write takes hold.

I have had an idea for a long time to write an entry that was motivated by reading George Orwell's essay Why I Write, but never seem to get to it. I'm not getting to it today, either. But it came to mind again for two reasons. First, I spent the morning giving a written interview to John Dupuis, who blogs at Confessions of a Science Librarian. John is a reader of my blog and asked me to share some of my ideas with his readers. I was honored to be asked, and so spent some time this morning reflecting on my blog, what and why I write. Second, today is the fourth anniversary of my first blog post.

Responding to John's questions is more writing than I do on most days. I don't have enough energy left to write a substantive post yet today, but I'm still in a reflective frame of mind about why I write.

Do I really need to blog? Someone has already said what I want to say. In that stretch of posts last November, I cited Norvig, Minsky, and Laurel, among others, talking about the same topics I was writing about. Some reasons I can think of are:

• My experiences are different, so maybe I have something to add, however small that might be.
• My posts link to all that great work, and someone who reads my blog may find an article they didn't know about and read it. Or they may remember it from the past, feel guilty at not having read it before, and finally go off to read it.
• If nothing else, I write to learn, and to make myself happy. Some days, that's more than enough reason for me.

There are certainly other self-interested reasons to write. There is noble self-interest:

Share your knowledge. It's a way to achieve immortality.
-- the 14th Dalai Lama

And there is the short-term self-interest. I get to make connections in my own mind. Sometimes I am privileged to see my influence on former students, when they respond to something I've written. And then there is the lazy blog, where some reader knows or has something I don't and shares. At times, these two advantages come together, as when former student Ryan Dixon brought me a surprise gift last winter.

Year Five begins today, even if still without comments.

While reading this morning I came across a link to this essay. College students should read it, because it points out many of the common anti-patterns in the essays that we professors see -- even in papers written for computer science courses.

Of course, if you read this blog, you know that my writing is a poster child for linguistic diffidence, and pat expressions are part of my stock in trade. It's sad to know that these anti-patterns make up so much of my word count.

This web page also introduced me to Roberts's book Patterns in English. With that title, I must check it out. I needed a better reason to stop by the library than merely to return books I have finished. Now I have one.

On my way into a store this afternoon to buy some milk, I ran into an old friend. He moved to town a decade or so ago and taught art at the university for five years before moving on to private practice. As we reminisced about his time on the faculty, we talked about how much we both like working with students. He mentioned that he recently attended his 34th wedding of a former student.

Thirty-four weddings from five years of teaching. I've been teaching for sixteen years and have been invited to only a handful of weddings -- three or four.

Either art students are a different lot from CS students, or I am doing something wrong...

I wrote about a recent CS curricular discussion, which started with a blog posting by Mark Guzdial. Reading the comments to Guzdial's post is worth the time, as you'll find a couple of lengthy remarks by Alan Kay. As always, Kay challenges even computer science faculty to think beyond the boundaries of our discipline to the role what our students learn from us plays in a democratic world.

One of Kay's comments caught my attention for connections to a couple of things I've written about in recent years. First, consider this:

I posit that this is still the main issue in America. "Skilled children" is too low a threshold for our system of government: we need "educated adults". ... I think the principle is clear and simple: there are thresholds that have to be achieved before one can enter various conversations and processes. "Air guitar and attitude" won't do.

Science is a pretty good model (and it was used by the framers of the US). It is a two level system. The first level has to admit any and all ideas for consideration (to avoid dogma and becoming just another belief system). But the dues for "free and open" are that science has built the strongest system of critical thinking in human history to make the next level threshold for "worthy ideas" as high as possible. This really works.

This echoes the split mind of a scientist: willing to experiment with the widest set of ideas we can imagine, then setting the highest standard we can imagine for accepting the idea as true. As Kay goes on to say, this approach is embedded in the fabric of the American mentality for free society and government. This is yet another good reason for all students to learn and appreciate modern science; it's not just about science.

Next, consider this passage that follows soon after:

"Air guitar" is a metaphor for choosing too tiny a subset of a process and fooling oneself that it is the whole thing. ... You say "needs" and I agree, but you are using it to mean the same as "wants", and it is simply not the case that education should necessarily adapt to the "wants" of students. This is where the confusion of education and marketing enters. The marketeers are trying to understand "wants" (and even inject more) and cater to them for a price; real educators are interested in "needs" and are trying to fulfill these needs. Marketeers are not trying to change but to achieve fit; educators are trying to change those they work with. Introducing marketing ideas into educational processes is a disaster in the making.

I've written occasionally about ideas from marketing, from the value of telling the right story to the creating of new programs. I believe those things and think that we in academia can learn a lot from marketers with the right ideas. Further, I don't think that any of this is in conflict with what Kay says here. He and I agree that we should not change our curriculum to cater solely to the perceptions and base desires of our clientele, whether students, industry, or even government. My appeal to marketing for inspiration lies in finding better ways to communicate what we do and offer and in making sure that what we do and offer are in alignment with the long-term viability of the culture. The best companies are in business for the long haul and must stay aligned with the changing needs of the world.

Further, as I am certain Kay will agree based on many of the things he has said about Apple of the 1980s, the very best companies create and sell products that their customers didn't even know they wanted. We in academia might learn something from the Apples of our world about how to provide the liberal and professional education that our students need but don't realize they need. The same goes for convincing state legislatures and industry when they view too short a horizon for what we do.

Like Kay, I want to give my students "real computing" and "real education".

I think it is fitting and proper to talk about these issues on Independence Day in the United States. We depend on education to preserve the democratic system in which we live and the values by which we live. But there's more. Education -- including, perhaps especially, science -- creates freedom in the student. The mind becomes free to think greater thoughts and accomplish greater deeds when it has been empowered with our best ideas. Science is one.

My recent entry on student evaluations brought to mind a few other items on not reading that I've encountered recently.

• Michael Mitzenmacher writes about the accessibility of scientific references, whether on-line or in obscure journals. How much effort should an author have to make to track down related work to cite? Presumably, Mitzenmacher holds authors responsible for reading works about which they know, but it seems a short step from asking whether authors must make extra effort to find related work to asking, as Bayard did, whether authors must make extra effort even to read related work. (And, if you have ever seen academic papers in computer science, you know that many of them do require extra effort to read!)
• Steve Yegge never learned to read sheet music and has survived by virtue of a prodigious memory. But he tells us that this is a bad thing:

  Having a good memory is a serious impediment to understanding. It lets you cheat your way through life.

  So, Montaigne and I need not worry. Had we better better memories, we might be skating through life as easily as Yegge.

• Comedian Pat Dixon has a schtick in which he gives unbiased movie reviews. How does he maintain his objectivity in a sea of personal opinion? He doesn't watch the movies! Wouldn't watching affect his reviews? Brilliant, and often quite funny.

I hope it's clear that at least this last example is not serious at all.

I've long been a fan of William James, and once wrote briefly about the connection between James's pragmatism and my doctoral work on knowledge-based systems. I was delighted yesterday to run across this quote from James's The Principles of Psychology, courtesy of 43 Folders and Linda Stone:

[Attention] is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. ... It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others....

Prone as I am to agile moments, this message from James struck me in an interesting way. First of all, I occasionally battle the issue that Stone writes about, the to-do list that grows no matter productive I seem to be on a given day. (And on lazy summer June days, well, all bets are off.) James tells me that part of my problem isn't a shortage of time, but a lack of will to focus. I need to make better, more conscious choices about what tasks to add to the list. Kent Beck is fond of saying something to the effect that you may have too many things to do and too little time, but you ultimately have control over only one side of the equation. James would tell us the same thing.

My mind also made a connection from this quote to the agile software and test-driven development practice of working on small stories, on taking small steps. If I pick up a card with a single, atomic, well-defined feature to be added to my program, I am able to focus. What is the shortest step I can take and make this feature part of my code? No distractions, no Zerstreutheit. Though I have an idea in mind toward where my program is evolving, for this moment I attend to one small feature and make it work. Focus. James would be proud.

I think it's ironic in a way that one of the more effective ways to reach the state of flow is to decompose a task into the smallest of tasks and focus on them one at a time. The mind gets into a rhythm of red bar-green bar: select task, write code, refactor, and soon it is deep in its own world. I would like to be more effective at doing this in my non-programming duties. Perhaps if I keep James and his quote in mind, I can be.

This idea applies for me in other areas, in particular in running and training for particular events. Focusing each day on a particular goal -- intervals, Long Slow Distance, hill strength, and so on -- helps the mind to push aside its concerns with other parts of the game and attend to a particular kind of improvement. There is a great sense of relaxation in running super-hard repeats when the problem I've been having is, say, picking up pace late in a run. (I'd love to run super-hard repeats again some day soon, but I'm not there yet.)

I saw a link to Wordle on Exploration Through Example and decided to try it out on Knowing and Doing. Wordle generates a tag cloud for any text you paste in. I pasted in the content of my blog since the beginning of 2008, and it produced this lovely image:

That looks like a pretty good capsule of what I've been writing about lately. I was a bit surprised at the size of "students", but I probably shouldn't have been. "Programming", "work", "time", "ideas", "read", and "computer"/"CS"/"computing" hit the mark.

Besides, I had fun writing the script to pull plain text for my posts from their source form. It was a nice break from a day dealing with lab reservations and end-of-year budget issues.

In recent days, I have written about not reading books and the relationship of these ideas to writing, from my enjoyment of Pierre Bayard's How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read. A couple of readers have responded with comments about how important reading is. Don't worry -- much of what Bayard and I are saying here is a joke. But it is also true, when looked at with one's head held tilted just so, and that's part of what made the book interesting to me. For you software guys, think about Extreme Programming -- an idea taken to its limits, to see what the limits can teach us. You can be sure that I am not telling you not to read every line of every novel and short story by Kurt Vonnegut! (I certainly have, some many, many times, and I enjoyed every minute.) Neither is Bayard, though it may seem so sometimes.

In my entries inspired by the book, it seems as if I am talking about myself an awful lot. Or consider my latest article, on parsing in CS courses. I read an article by Martin Fowler and ended up writing about my course and my opinions of CS courses. My guess is that most folks out there are more interested in Fowler's ideas than mine, yet I write.

This is another source of occasional guilt... Shouldn't this blog be about great ideas? When I write about, say, Bayard's book, shouldn't the entry be about Bayard's book? Or at least about Bayard?

Bayard helps me to answer these questions. Let's switch from Montaigne, the focus of my last entry on this topic, to Wilde. The lead quote of Bayard's Chapter 12 was the first passage of the book to seize my attention as I thumbed through it:

My experience writing this blog biases me toward shouting out, "Amen, Brother Bayard!" But, if it is true that all of my writing is a pretext for writing my autobiography, then it is all the more remarkable that I have any readers at all. Certainly you all have figured this out by now.

Bayard claims -- and Wilde agrees -- that it cannot be any other way. You may find more interesting people writing about themselves and read what they write, but you'll still be reading about the writer. (This is cold consolation for someone like me, who knows myself to be not particularly interesting!)

Bayard explores Wilde's writing on this very subject, in particular his The Critic as Artist (HB++). Bayard begins his discussion with the surface connection of Wilde offering strident support for the idea of not reading. Wilde says that, in addition to making lists of books to read and lists of books worth re-reading, we should also make lists of books not to read. Indeed, a teacher or critic would do an essential service for the world by dissuading people from wasting their time reading the wrong books. Not reading of this sort is a "power acquired by specialists, a particular ability to grasp what is essential".

Bayard then moves on to a deeper connection. Wilde asserts in his typical fashion that the distinction between creating a work of art and critiquing a work of art is artificial. First, the artist, when creating, necessarily exercises her critical faculty in the "spirit of choice" and the "subtle tact of omission"; without this faculty no one can create art, at least not art worth considering. This is an idea that most people are willing to accept, especially those creative people who have some awareness of how they create.

But what of the critic? Many people consider critics to be parasites who at best report what we can experience ourselves and and at worst detract from our experience with their self-indulgent contributions.

Not Wilde:

Criticism is itself an art. And just as artistic creation implies the working of the critical faculty, and, indeed, without it cannot be said to exist at all, so Criticism is really creative in the highest sense of the word. Criticism is, in fact, both creative and independent.

This means that a blogger who primarily comments on the work of others can herself be making art, creating new value. By choosing carefully ideas to discuss, subtly omitting what does not matter, the critic creates a new work potentially worthy of consideration in its own right. (Suddenly, the idea of a mashup comes to mind.)

The idea of critic as an independent creator is key. Wilde says:

The critic occupies the same relation to the work of art he criticises as the artist does to the visible world of form and colour, or the unseen world of passion and thought. He does not even require for the perfection of his art the finest materials. Anything will serve his purpose.

...

To an artist so creative as the critic, what does subject-matter signify? No more and no less than it does to the novelist and the painter. Like them, he can find his motives everywhere. Treatment is the test. There is nothing that has not in it suggestion or challenge.

Bayard summarizes other comments from Wilde in this way:

The work being critiqued can be totally lacking in interest, then, without impairing the critical exercise, since the work is there only as a pretext.

But how can this be?? Because ultimately, the writer writes about himself. Freed from the idea that writing about something else is about that something, the writer is able to use the something as a trigger, a cue to write about the ideas that lie in his own mind. (Please read the first paragraph of the linked entry, if nothing else. Talk about not reading!)

As Wilde says,

That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one's own soul.

Again, Bayard summarizes neatly:

Reflection on the self .. .is the primary justification for critical activity, and this alone can elevate criticism to the level of art.

As I read this chapter, I felt as if Bayard and Wilde were speaking directly to me and my own doubts as a blogger who likes to write about works I read, performances I see, and experiences as I have. It is a blogger's manifesto! Knowing and Doing feels personal to me because it is. Those works, performances, and experiences stimulate me to write, and that's okay. It is the nature of creativity to be sparked by something Other and to use that spark to express something that lies within the Self. Reading about Montaigne and his fear of forgetting what he had written was a trigger for me to write something I'd long been thinking. So I did.

I can take some consolation: This blog may not be worth reading, but not because I choose to connect what I read, see, hear, and feel to myself. It can be unworthy only to the extent that what is inside me is uninteresting.

By the way, I have just talked quite a bit about "The Critic as Artist", though I have never read it. I have only read the passages quoted by Bayard, and Bayard's commentary on it. I intend to read the original -- and begin forgetting it -- soon.

~~~~~

These three entries on Bayard's delightful little text cover a lot of ground in the neighborhood of guilt. We often feel shame at not having read something, or at not having grown from it. When we write for others, it is easy to become too concerned with getting things right, with being perfect, with putting on appearances. But consider this final quote from Bayard:

Truth destined for others is less important than truthfulness to ourselves, something attainable only by those who free themselves from the obligation to seem cultivated, which tyrannizes us from within and prevents us from being ourselves.

Long ago, near the beginning of this blog, I quoted Epictetus's The Enchiridion, via the movie Serendipity, of all places. That quote has a lot in common with what Bayard says here. Freeing ourselves from the obligation to seem cultivated -- being content to be thought foolish and stupid -- allows us to grow and to create. Epictetus evens refers to keeping our "faculty of choice in a state conformable to nature", just as Wilde stresses the role of critical faculty creating a work of art when we write.

Helping readers to see this truth and to release them from the obligation to appear knowing is the ultimate source of the value of How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read. Perhaps Bayard's will be proud that I mark it FB++.

In my last entry, I talked about Pierre Bayard's How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read, which I have, indeed, read. Bayard started with the notion that no one should feel shame about not having read a book, even when we are called upon to talk abut it. He eventually reached a much more important idea, that by freeing ourselves from this and other fears we have about books and learning we open ourselves to create art of our own. This entry looks at the bigger idea.

The issues that Bayard discusses throughout the book touch me in several personal and professional ways. I am a university professor, and as a teacher I am occasionally asked by students to talk about books and papers. I've read many of these, but not all; when I have read a work, though, I may well have forgotten a lot of it. In either case, I can find myself expected to talk intelligently about a work I don't know well. Not surprisingly, students show considerable deference to their teachers, in part because they expect a level of authority. That's pressure. Personally, I sometimes hang with an interesting, literate, well-read crowd. They've all read a lot of cool stuff; why haven't I? They don't ask me that, of course, but I ask myself.

Bayard assures us "don't worry!", explains why not, and tells us how to handle several common situations in which we will find ourselves. That's the idea -- partly humorous, partly serious -- behind the book.

But there is more to the book, both humor and truth, that connected with me. Consider:

Reading is not just acquainting ourselves with a text or acquiring knowledge; it is also, from its first moments, an inevitable process of forgetting.

Until I started writing this blog, I did not have a good sense of how bad my memory is for what I have read. I've never had a high level of reading comprehension. Those standardized tests we all took in grade school showed me to be a slow reader with only moderate comprehension, especially when compared to performance in school. One of the best outcomes for me of writing this blog has been to preserve some of what I read, especially the part that seems noteworthy at the time, before I start to forget it.

The chapter that contains the sentence quoted above begins with this subtitle:

Montaigne writes with fear about his forgetfulness, the loss any memory of having read a book. Does that still count? In one sense, yes. I've held Ringworld in my hands and taken in the words on each page. But in most ways I am today indistinguishable from a person who has never read the book, because I don't remember much more than the picture on the cover. Bayard explores this and other ways in which the idea of "to read" is ambiguous and bases his advice on the results.

How about any of the many, many technical computer science books I've read? The same fate. There is one solace to be had when we consider books that teach us how to do something. The knowledge we gain from reading technical material can become part of our active skill base, so that even after we have forgotten "knowledge that" the content of a compiler text is true, we can still have "knowledge how" to do something.

But reading is not the end of forgetting. Montaigne was an essayist. What about writing? Montaigne expects his loss to extend to his own work:

It is no great wonder if my book follows the fate of other books, and if my memory lets go of what I write as of what I read, and of what I give as of what I receive.

Forgetting what I have written is a sensation I share with Montaigne. Occasionally, I go back and re-read an old entry in this blog, or a month of entries, and am amazed. Some times, I am amazed that I wrote such drivel. Other times, I am amazed that I had such a good idea and managed to express it well. And, yes, I am often amazed to be reminded I have read something I've forgotten all about. In the best of these cases, the entry includes a quotation or, even better, a link to the work. This allows me to read it again, if I desire. I usually do.

That is good news. We can hold at bay the forgetting of what we read by re-reading. But there is another risk in forgetting: writing the same thing again. Bayard reports Montaigne's fear:

Incapable of remembering what he has written, Montaigne finds himself confronted with the fear of all those losing their memory: repeating yourself without realizing it....

Loss of memory creates an ambiguity in the writer's mind. It's common for me when writing a blog entry to have a sense of deja vu that I've written the same thing before. Sometimes my mind is playing tricks on me, due to the rich set of links in my brain, but sometimes I am and have forgotten. The fear in forgetting what we have written is heightened by the fear that what we write is unremarkable. We may remember the idea that stands out, but how are we to remember the nondescript? I often feel as Montaigne did:

Now I am bringing in here nothing newly learned. These are common ideas; having perhaps thought of them a hundred times, I am afraid I have already set them down.

I feel this almost no matter what I write. Surely my thoughts are common; what value is there in writing them down for others to read? That's why it was good for me to realize at the very beginning that I had to think that I was writing for myself. Only then would I find the courage to write at all and maybe benefit someone else. When confronted by a sense that I am writing the same ideas again, I just have to be careful. And when I do repeat myself, I must hope that I do it better the second time, or at least differently enough, to add something that makes the new piece worth a reader's time.

The danger in forgetting what I have written is not only in writing again. What about when a reader asks me about something I have written? Montaigne faced this fear, too, as Bayard writes:

But fear of repeating himself is not the only embarrassing consequence of forgetting his own books. Another is that Montaigne does not even recognize his own texts when they are quoted in his presence, leaving him to speak about texts he hasn't read even though he has written them.

That is at least two layers of not reading more than most of us expect to encounter in any situation! But the circumstance is quite real. When someone sends me e-mail asking about something I've forgotten I wrote, I have the luxury of time to re-read (there it is again!) before I respond. My correspondent is likely none the wiser. But what if they ask me in person? I am right where Bayard says I will be, left to respond in many of the ways he describes.

By writing about what I read and think about, there is a great risk that people will expect me to be changed by the experience! I did not do myself any favors when I chose a name for my blog, because I create an expectation about both knowing and doing. I certainly hope that I am changed by my experience reading and writing, but I know that often I have not changed, at least sufficiently. I still give lame assignments. I'm not that much better as a teacher at helping students learn more effectively. My shortcoming is all the more obvious when students and former students read my blog and are able to compare their experiences in my classes with my aspirations.

This is actually more a source of guilt for me than being thought not to have read a book. I know I am not as good as all the things I've read might lead one to believe, or even as good as what I've written (which sets a much lower bar!). If I am not growing, what is the point?

Of course, I probably am changing, in small increments beneath the scale of my perception. At least I hope so. Bayard doesn't say this in so many words, but I think it is implicit in how he approaches reading and not reading. For him, there is no distinction between the two:

We do not retain in memory complete books identical to the books rememeberd by everyone else, but rather fragments surviving from partial readings, frequently fused together and recast by our private fantasies.

This is a central theme for Bayard, and for me as well. He talks at length about the different ways our inner conception of books and libraries affects the act of reading any book. I often wonder how much of what I report about a book or paper I read is a product of me imposing my own view on what the writer has said -- not what is there, not what the author has intended, what distorts the writer's meaning? How much of what I am writing about Bayard's book reflects accurately the book he wrote?

Bayard would be unconcerned. On his view, I could no more not impose my inner book on the outer one than to be Bayard himself. No one can avoid distortion (in an objectivist sense) or imposition of self (in a subjectivist sense). What distinguishes the master is how forcefully and creatively one does so. Private fantasy, indeed!

To conceive of reading as loss ... rather than as gain is a psychological resource essential to anyone seeking effective strategies for surviving awkward literary confrontations.

Can I admit that I have forgotten something I've read or written? Certainly; I do it frequently. The key is to talk about the work as who I am in the present. I don't even need to explicitly acknowledge the loss, because the loss is a given. But I must talk without embarrassment and without any pretension that I remember exactly what I said or thought then. The human mind works in a certain way, and I must accept that state of affairs and get down to the business of learning -- and creating -- today.

I have another million to my credit, and it was a marvelous little surprise.

Popular culture is full of all sorts of literary references with which you and I are supposed to be familiar. Every year brings another one or two. The Paradox of Choice. The Tipping Point. The Wisdom of Crowds. Well-read people are expected, well, to have read the books, too. How else can we expect to keep up with our friends when they discuss these books, or to use the central wisdoms they contain in knowing ways?

I have a confession. I have read only two or three chapters of The Wisdom of Crowds. I have read only an excerpt from The Tipping Point that appeared in the New Yorker or some other literary magazine. And while I've seen a Google talk by Barry Schwartz on-line, I may not have read anything more than a short precis of the work. Of course, I have learned a lot about them from my friends, and by reading about them in various other contexts. But, strictly speaking, I have not read any of them.

To be honest, I feel no shame about this state of affairs. There are so, so many books to read, and these just have not seemed important enough to displace others from my list. And in the case of The Wisdom of Crowds, I found that one or two chapters told me pretty much all I needed to understand the Big Idea it contained. Much as Seth Godin has said about many popular business books, many books in the popular canon can be boiled down to much shorter works in their essence, with the rest being there for elaboration or academic gravitas.

For airplane reading on my trip to the workshop at Google, I took Pierre Bayard's How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read. Bayard's thesis is that neither I nor anyone else should feel shame about not having read any given book, even if we feel a strong compulsion to comment, speak, or write about it. In not reading and talking anyway, we are part of a grand intellectual tradition and are, in fact, acting out of necessity. There are simply too many books to read.

This problem arises even in the most narrow technical situation. When I wrote my doctoral dissertation, I surely cited works with which I was familiar but which I had not "read", or, having read them, had only skimmed them for specific details. I recall feeling a little bit uneasy; what if some party of the book or dissertation that I had not studied deeply said something surprising or wrong? But I knew a lot about these works in context: from other people's analyses, from other works by the same author, and even from having discussed the work with the author him- or herself. But in an important way, I was talking about a work I "had not read".

How I could cite the work anyway and still feel I was being intellectually honest gets to one of the central themes of Bayard's book: the relationships between ideas are often more important than the ideas themselves. To understand a work in the context of the universal library means more than just to know the details of the work, and the details themselves are often so affected by conditions outside of the text that they are less reliable than the bigger picture anyway.

First, let me assure you. Bayard wrote this book with a wink in his eye. At times, he speaks with a cavalier sarcasm. He also repeats himself in places; occasional paragraphs sound as if they have been lifted verbatim from previous chapters.

Second, this book fits Seth Godin's analysis of popular business books pretty well. Two or three chapters were sufficient to express the basic idea of this book. But such a slim product would have missed something important. How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read started as a joke, perhaps over small talk at a cocktail party, but as Bayard expanded on the idea he ended up with an irreverent take on reading, thinking, and understanding that carries a lot more truth than I might first have imagined. Readers of this blog who are software patterns aficionados might think of Big Ball of Mud in order to understand just what I mean: antipattern as pattern, when looked at from a different angle.

This book covers a variety of books that deal in some way with not reading books but talking about them. Along the way, Bayard explores an even wider variety of ideas. Many of these sound silly, even wrong, at first, and he uses this to weave a lit-crit tale that is perfect parody. But as I read, I kept saying, "Yeah, but..." in a way, this really is true.

For example, Bayard posits that reading too much can cause someone to lose perspective in the world of ideas and to lose one's originality. In a certain way, the reader subordinates himself to the writer, and so reading too much means always subordinating to another rather than creating ideas oneself. We could read this as encouragement not to read (much), which would miss his joke. But there is another level at which he is dead-on right. I knew quite a few graduate students who learned this firsthand when they got into a master's program and found that they preferred to immerse themselves in the research of others than to do creative research of their own. And there many blogs which do a fine job reporting on other people's work but which never seem to offer much new. (I struggle with that danger each time I write in this blog.)

Not reading does not mean that we cannot have an opinion. My friends and I are examples of this. Students are notorious for this, and Bayard, a lit professor, discusses the case of students in class at some length. But I was most taken by his discussion of Laura Bohannan's experience telling the story of Hamlet to the Tiv people of West Africa. As she told the story, the Tiv elders interpreted the story for her, correcting her -- and Western culture, and Shakespeare -- along the way. One of the interpretations was a heterodoxy that has a small but significant following among Shakespeare scholars. The chief even ventured to predict how the story ended, and did a pretty good job. Bayard used this as evidence that not reading a book may actually leave our eyes open to new possibilities. Bohannan's story is available on-line, and you really should read it -- it is delightful.

Bayard talks about so many different angles on our relationship with books and stories about them, including

• how we as listeners tend to defer to a speaker, and thus allow a non-reader to successfully talk about a book to us, and
• how some readers are masters at imposing their own views on even books they have read, which should give us all license to impose ourselves on the books we haven't read.

One chapter focuses on our encounters with writers, and the ticklish situations they create for the non-reader and for the writer. In another, Bayard deals with the relationship among professors, students, and books. It made me think about how students interpret the things I say in class, whether about our readings or the technical material we are learning. Both of these chapters figure in a second entry I'm writing about this book, as well as chapters on the works of Montaigne and Wilde.

One chapter uses as his evidence the campus novels of David Lodge, of whom I am a big fan. I've never blogged about them, but I did use the cover of one of his books to illustrate a blog entry. Yet another draws on Bill Murray's classic Groundhog Day, an odd twist in which actually reading books enters into Bayard's story and supports his thesis. I have recommended this film before and gladly do so again.

As in so many situations, our fear of appearing weak or unknowledgable is what prevents us from talking freely about a book we haven't read, or even to admit that we have not read it. But this same fear is also responsible for discouraging us from talking about books we have read and about ideas we have considered. This is ultimately the culprit that Bayard hopes to undermine:

But our anxiety in the face of the Other's knowledge is an obstacle to all genuine creativity about books. The idea that the Other has read everything, and thus is better informed than us, reduces creativity to a mere stopgap that non-readers might resort to in a pinch. In truth, readers and non-readers alike are caught up in an endless process of inventing books, whether we like it or not, and the real question is not how to escape that process, but how to increase its dynamism and its range.

Bayard's book is worth reading just for his excerpts of other books and for his pointer to the story about the Tiv. I should probably feel guilt at not having read this book yet when so many others have, but I'm just happy to have read it now.

While reading on the plane coming home, I glanced across the aisle and noticed another passenger reading Larry Niven's Ringworld. I smiled and thought "FB++", in Bayard's rating system. I could talk about it nonetheless.

I have already mentioned a couple of my first impressions of being a guest on the Google campus:

• good, plentiful, and diverse food and drink for employees and guests alike, and
• good, plentiful, and diverse power cables built right into the meeting tables.

Here are a few other things I noticed.

Calling it the "Google campus" is just right. It looks and feels like a college campus. Dining service, gym facilities, a small goodies store, laundry, sand volleyball courts... and lots of employees who look college-aged because they recently were.

Everywhere we walked outdoors, we saw numerous blue bicycles. They are free for the use of employees, presumably to move between buildings. But there appeared to be bike trails across the road where the bikes could be used for recreation, too.

The quad area between Buildings 40 and 43 had a dinosaur skeleton with pink flamingos in its mouth. Either someone forgot to tell the dinosaur "don't be evil", or the dinosaur has volunteered to serve as aviary for kitsch.

The same area included a neat little vegetable garden. How's that for eating local? (Maybe the dinosaur just wanted to fit in.)

As we entered Building 43 for breakfast, we were greeted with a rolling display of search terms that Google was processing, presumably in real time. I wondered if we were seeing a filtered list, but we did see a "paris hilton" in there somewhere.

The dining rooms served Google-branded ice cream sandwiches, IT's IT, "a San Francisco tradition since 1928". In typical Google fashion, the tasty treat (I verified its tastiness empirically with a trial of size N=2) has been improved, into "a natural, locally sourced, trans-fat-free rendition of their excellent treat". So there.

I don't usually comment on my experience in the restroom, but... The men's rooms at Google do more than simply provide relief; they also provide opportunities for professional development. Testing on the Toilet consists of flyers over the urinal with stories and questions about software testing. (But what's a "C.L.", as in "one conceptual change per C.L."?) I cannot confirm that female engineers at Google have the same opportunities to learn while taking the requisite breaks from their work.

I earlier commented that we visitors had to stay within sight of a Google employee. After a few more hours on campus, it became clear that security is a major industry at Google. Security guards were everywhere. My fellow guests and I couldn't decide whether they were guarding against intellectual property theft by brazen Microsoft or Yahoo! employees or souvenir theft by Google groupies. But I did decide that the Google security force far outnumbers the police force in my metro area.

All in all, an interesting and enjoyable experience.

The second half of the workshop opened with one of the best sessions of the event, the presentation "What Research Tells Us About Best Practices for Recruiting Girls into Computing" by Lecia Barker, a senior research scientist at the National Center for Women and IT. This was great stuff, empirical data on what girls and boys think and prefer. I'll be spending some time looking into Barker's summary and citations later. Some of the items she suggested confirm commonsense, such as not implying that you need to be a genius to succeed in computing; you only need to be capable, like anything else. I wonder if we realize how often our actions and examples implicitly say "CS is difficult" to interested young people. We can also use implicit cues to connect with the interests of our audience, such as applications that involve animals or the health sciences, or images of women performing in positions of leadership.

Other suggestions were newer to me. For example, evidence shows that Latina girls differ more from white and African-American girls than white and African-American girls differ from each other. This is good to know for my school, which is in the Iowa metro area with the highest percentage of African-Americans and a burgeoning Latina population. She also suggested that middle-school girls and high-school girls have different interests and preferences, so outreach activities should be tailored to the audience. We need to appeal to girls now, not to who they will be in three years. We want them to be making choices now that lead to a career path.

A second Five-Minute Madness session had less new information for me. I thought most about funding for outreach activities, such as ongoing support for an undergraduate outreach assistant whom we have hired for next year using a one-time grant form the university's co-op office. I had never considered applying for a special projects grant from the ACM for outreach, and the idea of applying to Avon was even more shocking!

The last two sessions were aimed at helping people get a start on designing an outreach project. First, the whole group brainstormed ideas for target audiences and goals, and then the newbies in the room designed a few slides for an outreach presentation with guidance from the more experienced people. Second, the two groups split, with the newbies working more on design and the experienced folks discussing the biggest challenges they face and ways to overcome them.

These sessions again made clear that I need to "think bigger". One, Outreach need not aim only at schools; we can engage kids through libraries, 4-H (which has broadened its mission to include technology teams), the FFA, Boys and Girls Clubs, and the YMCA and YWCA. Some schools report interesting results from working with minority girls through mother/daughter groups at community centers. Sometimes, the daughters end up encouraging the moms to think bigger themselves and seek education for more challenging and interesting careers. Two, we have a lot more support from upper administration and from CS faculty at my school than most outreach groups have at their schools. This means that we could be more aggressive in our efforts. I think we will next year.

The workshop ended with a presentation by Gabe Cohen, the project manager for Google Apps. This was the only sales pitch we received from Google in the time we were here (other than being treated and fed well), and it lasted only fifteen minutes. Cohen showed a couple of new-ish features of the free Apps suite, including spreadsheets with built-in support for web-based form input. He closed hurriedly with a spin through the new AppEngine, which debuted to the public on Wednesday. It looks cool, but do I have time?

The workshop was well-done and worth the trip. The main point I take away is to be more aggressive on several fronts, especially in seeking funding opportunities. Several companies we work with have funded outreach activities at other schools, and our state legislative and executive branches have begun to take this issue seriously from the standpoint of economic development. I also need to find ways to leverage faculty interest in doing outreach and interest from our administration in both STEM education initiatives and community service and outreach.

The workshop has ended. Google was a great host, from beginning to end. They began offering food and drinks almost immediately, and we never hungered or thirsted for long. That part of the trip made Google feel like the young person's haven it is. Wherever we went, the meeting tables included recessed power and ethernet cables for every kind of laptop imaginable, including my new Mac. (Macbook Pros were everywhere we went at Google.) But we also learned right away that visitors also must stay within bounds. No wandering around was allowed; we had to remain within sight of a Googler. And we were told not to take any photos on the grounds or in the buildings.

The workshop was presented live from within Google Docs, which allowed the leaders and presenters to display from a common tool and to add content as we went along. The participants didn't have access to the doc, but we were it as a PDF file -- on the smallest flash drive I've ever owned. It's a 1GB stick with the dimensions of the delete key on my laptop (including height).

The introduction to the workshop consisted of a linked-list game in which each person introduced the person to his left, followed by remarks from Maggie Johnson, the Learning and Development Director at Google Engineering, and Chris Stephenson, the executive director of ACM's Computer Science Teachers Association. The game ran a bit long, but it let everyone see how many different kinds of people were in the room, including a lot of non-CS faculty who lead outreach activities for some of the bigger CS departments. Chris expressed happiness that K-12, community colleges, and universities were beginning to work together on the CS pipeline. Outreach is necessary, but it can also be joyful. (This brought to mind her panel statement at SIGCSE, in a session I still haven't written up...)

Next up was Liz Adams reporting on her survey of people and places who are doing road shows or thinking about it. She has amassed a lot of raw data, which is probably most useful as a source of ideas. During her talk, someone asked, does anyone know if what they are doing is working? This led to a good discussion of assessment and just what you can learn. The goals of these road shows are many. When we meet with students, are we recruiting for our own school? Or are we trying to recruit for discipline, getting more kids to consider CS as a possible major? Are we working to reach more girls and underrepresented groups, or do we seek a rising tide? Perhaps we are doing service for the economy of our community, region, or state? The general answer is 'yes' to all of these things, which makes measuring success all the more difficult. While it's comforting to shoot wide, this may not be the most effective strategy for achieving any goal at all!

One idea I took away from this session was to ask students to complete a short post-event evaluation. I view most of our outreach activities these days as efforts to broaden interest in computer science generally, and to broaden students' views of the usefulness and attractiveness of computing even more generally. So I'd like to ask students about their perceptions of computing after we work with them. Comparing these answers to ones gathered before the activity would be even better. My department already asks students declaring CS majors to complete a short survey, and I plan to ensure it includes a question that will allow us to see whether our outreach activities have had any effect on the new students we see.

Then came a session called Five-Minute Madness, in which three people from existing outreach programs answered several questions in round-robin fashion, spending five minutes altogether on each. I heard a few useful nuggets here:

• Simply asking a young student "What will you be when you grow up?" and then talking about what we do can be a powerful motivator for some kids.

• Guidance counselors in the high schools are seriously misinformed about computing. No surprise there. But they often don't have access to the right information, or the time to look for it. The outreach program at UNC-Charlotte has produced a packet of information specifically for school counselors, and they visit with the counselors on any school visit they can.

• Reaching the right teacher in a high school can be a challenge. It is hard to find "CS teachers" because so few states certify that specialty. Don't send letters addressed to the "computing teacher"; it will probably end up in the trash can!

• We have to be creative in talking to people in the Department of Education, as well as making sure we time our mailings and offerings carefully. Know the state's rules about curriculum, testing, and the like.

• It's a relationship. Treat initial contacts with a teacher like a first date. Take the time to connect with the teacher and cultivate something that can last. One panelist said, "We HS teachers need a little romance." If we do things right, these teachers can become our biggest advocates and do a lot of "recruiting" for us through their everyday, long-term relationship with the students.

Dinner in one of the Google cafeterias was just like dinner in one of my university's residence halls, only with more diverse fare. A remarkable number of employees were there. Ah, to be young again.

Our first day closed with people from five existing programs telling us about their road shows. My main thought throughout this session was that these people spend a lot of time talking to -- at -- the kids. I wonder how effective this is with high school students and imagine that as the audience gets younger, this approach becomes even less effective. That said, I saw a lot of good slides with information that we can use to do some things. The presenters have developed a lot of good material.

Off to bed. Traveling west makes for long, productive days, but it also makes me ready to sleep!

Someone pointed me toward a video of a talk given at Google by John Medina on his new book Brain Rules. I enjoyed the talk and will have to track down a copy of the book. Early on, he explains that the way he have designed our schools and workplaces produce the worst possible environments in which for us to learn and work. But my favorite passage came near the end, in response to the question, "Do you believe in magic?"

Hopefully I'm a nice guy, but I'm a really grumpy scientist, and in the end, I'm a reductionist. So if you can show me, [I'll believe it]. As a scientist, I have to be grumpy about everything and be able to be willing to believe anything. ... If you care what you believe, you should never be in the investigative fields -- ever. You can't care what you believe; you just have to care what's out there. And when you do that, your bandwidth is as wide as that sounds, and the rigor ... has to be as narrow as as the biggest bigot you've ever seen. Both are resident in a scientist's mind at the same time.

Yes. Unfortunately, public discourse seems to include an unusually high number of scientists are very good at the "being grumpy about everything" part and not so good at the "being able to be willing to believe anything" part. Notice that Medina said "be able to be willing to believe", not "be willing to believe". I think that some people are less able to be willing to believe something they don't already believe, which makes them not especially good candidates to be scientists.

I grew up on the sitcom of the 1970s and 1980s. As kids, we watched almost everything we saw in reruns, whether from the '60s or the '70s, but I enjoyed so many of them. By the time I got to college, I had well-thought ideas on why The Dick Van Dyke Show remains one of the best sitcoms ever, why WKRP in Cincinnati was underrated for its quality, and why All in the Family was _the_ best sitcom ever. I still hold all these biases in my heart. Of course, I didn't limit myself to sitcoms; I also loved light-action dramas, especially The Rockford Files.

Little did I know then that my TV viewing was soaking up a cognitive surplus in a time of social transition, or that it had anything in common with gin pushcarts in the streets of London at the onset of the Industrial Revolution.

Clay Shirky has published a wonderful little essay, Gin, Television, and Social Surplus that taught me these things and put much of what we see on happening on the web into the context of a changing social, cultural, and economic order. Shirky contends that, as our economy and technology evolve, a "cognitive surplus" is created. Energy that used to be spent on activities required in the old way is now freed for other purposes. But society doesn't know what to do with this surplus immediately, and so there is a transition period where the surplus is dissipated in (we hope) harmless ways.

My generation, and perhaps my parents', was part of this transition. We consumed media content produced by others. Some denigrate that era as one of mindless consumption, but I think we should not be so harsh. Shows like All in the Family and, yes, WKRP in Cincinnati often tackled issues on the fault lines of our culture and gave people a different way to be exposed to new ideas. Even more frivolous shows such as The Dick Van Dyke Show and The Rockford Files helped people relax and enjoy, and this was especially useful for those who were unprepared for the expectations of a new world.

We are now seeing the advent of the new order in which people are not relegated to consuming from the media channels of others but are empowered to create and share their own content. Much attention is given by Shirky and many, many others to the traditional media such as audio and video, and these are surely where the new generation has had its first great opportunities to shape its world. As Shirky says:

Here's something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here's something four-year-olds know: Media that's targeted at you but doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still for.

But as I've been writing about here, lets not forget the next step: the power to create and shape the media themselves via programming. When people can write programs, they are not relegated even to using the media they have been given but are empowered to create new media, and thus to express and share ideas that may otherwise have been limited to the abstraction of words. Flickr and YouTube didn't drop from the sky; people with ideas created new channels of dissemination. The same is true of tools like Photoshop and technologies such as wikis: they are ideas turned into reality through code.

Do read Shirky's article, if you haven't already. It has me thinking about the challenge we academics face in reaching this new generation and engaging them in the power that is now available to them. Until we understand this world better, I think that we will do well to offer young people lots of options -- different ways to connect, and different paths to follow into futures that they are creating.

One thing we can learn from the democratized landscape of the web. I think, is that we are not offering one audience many choices; we are offering many audiences the one or two choices each that they need to get on board. We can do this through programming courses aimed at different audiences and through interdisciplinary major and minor programs that embed the power of computing in the context of problems and issues that matter to our students.

Let's keep around the good old CS majors as well, for those students who want to go deep creating the technology that others are using to create media and content -- just as we can use the new technologies and media channels to keep great old sitcoms available for geezers like me.

A former student recently mentioned a tough choice he faces. He has a great job at a Big Company here in the Midwest. The company loves him and wants him to stay for the long term. He likes the job, the company, and the community in which he lives. But this isn't the sort of job he originally had hoped for upon graduation.

Now a position of just the sort he was originally looking for is available to him in a sunny paradise. He says, "I have quite a decision to make.... it's hard to convince myself to leave the secure confines of [Big Company]. Now I see why their turnover rate is so low."

I had a hard time offering any advice. When I was growing up, my dad work for Ford Motor Company in an assembly plant, and he faced insecurity about the continuance of his job several times. I don't know how much this experience affected my outlook on jobs, but in any case my personality is one that tends to value security over big risk/big gain opportunities.

Now I hold a job with greater job security than anyone who works for a big corporation. An older colleague is fond of saying Real men don't accept tenure. I first heard him say that when I was in grad school, and I remember not getting it at all. What's not to like about tenure?

After a decade with tenure, I understand better now what he means. I always thought that the security provided by having tenure would promote taking risks, even if only of the intellectual sort. But too much security is just as likely to stunt growth and inhibit taking risks. I sometimes have to make a conscious effort to push myself out of my comfort zone. Intellectually, I feel free to try new things, but pushing myself out of a comfortable nest here into a new wnvironment -- well, that's another matter. What are the opportunity costs in that?

I love what Paul Graham says about young CS students and grads having the ability to take entrepreneurial risk, and how taking those risks may well be the safer choice in the long run. It's kind of like investing in stocks instead of bonds, I think. I encourage all of my students to give entrepreneurship a thought, and I encourage even more the ones whom I think have a significant chance to do something big. There is probably a bit of wistfulness in my encouragement, not having done that myself, but I don't think I'm simply projecting my own feelings. I really do believe that taking some employment risk, especially while young, is good for many CS grads.

But when faced with a concrete case -- a particular student having to make a particular decision -- I don't feel quite so cocksure in saying "go for it with abandon". This is not abstract theory; his job and home and fiancee are all in play. He will have to make this decision on his own, and I'd hate to push him toward something that isn't right for him from my cushy, secure seat in the tower. I feel a need to stay abstract in my advice and leave him to sort things out. Fortunately, he is a bright, level-headed guy, and I'm sure he'll do fine whichever way he chooses. I wish him luck.

Surround yourself with smart, competent people, and you will find ideas in the air. One of the compelling thoughts in that article is this:

A scientific genius is not a person who does what no one else can do; he or she is someone who does what it takes many others to do.

For those of us who are not geniuses, the lesson is that we can still accomplish great things -- if we take part in the right sort of collaboration and be curious, inquisitive, and open to big ideas. I think this applies not only to inventions but also to ideas for start-ups and insight to class projects.

(So go to class. You'll find people there.)

But being in a group is not a path to easy accomplishment, as people who have tried to write a book in a group know:

Talking about a "group-book" is a lot of fun. Actually putting one together, maybe less fun.

The ongoing ChiliPLoP working group of which I am a member is another datapoint for Mitzenmacher's claim. Doing more than brainstorming ideas in a groups takes all the same effort, coordination, and individual and collective responsibility as any other sort of work.

(As an aside, I love Stigler's Law as quoted in the Gladwell article linked above! Self-reference can be a joy, especially with the twist engendered by this one.)

I notice a common rhetorical device in many academic arguments. It goes like this. One person makes a claim and offers some evidence. Often, the claim involves doing something new or seeing something in a new way. The next person rebuts the argument with a claim that the old way of doing or seeing things is more "fundamental" -- it is the foundation on which other ways of doing and seeing are built. Oftentimes, the rebuttal comes with no particular supporting evidence, with the claimant relying on many in the discussion to accept the claim prima facie. We might call this The Fundamental Imperative.

This device is standard issue in the CS curriculum discussions about object-oriented programming and structured programming in first-year courses. I recently noticed its use on the SIGCSE mailing list, in a discussion of what mathematics courses should be required as part of a CS major. After several folks observed that calculus was being de-emphasized in some CS majors, in favor of more discrete mathematics, one frequent poster declared:

(In a word, computer science is no longer to be considered a hard science.)

If we know [the applicants'] school well we may decide to treat them as having solid and relevant math backgrounds, but we will no longer automatically make that assumption.

Often, the conversation ends there; folks don't want to argue against what is accepted as basic, fundamental, good, and true. But someone in this thread had the courage to call out the emperor:

If you want good physicists, then hire people who have calculus. If you want good computer scientists, then hire people who have discrete structures, theory of computation, and program verification.

I don't believe that people who are doing computer science are not doing "hard science" just because it is not physics. The world is bigger than that.

...

You say "solid and relevant" when you really should be saying "relevant". The math that CS majors take is solid. It may not be immediately relevant to problems [at your company]. That doesn't mean it is not "solid" or "hard science".

I sent this poster a private "thank you". For some reason, people who drop the The Fundamental Imperative into an argument seem to think that it is true absolutely, regardless of context. Sure, there may be students who would benefit from learning to program using a "back to the basics" approach, and there may be CS students for whom calculus will be an essential skill in their professional toolkits. But that's probably not true of all students, and it may well be that the world has changed enough that most students would benefit from different preparation.

"The Fundamental Imperative" is a nice formal name for this technique, but I tend to think of it as "if it was good enough for me...", because so often it comes down to old fogies like me projecting our experience onto the future. Both parties in such discussions would do well not to fall victim to their own storytelling.

In his recent bestseller The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Nassim Nicholas Taleb uses the term narrative fallacy to describe man's penchant for creating a story after the fact, perhaps subconsciously, in order to explain why something happened -- to impute a cause for an event we did not expect. This fallacy derives from our habit of imposing patterns on data. Many view this as a weakness, but I think it is a strength as well. It is good when we use it to communicate ideas and to push us into backing up our stories with empirical investigation. It is bad when we let our stories become unexamined truth and when we use the stories to take actions that are not warranted or well-founded.

Of late, I've been thinking of the narrative fallacy in its broadest sense, telling ourselves stories that justify what we see or want to see. My entry on a response to the Onward! submission by my ChiliPLoP group was one trigger. Those of us who believe strongly that we could and perhaps should be doing something different in computer science education construct stories about what is wrong and what could be better; we're like anyone else. That one OOPSLA reviewer shed a critical light on our story, questioning its foundation. That is good! It forces us to re-examine our story, to consider to what extent it is narrative fallacy and to what extent it matches reality. In the best case, we now know more about how to tell the story better and what evidence might be useful in persuading others. In the worst, we may learn that our story is a crock. But that's a pretty good worst case, because it gets us back on the path to truth, if indeed we have fallen off.

A second trigger was finding a reference in Mark Guzdial's blog to a short piece on universal programming literacy at Ken Perlin's blog. "Universal programming literacy" is Perlin's term for something I've discussed here occasionally over the last year, the idea that all people might want or need to write computer programs. Perlin agrees but uses this article to consider whether it's a good idea to pursue the possibility that all children learn to program. It's wise to consider the soundness of your own ideas every once in a while. While Perlin may not be able to construct as challenging a counterargument as our OOPSLA reviewer did, he at least is able to begin exploring the truth of his axioms and the soundness of his own arguments. And the beauty of blogging is that readers can comment, which opens the door to other thinkers who might not be entirely sympathetic to the arguments. (I know...)

It is essential to expose our ideas to the light of scrutiny. It is perhaps even more important to expose the stories we construct subconsciously to explain the world around us, because they are most prone to being self-serving or simply convenient screens to protect our psyches. Once we have exposed the story, we must adopt a stance of skepticism and really listen to what we hear. This is the mindset of the scientist, but it can be hard to take on when our cherished beliefs are on the line.

The Small Doses pattern I wrote up in my previous entry was triggered almost exclusively by the story I heard from Carl Page. The trigger lives on in the text that runs from "Often times, the value of Small Doses..." to the end, and in the paragraph beginning "There is value in distributing...". The story was light and humorous, just the sort of story that will stick with a person for twenty or more years.

As I finally wrote the pattern, it grew. That happens all the time when I write. It grew both in size and in seriousness. At first I resisted getting too serious, but increasingly I realized that the more serious kernel of truth needed telling. So I gave it a shot.

The result of this change in tone and scope means that the pattern you read is not yet ready for prime time. Rather than wait until it was ready, though, I decided to let the pattern be a self-illustration. I have put it out now, in its rough form. It is rough both in completeness and in quality. Perhaps my readers will help me improve. Perhaps I will have time and inspiration soon to tackle the next version.

In my fantasies, I have time to write more patterns in a Graduate Student pattern language (code name: Chrysalis), even a complete language, and cross-reference it with other pattern languages such as XP. Fantasies are what they are.

Last night, I attended a Billy Joel concert. I last saw him perform live a decade or so ago. Billy was a decade older, and I was a decade older. He looked it, and I'm sure I do, too.

But when he started to play the piano, it could have been 1998 in the arena. Or 1988. Or 1978. The music flowing from his hands and his dancing feet filled me. Throughout the night I was 19 again, then 14, 10, and 25. I was lying on my parents' living room floor; sitting in the hand-me-down recliner that filled my college dorm room; dancing in Market Square Arena with an old girlfriend. I was rebellious teen, wistful adult, and mesmerized child.

There are moments when time seems more illusion than reality. Last night I felt like Billy Pilgrim, living two-plus hours unstuck in time.

Oh, and the music. There are not many artists who can, in the course of an evening, give you so many different kinds of music. From the pounding rock of "You May Be Right" to the gentle, plaintive "She's Always A Woman", and everything between. The Latin rhythms of "Don't Ask Me Why" extended with an intro of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy", and a "Root Beer Rag" worthy of Joplin.

Last night, my daughters aged 15 and 11 attended the concert with me. Music lives on, and time folds back on itself yet again.

[A transcript of the SIGCSE 2008 conference: Table of Contents]

This sort of entry usually comes after I write up the various conference sessions and have leftovers that didn't quite fit in an article. That may still happen, but I already have some sense of what will go where and have these items as miscellaneous observations.

First of all, I tried an experiment today. I did not blog in real-time. I used -- gasp! -- the antiquated technology of pen and paper to take notes during the sessions. On one or two occasions, I whipped open the laptop to do a quick Google search for a PhD dissertation or a book, but I steadfastly held back from the urge to type. I took notes on paper, but I couldn't fall into "writing" -- crafting sentences, then forming paragraphs, editing, ... All I could do was jot, and because I write slowly I had to be pickier about what I recorded. One result is that I paid more attention to the speakers, and less to a train of thought in my head. Another is that I'll have to write up the blog posts off-line, and that will take time!

As I looked through the conference program last night, I found myself putting on my department head hat, looking for sessions that would serve my department in the roles I now find myself in more often: CS1 for scientists, educational policy in CS, and the like. But when I got to the site and found myself having to choose between Door A and Door B... I found myself drifting into the room where Stuart Reges was talking about a cool question that seems to pick out good CS students, and the nifty assignments. Whatever my job title may be, I am a programmer and CS teacher. (More on both of those sessions in coming entries...)

Now, for a couple of non-CS, non-teaching observations.

• I am amazed at how many healthy adults will walk out of their way, past a perfectly good set of stairs, to ride up an escalator. Sigh.
• Staying at the discount motel over three miles away and without a car, I am relying on public buses. I have quickly learned that bus schedules are suggestions, not contracts. Deal with it. And in Portland, that often means: deal with it in the rain.
• Schoolchildren here take standard mass transit buses to school. I never knew such a place existed.

There is so much for me to learn.

With the exception of my annual visit to Carefree for ChiliPLoP, I don't often get a chance to return to a city for another conference. This year brings a pleasant return to Portland for SIGCSE 2008. OOPSLA'06 was in Portland, and I wrote up a little bit about running in Portland as part of my first visit to town. Because I was on the conference planning committee that year, I made three trips to the city, stayed in the same hotel three times, and ran several of the same routes three times. The convention center is right in town, which makes it hard to get to any nice parks to run, but Portland has a 3-mile loop alongside the Willamette River that provides a decent run.

This time, I am on my own dime and trying to save a little money by staying at a budget motel about 3.5 miles from the convention center. That meant figuring out bus routes and bus stops for the ride between the two -- no small feat for a guy who has never lived in a place where public transportation is common! It also meant planning some new runs, including a route back to the waterfront.

I arrived in town early enough yesterday to figure out the buses (I think) and still have time for an exploratory run. I ran toward the river, and then toward the convention center, until I knew the lay of the land well enough. The result was 4.5 miles of urban running in neighborhoods I'd never seen. This morning, used what I learned to get to the river, where I ran my first lap through the Governor Tom McCall Waterfront Park and the Eastbank Esplanade since October 2006. I ended up with about 8 miles under my belt, and a strong desire to return Saturday evening for three laps and what will be a 14-miler -- what would be my longest run since the Marine Corps Marathon. Let's see how I feel in a couple of days...

The rest of this week I am at SIGCSE, and I'm looking forward to seeing old friends and colleagues and to talking CS for a few days. Then on Sunday, four of us fly to Phoenix for ChiliPLoP and some intense work. This is a long time to be away from home and to miss my family, but the ideas should keep me busy.

Does it have a name?

Of course, Schadenfreude itself doesn't really have a name in English. It is a German word that means roughly delight in another person's misfortune. (However, I see that Wikipedia offers one, the 300+-year-old, apparently abandoned "epicaricacy".)

Last semester, a colleague described what struck me as the complement of Schadenfreude. He reported that one of our close friends, a retired professor here, expressed a strong unhappiness or distaste for faculty who succeeded in publishing academic papers. This matters to him because he is one of those folks. His friend came to the university in a different era, when we were a teacher's college without any pretension to being a comprehensive university. The new faculty who publish and talk about their research, she said, are "just showing off". Their success caused her pain, even if they didn't brag about their success.

This is not the opposite of Schadenfreude. That is happiness in another's good fortune, which Wikipedia tells us matches the Buddhist concept of mudita. What our friend feels inverts both the emotion and the trigger.

I don't think that her condition corresponds to envy. When someone is envious, they want what someone else has. Our friend doesn't want what the others have; she is saddened, almost angered, that others have it. No one should.

The closest concept I can think of is "sour grapes", a metaphor from one of Aesop's beloved fables. But in this story, the fox does want the grapes, and professes to despise them only when he can't reach them. I believe that our friend really doesn't want the success of research; she earnestly believes that our mission is to teach, not publish, and that energy spent doing research is energy misspent. And that makes her feel bad.

When my colleague told me his story, I joked that the name for this condition should be freudenschade. I proposed this even though I know a little German and know how non-sensical it is. But it seemed fun. Sadly, I wasn't the first person to coin the word... Google tells me that at least one other person has. You may be tempted to say that I feel freudenschade that someone else coined the term "freudenschade" first, but I don't. What I feel is envy!

The particular story that led to my discussion is almost beside the point. I'm on a mission that has moved beyond it. I am not aware of a German word for the complement of Schadenfreude. Nor am I aware of an English word for it. Is there a word for it anywhere, in English, German, or some other language?

I'm curious... Perhaps the Lazyweb can help me.

While catching up on some work at the office yesterday -- a rare Saturday indeed -- I listened to Peter Turchi's OOPSLA 2007 keynote address, available from the conference podcast page. Turchi is a writer with whom conference chair Richard Gabriel studied while pursuing his MFA at Warren Wilson College. I would not put this talk in the same class as Robert Hass's OOPSLA 2005 keynote, but perhaps that has more to do with my listening to an audio recording of it and not being there in the moment. Still, I found it to be worth listening as Turchi encouraged us to "get lost" when we want to create. We usually think of getting lost as something that happens to us when we are trying to get somewhere else. That makes getting lost something we wish wouldn't happen at all. But when we get lost in a new land inside our minds, we discover something new that we could not have seen before, at least not in the same way.

As I listened, I heard three ideas that captured much of the essence of Turchi's keynote. First was that we should strive to avoid preconception. This can be tough to do, because ultimately it means that we must work without knowing what is good or bad! The notions of good and bad are themselves preconceptions. They are valuable to scientists and engineers as they polish up a solution, but they often are impediments to discovering or creating a solution in the first place.

Second was the warning that a failure to get lost is a failure of imagination. Often, when we work deeply in an area for a while, we sometimes feel as if we can't see anything new and creative because we know and understand the landscape so well. We have become "experts", which isn't always as dandy a status as it may seem. It limits what we see. In such times, we need to step off the easy path and exercise our imaginations in a new way. What must I do in order to see something new?

This leads to the third theme I pulled from Turchi's talk: getting lost takes work and preparation. When we get stuck, we have to work to imagine our way out of the rut. For the creative person, though, it's about more about getting out of a rut. The creative person needs to get lost in a new place all the time, in order to see something new. For many of us, getting lost may seem like as something that just happens, but the person who wants to be lost has to prepare to start.

Turchi mentioned Robert Louis Stevenson as someone with a particular appreciation for "the happy accident that planning can produce". But artists are not the only folks who benefit from these happy accidents or who should work to produce the conditions in which they can occur. Scientific research operates on a similar plane. I am reminded again of Robert Root-Bernstein's ideas for actively engaging the unexpected. Writers can't leave getting lost to chance, and neither can scientists.

Turchi comes from the world of writing, not the world of science. Do his ideas apply to the computer scientist's form of writing, programming? I think so. A couple of years ago, I described a structured form of getting lost called air-drop programming, which adventurous programmers use to learn a legacy code base. One can use the same idea to learn a new framework or API, or even to learn a new programming language. Cut all ties to the familiar, jump right in, and see what you learn!

What about teaching? Yes. A colleague stopped by my office late last week to describe a great day of class in which he had covered almost none of what he had planned. A student had asked a question whose answer led to another, and then another, and pretty soon the class was deep in a discussion that was as valuable, or more, than the planned activities. My colleague couldn't have planned this unexpectedly good discussion, but his and the class's work put them in a position where it could happen. Of course, unexpected exploration takes time... When will they cover all the material of the course? I suspect the students will be just fine as they make adjustments downstream this semester.

What about running? Well, of course. The topic of air-drop programming came up during a conversation about a general tourist pattern for learning a new town. Running in a new town is a great way to learn the lay of the land. Sometimes I have to work not to remember landmarks along the way, so that I can see new things on my way back to the hotel. As I wrote after a glorious morning run at ChiliPLoP three years ago, sometimes you run to get from Point A to Point B; sometimes, you should just run. That applies to your hometown, too. I once read about an elite women's runner who recommended being dropped off far from your usual running routes and working your way back home through unfamiliar streets and terrain. I've done something like this myself, though not often enough, and it is a great way to revitalize my running whenever the trails start look like the same old same old.

It seems that getting lost is a universal pattern, which made it a perfect topic for an OOPSLA keynote talk.

... when Charlie Eppes invokes your research area on Numb3rs. In the episode I saw last Friday, the team used a recommender system, among other snazzy techie glitz, to track down a Robin Hood who was robbing from the dishonestly rich and giving to the poor through a collection of charities. A colleague of mine does work in recommender systems and collaborative filtering, so I thought of him immediately. His kind of work has entered the vernacular now.

I don't recall the Numb3rs crew ever referring to knowledge-based systems or task-specific architectures, which was my area in the old days. Nor do I remember any references to design patterns or to programming language topics, which is where I have spent my time in the last decade or so. Should I feel left out?

But Charlie and Amita did use the idea of steganography in an episode two years ago, to find a pornographic image hidden inside an ordinary image. I have given talks on steganography on campus occasionally in the last couple of years. The first time was at a conference on camouflage, and most recently I spoke to a graphic design class, earlier this month. (My next engagement is at UNI's Saturday Science Showcase, a public outreach lecture series my college runs in the spring.) So I feel like at least some of my intellectual work has been validated.

Coincidentally, I usually bill my talks on this topic as "Numb3rs Meets The Da Vinci Code: Information Masquerading as Art", and one of the demonstrations I do is to hide an image of Numb3rs guys in a digitized version of the Mona Lisa. The talk is a lot of fun for me, but I wonder if college kids these days pay much attention to network television, let alone da Vinci's art.

Lest you think that only we nth-tier researchers care to have our areas trumpeted in the pop world, even the great ones can draw such pleasure. Last spring, Grady Booch gave a keynote address at SIGCSE. As a part of his opening, he played for us a clip from a TV show that had brightened his day, because it mentioned, among other snazzy techie glitz, the Unified Modeling Language he had helped to create. Oh, and that video clip came from... Numb3rs!

My horoscope says so:

Thursday, January 24

Scorpio (October 24-November 22) -- You are smart enough to realize meeting force with force will only result in non-productive developments. To your credit, you will turn volatile matters around with wisdom, consideration, and gentleness.

Now, I may not really be smart enough, or wise enough, or even gentle enough. But on days like today it is good to hear such advice. Managing a team, a faculty, or a class involves a lot or relationships and a lot of personalities. Using wisdom, consideration, and gentleness is usually a more effective way to deal with unexpected conflicts than responding in kind or brute force.

Some days, my horoscope fits my situation perfectly. Today is one. But I promise not to turn to the zodiac for future blogging inspiration, unless it delivers a similarly general piece of advice.

One piece of good news from the past week: My permalinks should work now! Our college web server is once again behaving as it should, which means that http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/ will not redirect to a http://cns2.uni.edu/ URL. This means that my permalinks, which are in the www.cs.uni.edu domain, will once again work. This makes me happy, and I hope that it makes it easier for folks to link directly to articles that they discuss in their own blogs. There may still be a problem with the category pages, but the sysadmins should have that fixed soon.

Now for that Bloglines issue... I haven't had much luck getting help from the Bloglines team, but I'll keep trying.

[Nothing new here for regular readers... This post implements an idea that I saw on Brian Marick's blog and liked: a table of contents for a set of conference posts coupled with cross-links as notes at the top of each entry. I have done a table of contents before, for OOPSLA 2005 -- though, sadly, not for 2004 or 2006 -- but I like the addition of the link back from entries to the index. This may help readers follow my entries, especially when they are out of order, and it may help me when I occasionally want to link back to the workshop as a unit.]

This set of entries records my experiences at the SECANT 2007 workshop November 17-18, hosted by the Purdue Department of Computer Science.

Primary entries:

• Workshop Intro: Teaching Science and Computing
  -- on building a community
• Workshop 1: Creating a Dialogue Between Science and CS
  -- How can we help scientists and CS folks work together?
• Workshop 2: Exception Gnomes, Garbage Collection Fairies, and Problems
  -- on a hodgepodge of sessions around the intersection of science ed and computing
• Workshop 3: The Next Generation
  -- what scientists are doing out in the world and how computer scientists are helping them
• Workshop 4: Programming Scientists
  -- Should scientists learn to program? And, if so, how?
• Workshop 5: Wrap-Up
  -- on how to cause change and disseminate results

Ancillary entries:

• A Program is an Idea
  -- going farther on why scientists, and everyone else, should learn to program

The next few items on the newsfeed will be these entries, updated with the "transcript" cross-link. [Done]

Now that things have wound down for the semester, I hope to do some mental clean-up and some CS. As much as I enjoyed the SECANT workshop last month (blogged in detail ending here), travel that late in a semester compresses the rest of the term into an uncomfortably small box. That said, going to conferences and workshops is essential:

Wherever you work, most of the smart people are somewhere else.

I saw that quote attributed to Bill Joy in an article by Tim Bray. Joy was speaking of decentralization and the web, but it applies to the pre-web network that makes up any scholarly discipline. Even with the web, it's good to get out of the tower every so often and participate in an old-fashioned conversation.

One part of the semester clean-up will be assessing the state of my department head backlog. Most days, I add more things to my to-do list than I am unable to cross off. Some of them are must-dos, details, and others are ideas, dreams. By the end of the semester, I have to be honest that many of the latter won't be done, soon if ever. I don't do a hard delete of most of these items; I just push them onto a "possibilities" list that can grow as large as it likes without affecting my mental hygiene.

I recently told my dean that, after two and a half years as head, I had almost come to peace with what I have taken to calling "time management by burying". He just smiled and said that the favorite part of his semester is doing just that, looking at his backlog and saying to himself, "Well, guess I'm not going to do that" as he deleted it from the list for good. Maybe I should be more ruthless myself. Or maybe that works better if you are a dean...

I've been following the story of the University of Michigan hiring West Virginia University's head football coach. Whatever one thinks of the situation -- and I think it brings shame to both Michigan and its new coach -- there was a very pragmatic piece of advice to be learned about managing people from one Pittsburgh Post-Gazette sports article about it. Says Bob Reynolds, former chief operating officer of Fidelity Investments:

I've been the COO of a 45,000-person company. When somebody's producing, you ask, 'What can I do for you to make your life better?' Not 'What can I do to make your life more miserable?'

That's a good thought for an academic department head to start each day with. And maybe a CS instructor, too.

I had to drive to Des Moines for a luncheon today. Four hours driving, round-trip, for a 1.25-hour lunch -- the things I do for my employer! The purpose of the trip was university outreach: I was asked to represent the university at a lunch meeting of the Greater Des Moines Committee, in place of our president and dean.

The luncheon was valuable for making connections to the movers and shakers in the capital city, and for talking to business leaders about computer science enrollments, math and science in the K-12 schools, and IT policy for the state. The lunch speaker, Ted Crosbie, the chief technology officer of Iowa, gave a good talk on economic development and the future of the state's technology efforts.

But was it all worth four hours on the road? Probably so, but I will give a firm Yes, for an unexpected reason.

A couple of minutes after I took my seat for lunch, former Iowa Governor Terry Branstad (1983-1999) sat down at our table. He struck up a nice conversation. Then, a couple of minutes later, former Iowa Governor Robert Ray (1969-1983) joined us. Very cool. I was impressed at how involved and informed these retired public officials remain in the affairs of the state, especially in economic development. The latter is, of course, something of great importance to my department and its students, as well as the university as a whole.

Then on the drive home, I saw a bald eagle soar majestically over a small riverbed. A thing of beauty.

On this and every day:

For the harvests of the Spirit, Thanks be to God;
For the good we all inherit, Thanks be to God;
For the wonders that astound us,
For the truths that will confound us,
Most of all that love has found us, Thanks be to God.

(Lyric by Fred Pratt Green, copyright 1970. Sung to a traditional Welsh melody.)

Among so many things, I'm thankful for the chance to write here and to have people read what I write.

Happy Thanksgiving.

[A transcript of the SECANT 2007 workshop: Table of Contents]

The last bit of the SECANT workshop focused on how to build a community at this intersection of CS and science. The group had a wide-ranging discussion which I won't try to report here. Most of it was pretty routine and would not be of interest to someone who didn't attend. But there were a couple of points that I'll comment on.

On how to cause change.     At one point the discussion turned philosophical, as folks considered more generally how one can create change in a larger community. Should the group try to convince other faculty of the value of these ideas first, and then involve them in the change? Should the group create great materials and courses first and then use them to convince other faculty? In my experience, these don't work all that well. You can attract a few people who are already predisposed to the idea, or who are open to change because they do not have their own ideas to drive into the future. But folks who are predisposed against the idea will remain so, and resist, and folks who are indifferent will be hard to move simply because of inertia. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Others expressed these misgivings. Ruth Chabay suggested that perhaps the best way to move the science community toward computational science is by producing students who can use computation effectively. Those students will use computation to solve problems. They will learn deeper. This will catch the eye of other instructors. As a result, these folks will see an opportunity to change how they teach, say, physics. We wouldn't have to push them to change; they would pull change in. Her analogy was to the use of desktop calculators in math, chemistry, and physics classes in the 1970s and 1980s. Such a guerilla approach to change might work, if one could create a computational science course good enough to change students and attractive enough to draw students to take it. This is no small order, but it is probably easier than trying to move a stodgy academic establishment with brute force.

On technology for dissemination.     Man, does the world change fast. Folks talked about Facebook and Twitter as the primary avenues for reaching students. Blogs and wikis were almost an afterthought. Among our students, e-mail is nearly dead, only 20 years or so after it began to enter the undergraduate mainstream. I get older faster than the calendar says because the world is changing faster than the days are passing.

Miscellaneous.     Purdue has a beautiful new computer science building, the sort of building that only a large, research school can have. What we might do with a building at an appropriate scale for our department! An extra treat for me was a chance to visit a student lounge in the building that is named for the parents of a net acquaintance of mine, after he and his extended family made a donation to the building fund. Very cool.

I might trade my department's physical space for Purdue CS's building, but I would not trade my campus for theirs. It's mostly buildings and pavement, with huge amounts of auto traffic in addition to the foot traffic. Our campus is smaller, greener, and prettier. Being large has its ups and its downs.

Thanks to a recommendation of the workshop's local organizer, I was able to enjoy some time running on campus. Within a few minutes I found my way to some trails that head out into more serene places. A nice way to close the two days.

All in all, the workshop was well worth my time. I'll share some of the ideas among my science colleagues at UNI and see what else we can do in our own department.

Earlier this week, I read The Geomblog's A day in the life..., in which Suresh listed what he did on Monday. Research did not appear on the list.

I felt immediate and intense empathy. On Monday, I had spent all morning on our college's Preview Day, on which high school students who are considering studying CS at my university visit campus with their parents. It is a major recruiting effort in our college. I spent the early morning preparing my discussion with them and the rest of the morning visiting with them. The afternoon was full of administrative details, computer labs and registration and prospective grad students. On Tuesday, when I read the blog entry, I had taught compilers -- an oasis of CS in the midst of my weeks -- and done more administration: graduate assistantships, advising, equipment purchases, and a backlog of correspondence. Precious little CS in two days, and no research or other scholarly activity.

Alas, that is all too typical. Attending an NSF workshop this week is a wonderful chance to think about computer science, its application in the sciences, and how to teach it. Not research, but computer science. I only wish I had a week or five after it ends to carry to fruition some of the ideas swirling around my mind! I will have an opportuniy to work more on some of these ideas when I return to the office, as a part of my department's curricular efforts, but that work will be spread over many weeks and months.

That is not the sort of intense, concentrated work that I and many other academics prefer to do. Academics are bred for their ability to focus on a single problem and work intensely on it for long periods of time. Then comes academic positions that can spread us quite then. An administrative position takes that to another level.

Today at the workshop, I felt a desire to bow down before an academic who understands all this and is ready to take matters into his own hands. Some folks were discussing the shortcomings of the current Mac OS X version of VPython, the installation of which requires X11, Xcode, and Fink. Bruce Sherwood is one of the folks in charge of VPython. He apologized for the state of the Mac port and explained that the team needs a Mac guru to build a native port. They are looking for one, but such folks are scarce. Never fear, though... If they can't find someone soon, Sherwood said,

I'm retiring so that I can work on this.

Now that is commitment to a project. We should all have as much moxie! What do you say, Suresh?

My apologies to the 130-odd of you who read this blog via Bloglines. A couple of you have alerted me to a technical issue with links disappearing from my posts when you read Knowing and Doing through the Bloglines interface. The problem is intermittent, which makes it frustrating for you all and harder for me to track down.

I've validated my RSS feed at http://feedvalidator.org and looked for some clues in the HTML source. No luck. At this point, I have asked the folks at Bloglines to see if they can find something in my feed that interacts badly with their software. I'll keep you posted.

Last Saturday morning, I opened a book at random, just to fill some time, and ended up writing a blog entry on electronic communities. It was as if the book were magic... I opened to a page, read a couple of sentences, and was launched on what seemed like the perfect path for that morning. That experience echoed one of the things Vonnegut himself has often said: there is something special about books.

This is one reason that I don't worry about getting dumber by reading books, because for me books have always served up magic.

I remember reading just that back in high school, in Richard Bach's Illusions:

I noticed something strange about the book. "The pages don't have numbers on them, Don."

"No," he said. "You just open it and whatever you need most is there."

"A magic book!"

These days, I often have just this experience on the web, as I read blogs and follow links off to unexpected places. An academic book or conference proceedings can do the same. Bach would have said, "But of course."

"No you can do it with any book. You can do it with an old newspaper, if you read carefully enough. Haven't you done that, hold some problem in your mind, then open any book handy and see what it tells you?"

I do that sometimes, but I'm just as likely to catch a little magic when my mind is fallow, and I grab a paper of one of my many stacks for a lunch jaunt. Holding a particular problem in my mind sometimes puts too much pressure on whatever might happen.

Indeed, this comes back to the theme of the article I wrote on Saturday morning. On one hand there are traditional media and traditional communities, and on the other are newfangled electronic media and electronic communities. The traditional experiences often seem to hold some special magic for us. But the magic is not in any particular technology; it is in the intersection between ideas out there and our inner lives.

When I feel something special in the asynchronicity of a book's magic, and think that the predetermination of an RSS feed makes it less spontaneous, that just reflects my experience, maybe my lack of imagination. If I look back honestly, I know that I have stumbled across old papers and old blog posts and old web pages that served up magic to me in much the same way that books have done. And, like electronic communities, the digital world of information creates new possibilities for us. A book can be magic for me only if I have a copy handy. On the web, every article is just a click a way. That's a powerful new sort of magic.

Over on one of the mailing lists I browse -- maverick software development -- there has been a lot of talk about how a lack of trust is one of the primary dysfunctions of teams. The discussion started as a discussion of Patrick Lencioni's The Five Dysfunctions of a Team but has taken on its own life based on the experiences of the members of the list.

One writer there made the bold claim that all team dysfunctions are rooted in a lack of trust. Others, such as fear of conflict and lack of commitment to shared goals, grow solely from a lack of trust among team members and leaders. This is, in fact, what Lencioni claims in his book, that a lack of trust creates an environment in which people fear conflict, which ensures a lack of commitment and ultimately an avoidance of accountability, ending in an inattention to the results produced by the team.

The writer who made this claim asked list members for specific counterexamples. I don't know if I can do that, but I will say that it's amazing what a lack of confidence can do to an individual's outlook and performance, and ultimately on his or her ability to contribute positively as a team member.

When a person lacks confidence in his ability, he will be inclined to interpret every contingent signal in a different way than it was intended. This interpretation is often extreme, and very often wrong. This creates an impediment to performance and to interaction.

I see it in students all the time. A lack of confidence makes it hard to learn! If I don't trust what I know or can do, then every new idea looks scary. How can I understand this if I don't understand the more fundamental material? I don't want to ask this question, because the teacher, or my classmates, will see how little I know. There's no sense in trying this; I'll just fail.

This is, I think a problem in CS classes between female and male students. Male students seem more likely than females to bluff their way through a course, pretending they understand something more deeply than they do. This gives everyone a distorted image of the overall understanding of the class, and leaves many female students thinking that they are alone in not "getting it". One of the best benefits of teaching a CS class via discussion rather than lecture is that over time the bluffers are eventually outed by the facts. I still recall one of our female students telling me in the middle of one of my courses taught in this way that she finally saw that no one else had any better grasp on the material than she did and that, all things considered, she was doing pretty well. Yes!

I see the effects of lack of confidence in my faculty colleagues, too. This usually shows up in a narrow context, where the person doesn't know a particular area of computing very well, or lacks experience in a certain forum, and as a result shies away from interacting in venues that rely on this topic. I also see this spill over into other interactions, where a lack of confidence in one area sets the tone for fear of conflict (which might expose an ignorance) and disengagement from the team.

I see it in myself, as instructor on some occasions and as a faculty member on others. Whenever possible I use a lack of confidence in my understanding of a topic as a spur to learn more and get better. But in the rush of days this ideal outlook often falls victim to rapidly receding minutes.

A personal lack of confidence has been most salient to me in my role as a department head. This was a position for which I had received no direct training, and grousing about the performance of other heads offers only the flimsiest foundation for doing a better job. I've been sensitized to nearly every interaction I have. Was that a slight, or standard operating procedure? Should I worry that my colleague is displeased with something I've done, or was that just healthy feedback? Am I doing a good enough job, or are the faculty simply tolerating me? As in so many other contexts, these thoughts snowball until they are large enough to blot everything else out of one's sight.

The claimant on the mailing list might say that trust is the real issue here. If the student trusts his teacher, or the faculty member trusts his teammates, or the department head trusts his faculty, either they would not lack confidence or would not let it affect their reactions. But that is precisely the point: they are reactions, from deep within. I think we feel our lack of confidence prior to processing the emotion and acting on trust. Lack of confidence is probably not more fundamental than lack of trust, but I think they are often orthogonal to one another.

How does one get over a lack of confidence? The simplest way is to learn what we need to know, to improve our skills. In the mean time, a positive attitude -- perhaps enabled by a sense of trust in our teammates and situation -- can do wonders. Institutionally, we can have, or work to get, support from above. A faculty member who trusts that she has room to grow in the presence of her colleagues and head, or a new department who trusts that he has room to grow in the presence of his dean, will be able to survive a lack of confidence while in the process of learning. I've seen new deans and heads cultivate that sort of trust by acting cautiously at the outset of their tenure, so as not to lose trust before the relationship is on firm ground.

In the context of software development, the set of tasks for which someone is responsible is often more crisply delineated than the set of tasks for a student or manager. In one way, that is good news. If your lack of confidence stems from not knowing how Spring or continuation passing style works, you can learn it! But it's not too simple, as there are time constraints and team relationships to navigate along the way.

Ultimately, a mindset of detachment is perhaps the best tool a person who lacks confidence can have. Unfortunately, I do not think that detachment and lack of confidence are as common a package as we might hope. Fortunately, one can cultivate a sense of detachment over time, which makes dealing with recurring doubts about one's capabilities easier to manage over time.

If only it were as easy to do these things as it is to say them!

I volunteered to help with a local 5K/10K race this morning. When I arrived at my spot along the course, I had half an hour to fill before the race began, and 45 minutes or so before the first runners would reach me. At first I considered taking a short nap but feared I'd sleep too long. Not much help to the runners in that! So I picked up Kurt Vonnegut's A Man Without a Country, which was in my front seat on its way back to the library. (I wrote a recent article motivated by something else I read in this last book of Vonnegut's.)

I opened the book to Page 61, and my eyes fell immediately to:

Electronic communities build nothing. You end up with nothing. We are dancing animals.

This passage follows a wonderful story about how Kurt mails his manuscripts, daily coming into contact with international voices and a flamboyant postal employee on whom he has a crush. I've heard this sentiment before, in many different contexts and from many different people, but fundamentally I disagree with the claim. Let me tell you about two stories of this sort that stick in my mind, and my reactions at the time.

A decade or so ago, the famed philosopher and AI critic Hubert Dreyfus came to our campus to deliver a lecture as part of an endowed lecture series in the humanities. Had I been blogging at that time, I surely would have written a long review of this talk! Instead, all I have a notebook on my bookshelf full of pages and pages of notes. (Perhaps one of these days...) Dreyfus claimed that the Internet was leading to a disintegration of society by creating barriers to people connecting in the real world. Electronic communication was supplanting face-to-face communication but giving us only an illusion of a real connection; in fact, we were isolating ourselves from one another.

In the question-and-answer session that followed, I offered a counterargument. Back in the mid-1980s I became quite involved in several Usenet newsgroups, both for research and entertainment. In the basketball and football newsgroups, I found intelligent, informed, well-rounded people with who to discuss sports at a deeper level than I could with anyone in my local physical world. These groups became an important part of my day. But as the number of people with Internet access exploded, especially on college campuses, the signal-to-noise ratio in the newsgroups fell precipitously. Eventually, a core group of the old posters moved much of discussion off-group to a private mailing list, and ultimately I was invited to join them.

This mailing list continues to this day, taking on and losing members as lives change and opportunities arise. We still discuss sports and politics, pop culture and world affairs. It is a community as real to me as most others, and I consider some of the folks there to be good friends whom I'm lucky to have come to know. Members of the basketball group get together in person annually for the first two rounds of the NCAA tournament, and wherever we travel for business or pleasure we are likely to be in the neighborhood of a friend we can join for a meal and a little face-to-face communication. Like any real community, there are folks in the group whom I like a lot and others with whom I've made little or no personal connection. On-line we have good moments and disagreements and occasional hurt feelings, like any other community of people.

The second story I remember most is from Vonnegut himself, when he, too, visited my campus back when. At one of the sessions I attended, someone asked him about the fate of books in the Digital Age. Vonnegut was certain that books would continue on in much their current form, because there was something special about the feel of a book in one's hands, the touch of paper on the skin, the smell of the print and binding. Even then I recall disagreeing with this -- not because I don't also feel that something special in the feel of a book in my hands or the touch of the paper on my skin. A book is an artifact of history, an invention of technology. Technology changes, and no matter how personally we experience a particular technology's outward appearance, it is more likely to be different in a few years than to be the same.

My Usenet newsgroup story seems to contradict Dreyfus's thesis, but he held that, because we took it upon ourselves to meet in person, my story actually supported it. To me that seemed a too convenient way for him to dismiss the key point: our sports list is essentially an electronic community, one whose primary existence is virtual. Were the Internet to disappear tomorrow, some of the personal connections we've made would live on, but the community would die.

And keep in mind that I am old guy... Today's youth grow up in a very different world of technology than we did. One of the specific sessions I regret missing by missing OOPSLA was the keynote by Jim Purbrick and Mark Lentczner on Second Life, a new sort of virtual world that may well revolutionize the idea of electronic community not only for personal interaction but for professional, corporate, and economic interaction as well. As an example, OOPSLA itself had an island in Second Life as a way to promote interaction among attendees before and during the conference.

The trend in the world these days is toward more electronic interaction, not less, and new kinds that support wider channels of communication and richer texture in the interchange. There are risks in this trend, to be sure. Who among us hasn't heard the already classic joke about the guy who needs a first life before he can have a Second Life? But I think that this trend is just another step in the evolution of human community. We'll find ways to minimize the risks while maximizing the benefits. The next generation will be better prepared for this task than old fogies like me.

All that said, I am sympathetic to the sentiment that Vonnegut expressed in the passage quoted above, because I think underlying the sentiment is the core of a truth about being human. He expresses his take on that truth in the book, too, for as I turned the page of the book I read:

We are dancing animals. How beautiful it is to get up and go out and do something. We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different.

I know this beauty, and I'm sure you do. We are physical beings. The ability and desire to make and share ideas distinguish us from the rest of the world, but still we are dancing animals. There seems in us an innate need to do, not just think, to move and see and touch and smell and hear. Perhaps this innate trait is why I love to run.

But I am also aware that some folks can't run, or for whatever reason cannot sense our physical world in the same way. Yet many who can't still try to go out and do. At my marathon last weekend, I saw men who had lost use of their legs -- or lost their legs altogether -- making their way over 26.2 tough miles in wheelchairs. The long uphill stretches at the beginning of the course made their success seem impossible, because every time they released their wheels to grab for the next pull forward they lost a little ground. Yet they persevered. These runners' desire to achieve in the face of challenge made my own difficulties seem small.

I suspect that these runners' desire to complete the marathon had as much to do with a sense of loss as with their innate nature as physical beings. And I think that this accounts for Vonnegut's and others' sentiment about the insufficiency of electronic communities: a sense of loss as they watch the world around evolve quickly into something very different from the world in which they grew.

Living in the physical world is clearly an important part of being human. But it seems to be neither necessary nor sufficient as a condition.

Like Vonnegut, I grew up in a world of books. To me, there is still something special about the feel of a book in my hands, the touch of paper on my skin, the smell of the print and binding of a new book the first time I open it. But these are not necessary parts of the world; they are artifacts of history. The sensual feel of a book will change, and humanity will survive, perhaps none they worse for it.

I can't say that face-to-face communities are merely an artifact of history, soon to pass, but I see no reason to believe that the electronic communities we build now -- we do build them, and they so seem to last, at least on the short time scale we have for judging them -- cannot augment our face-to-face communities in valuable ways. I think that they will allow us to create forms of community that were not available to us before, and thus enrich human experience, not diminish it. While we are indeed dancing animals, as Vonnegut describes us, we are also playing animals and creative animals and thinking animals. And, at our core, we are connection-making animals, between ideas and between people. Anything that helps us to make more, different, and better connections has a good chance of surviving in some form as we move into the future. Whether dinosaurs like Vonnegut or I can survive there, I don't know!

Some days I read a paper or two and feel like I've lost ground. I just have more to read, think, and do. Of course, this phenomenon is universal... As Design Observer tells us, reading makes us more ignorant:

According to the Mexican critic Gabriel Zaid, writing in "So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance", ... "If a person read a book a day, he would be neglecting to read 4,000 others... and his ignorance would grow 4,000 times faster than his knowledge."

Don't read a book today! Now there is a slogan modern man can get behind. It seems that a few college students have already signed on.

My hope for most days is just the opposite. Here is a nice graphic slogan for this hope, courtesy of Brian Marick:

But it's hard to feel that way some days. The universe of knowing and doing is large. The best antidote to Sisyphean despair is to set a few measurable goals that one can reach with a reasonable short-term effort. Each step can give a bit of satisfaction, and -- if you take enough such steps -- you can end up someplace new. A lot like writing code.

Today I wrote a program, just for fun. I wrote a solution to the classic WordLadder game, which is a common nifty assignment used in the introductory Data Structures course. I had never assigned it in one of my courses and had never had any other reason to solve it. But my daughter came home yesterday with a math assignment that included a few of these problems, such as converting "heart" to "spade", and in the course of talking with her I ended up doing a few of the WordLadder problems on my own. I'm a hopeless puzzle junkie.

Some days, an almost irrational desire to write a program comes over me, and last night's fun made me think, "I wonder how I might do this in code?" So I used a few spare minutes throughout today to implement one of my ideas from last night -- a simple breadth-first search that finds all of the shortest solutions in a particular dictionary.

A few of those spare minutes came at the public library, while the same daughter was participating in a writers' workshop for youth. As I listened to their discussion of a couple of poems written by kids in the workshop in the background, I thought to myself, "I'm writing here, too." But then it occurred to me that the kids in the workshop wouldn't call what I was doing "writing". Nor would their workshop leader or most people that we call "writers". Nor would most computer scientists, not without the rest of the phrase: "writing a program".

Granted, I wasn't writing a poem. But I was exploring an idea that had come into my mind, one that drove forward. I wasn't sure what sort of program I would end up, and arrived at the answer only after having gone down a couple of expected paths and found them wanting. My stanzas, er, subprocedures, developed over time. One grew and shrank, changed name, and ultimately became much simpler and clearer than what I had in mind when I started.

I was telling a story as much as I was solving a problem. When I finished, I had a program that communicates to my daughter an idea I described only sketchily last night. The names of my variables and procedures tell the story, even without looking at too much of their detail. I was writing as a way to think, to find out what I really thought last night.

Today I wrote a program, and it was fun.

There is a great scene toward the end of one of my favorite movies, An Officer and a Gentleman. The self-centered and childlike protagonist, Zach Mayo, has been broken down by Drill Instructor Foley. He is now maturing under the Foley's tough hand. The basic training cohort is running the obstacle course for its last time. Mayo is en route to a course record, and his classmates are urging him on. But as his passes one of his classmates on the course, he suddenly stops. Casey Seeger has been struggling with wall for the movie, and it looks like she still isn't going to make it. But if she doesn't, she won't graduate. Mayo sets aside his record and stands with Seeger, cheering her and coaching her over the wall. Ultimately, she makes it over -- barely -- and the whole class gathers to cheer as Mayo and Seeger finish the run together. This is one of the triumphant scenes of the film.

I thought of this scene while running mile repeats on the track this morning. Three young women in the ROTC program were on the track, with two helping the third run sprints. The two ran alongside their friend, coaxing her and helping her continue when she clearly wanted to stop. If I recall correctly from my sister's time in ROTC, morning PT (physical training) is a big challenge for many student candidates and, as in An Officer and a Gentleman, they must meet certain fitness thresholds in order to proceed with the program -- even if they are in non-combat roles, such as nurses.

It was refreshing to see that sort of teamwork, and friendship, among students on the track.

It is great when this happens in one our classes. But when it does, it is generally an informal process that grows among students who were already friends when they came to class. It is not a part of our school culture, especially in computer science.

Some places, it is part of the culture. A professor here recently related a story from his time teaching in Taiwan. In his courses there, the students in the class identified a leader, and then they worked together to make sure that everyone in the class succeeded. This was something that students expected of themselves, not something the faculty required.

I have seen this sort of collectivism imposed from above by CS professors, particularly in project courses that require teamwork. In my experience, it rarely works well when foisted on students. The better students resent having their grade tied to a weaker student's, or a lazier one's. (Hey, it's all about the grade, right?) The weaker students resent being made someone else's burden. Maybe this is a symptom of the Rugged Individualism that defines the West, but working collectively is generally just not part of our culture.

And I understand how the students feel. When I found myself in situations like this as a student, I played along, because I did what my instructors asked me to do. And I could be helpful. But I don't think it ever felt natural to me; it was an external requirement.

Recently I found myself discussing pair programming in CS1 with a former student who now teaches for us. He is considering pairing students in the lab portion of his non-majors course. Even after a decade, he remembers (fondly, I think) working with a different student each week in my CS1 lab. But the lab constituted only a quarter of the course grade, and the lab exercises did not require long-term commitment to helping the weakest members of the class succeed. Even still, I had students express dissatisfaction at "wasting their time".

This is one of the things that I like about the agile software methods: it promotes a culture of unity and of teamwork. Pair programming is one practice that supports this culture, but so are collective ownership, continuous integration, and coding standard. Some students and programmers, including some of the best, balk at being forced into "team". Whatever the psychological, social, and political issues, and whatever my personal preferences as a programmer, there seems something attractive about a team working together to get better, both as a team and as individuals.

I wish the young women I saw this morning well. I hope they succeed, as a team and as individuals. They can make it over the wall.

As you seek the three great virtues of a programmer, you seek to cultivate...

... the kind of laziness that makes you want to minimize future effort but investing effort today, to maximize your productivity and performance over the long haul, not the kind that leads you to avoid essential work or makes you want to cut corners.

... the kind of impatience that encourages you to work harder, not the kind of impatience that steals your spirit when you hit a wall or makes you want to cut corners.

... the kind of hubris that makes you think that you can do it, to trust yourself, not the kind of hubris that makes you think you don't have to listen to the problem, your code, or other people -- or the kind that makes you want to cut corners.

The last week or so I've been trying to steal a few minutes each day to clean up the closet in my home work area. One of the big jobs has been to get rid of several years of journals and proceedings that built up from 1998 to 2002, when it seems I had time only to skim my incoming periodicals.

I seem genetically unable to simply through these into a recycling bin; instead, I sit on the floor and thumb through each, looking at least at the table of contents to see if there is anything I still want to read. Most of the day-to-day concerns in 2000 are of no particular interest now. But I do like to look at the letters to the editor in Communications of the ACM, IEEE Computer, and IEEE Spectrum, and some of the standing columns in SIGPLAN Notices, especially on Forth and on parsing. Out of every ten periodicals or so, I would guess I have saved a single paper or article for later reading.

One of the unexpected joys has been stumbling upon all of the IEEE Spectrum issues. It's one of the few general engineering generals I've ever received, and besides it has the bimonthly Reflections column by Robert Lucky, which I rediscovered accidentally earlier this month. I had forgotten in the off-months of Reflections, Spectrum runs a column called Technically Speaking, which I also enjoy quite a bit. According to its by-line, this column is "a commentary on technical culture and the use and misuse of technical language". I love words and learning about their origin and evolution, and this column used to feed my habit.

Most months, Technically Speaking includes a sidebar called "Worth repeating", which presents a quote of interest. Here are a couple that struck me as I've gone through my old stash.

From April 2000:

Engineering, like poetry, is an attempt to approach perfection. And engineers, like poets, are seldom completely satisfied with their creations.... However, while poets can go back to a particular poem hundreds of times between its first publication and its final version in their collected works, engineers can seldom make major revision in a completed structure. But an engineer can certainly learn from his mistakes.

This is from Henry Petroski, in To Engineer is Human. The process of discovery in which an engineer creates a new something is similar to the poet's process of discovery. Both lead to a first version by way of tinkering and revision. As Petroski notes, though, when engineers who build bridges and other singular structures publish their first version, it is their last version. But I think that smaller products which are mass produced often can be improved over time, in new versions. And software is different... Not only can we grow a product through a conscious process of refactoring, revision, and rewriting from scratch, but after we publish Version 1.0 we can continue to evolve the product behind its interface -- even while it is alive, servicing users. Software is a new sort of medium, whose malleability makes cleaving too closely to the engineering mindset misleading. (Of course, software developers should still learn from their mistakes!)

From June 2000:

You cannot have good science without having good science fans. Today science fans are people who are only interested in the results of science. They are not interested in a good play in science as a football fan is interested in a good play in football. We are not going to be able to have an excellent scientific effort unless the man in the street appreciates science.

This is reminiscent of an ongoing theme in this blog and in the larger computer science community. It continues to be a theme in all of science as well. How do we reform -- re-form -- our education system so that most kids at least appreciate what science is and means? Setting our goal as high as creating fans as into science as into football or NASCAR would be ambitious indeed!

Oh, and don't think that this ongoing theme in the computer science and general scientific world is a new one. The quote above is from Edward Teller, taken off the dust jacket of a book named Rays: Visible and Invisible, published in 1958. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Perhaps it should comfort us that the problem we face is at least half a century old. We shouldn't feel guilty that we cannot solve it over night.

And finally, from August 2000:

To the outsider, science often seems to be a frightful jumble of facts with very little that looks human and inspiring about it. To the working scientist, it is so full of interest and so fascinating that he can only pity the layman.

I think the key here is make moire people insiders. This is what Alan Kay urges us to do -- he's been saying this for thirty years. The best way to share the thrill is to help people to do what we do, not (just) tell them stories.

I recently mentioned again Seth Godin's All Marketers are Liars in the context of teachers as liars. One last mention -- this time, for researchers and students.

As I read pages 29 and 30 of the book, I was struck by how much Godin's advice for marketers matches my experience as a researcher, first as a graduate student, then as a young faculty member, and now as a grizzled veteran. Consider:

There are only two things that separate success from failure in most organizations today:

1. Invent stuff worth talking about.
2. Tell stories about what you've invented.

That is the life of the academic researcher: invent cool stuff, and talk about the inventions. Some of my best professors were people who invented cool stuff and loved to talk about their inventions. They relished being in the lab, creating, and then crafting a story that shared their excitement. As a student, undergrad and grad alike, I was drawn to these profs, even when they worked in areas that didn't interest me much. When they did -- wow.

Many people get into research because we want to do #1, and #2 is just part of the deal. Whether the young researcher wants to or not, telling the stories is essential. It is how we spread our ideas and get the feedback that helps us to improve them. But on a more mercenary level it's also how we get folks interested in offering us tenure-track positions, and then offering us tenure.

Over the course of my career, I have come to realize how many people go into research because they want to do #2. As strange as it might sound, Getting a Ph.D. is one of the more attractive routes to becoming a professional story-teller, because it is the de facto credential for teaching at universities. Sometimes these folks continue to invent cool stuff to talk about. But some ultimately fall away from the research game. They want to tell stories, but without the external pressure to do #1. Maybe they lose the drive to invent, or never really had it in the first place. These folks often become great teachers, too, whether as instructors at research schools or as faculty at so-called "teaching universities". Many of those folks still have a passion for something like #1, but it tends toward learning about the new stuff that others create, synthesizing it, and preparing it for a wider audience. Then they tell the stories to their students and to the general public.

As I've written before, CS needs its own popular story teller, working outside the classroom, to share the thrill... I don't think that has to be an active researcher -- think about the remarkable effect that Martin Gardner had on the world by sharing real math with us in ways that made us want to do mathematics -- and even computer science! But having someone who continues to invent be that person would work just fine. Thank you, Mr. Feynman.

So, to my grad students and to graduate students everywhere, this is my advice to you: Invent stuff worth talking about, and then tell stories about what you've invented.

But this advice is not just for graduate students. Consider this passage from Godin, which I also endorse wholeheartedly:

On a personal level, your resume should be about inventing remarkable things and telling stories that register--not about how good you are at meeting specs. Organizations that are going to be around tomorrow will be those that stop spending all their time dealing with the day-to-day crises of shipping stuff out the door or reacting to emergencies. Instead the new way of marketing will separate winners from losers.

This is where the excitement and future of computer science in industry lie, too. Students who can (only) meet specs are plentiful and not always all that valuable. The real value comes in creating and integrating ideas. This is advice that I've been sharing with entrepreneurially-minded students for a while, and I think as time goes by it will apply to more and more students. Paul Graham has spent a lot of time spreading this message, in articles such as What You'll Wish You'd Known, and I've written about Graham's message here as well. The future belongs to people who are asking questions, not people who can deliver answers to other peoples' questions.

So, this advice is not just for students. It is for everyone.

I recently realized something.

In books with academic settings, one often sees images of the professor, deep in thought, strolling along the tree-lined walks of campus. Students bustle about on the way between classes. The professor walks along, carefree, absorbed in whatever interesting problem has his or her mind. (All too often, it's a him.) Even if he is running late, has a meeting to attend or a class to lead, he hurries not. He is a professor and leads a life of his own design, even if administrators and students try to impinge on his time. Whatever deep thought occupies his mind comes first. So peaceful.

Movies show us these images, too. So peaceful.

I've never been like that. My campus setting looks much like the ones described in books and movies (though lately ours has looked more like a construction zone than an old-Ivy plat), but I always seem to be in hurry. Can't be late for class, or late for that meeting. Too much to do.

I've often asked myself, when will it be like in the books and movies.

My realization: The problem isn't with my campus or even my university. It's me.

The images in the books and movies are different because the prof ambling peacefully along isn't me. It's Professor Kingsfield. Many of these characters are clichés even when done well, but in any case they are different from me.

The only way for me to live out those images is to modify my own behavior or outlook. Peace comes from inside, not out there. But I don't think I am in need of a change... I'm not restless or dissatisfied; I'm just busy being me, solving problems and thinking about the latest something to cross my path.

So maybe what I need to change is my expectation -- the expectation that I can or even should be like the fictional people I see in those scenes. I suspect that having unrealistic expectations is the cause of as much disharmony as having the "wrong outlook". The outlook isn't always wrong. Sometimes it's just me.

Here is security, which comes along with my new favorite error message:

Your password must be at least 18770 characters and cannot repeat any of your previous 30689 passwords. Please type a different password. Type a password that meets these requirements in both text boxes.

Oh, yeah -- be sure to type it twice.

I leave it to the TheoryCS guys at Ernie's 3D Pancakes, Computational Complexity, and The Geomblog to give us the mathematical picture on how secure an 18,770-character password is, and what the implications are for installing SP1, before which you could get by with a passcode of a mere 17,145 characters.

Sponsored outlets in the walkways of the concourses:

and

The sponsor in this case is Chase, The Bank Formerly Known as Chase Manhattan and later as JP Morgan Chase. Each outlet plate has a blue Chase banner running down the wall from about eye level right down to the pair of outlets. The banners caught my eye, so I guess they worked. Eventually the gimmick will wear out its novelty -- perhaps it already has for other flyers, or elsewhere in the country; I don't fly often -- but I thought it was cute. Funny how changes in technology have made something as mundane as an open outlet so valuable!

Oh, and thanks to cashing in some very old, expiring frequent flyer miles, I flew first class for the first time in a long time, from Indianapolis to John Wayne/Orange County. It wasn't quite like the Seinfeld episode in which Jerry and Elaine experience the different sides of traveling first class and coach, but it was very, very nice. A good addition to my vacation.

My last post looked at the relationship between honesty and blocking, motivated by a recent thread on the XP discussion list. In another thread, I encountered Dale Emery's message on The Prime Directive, and that got me to thinking about being honest with myself about my own behavior, and how to get better.

If you read much in the agile world, you'll run across the phrase "Prime Directive" a lot. I'm not a Trekkie, though I have enjoyed the several movies and TV series, but the first thing I think of when I hear the phrase is James T. Kirk. That's not what the agile folks are talking about... even if that directive raises interesting questions for a software person introducing agile methods to an organization!

If you google "prime directive agile", the first link is to Bob Martin's The Prime Directive of Agile Development, which is: Never be blocked. This is an ironic choice of words, given what I discussed in my previous post, but Martin is using an analogy from billiards, not football: An agile developer "makes sure that the shot he is taking sets up the next shot he expects to take.... A good agile developer never takes a step that stops his progress, or the progress of others." This is a useful notion, I think, but again not what most agilists mean when they speak of the Prime Directive.

They are referring instead to Norm Kerth's use of the phrase in the realm of project retrospectives, in which teams learn from the results of a recently-completed project in order to become a better team for future projects. Here is the Prime Directive for retrospectives, according to Norm:

The prime directive says:

Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.

At the end of a project everyone knows so much more. Naturally we will discover decisions and actions we wish we could do over. This is wisdom to be celebrated, not judgement used to embarrass.

This directive creates an environment in which people can examine past actions and results without fear of blame or reprisal. Instead the whole team can find ways to improve. When we look back at behavior and results in this context, we can be honest -- with our teammates and with ourselves. It's hard to improve oneself without facing the brutal facts that define our world and our person.

Emery's article focuses on the power of the phrase "given what they knew at the time". He does not view it as a built-in excuse -- well, I didn't know any better, so... -- rather as a challenge to identify and adjust the givens that limit us.

I apply The Prime Directive to my personal work by saying, "I did the best I could, given..." then fill in the givens. Then I set to work removing or relaxing the limiting conditions so that I perform better in the future. Usually, the most important conditions are the conditions within me, the conditions that I created.... If I created those conditions (and I did), then they are the conditions I can most directly improve.

Well said. Being honest with myself isn't easy, nor is following through on what I learn when I am. I take this as a personal challenge for the upcoming year.

(By the way, I strongly recommend Norm Kerth's book on retrospectives, as well as his pattern language on the transition from software analysis to design, Caterpillar's Fate. Norm is an engaging speaker and doer who celebrates the human element in whatever he touches. I reported on a talk he gave at PLoP 2004 on myth and patterns back in the early days of this blog.)

I recently wrote about a long-running thread on the XP discussion list about defining 'agile'. Another theme I've noticed across several threads is honesty. This entry and the one that follows look at two facets of the theme.

In one thread that seems to be dying down, the list has discussed the ethics of "blocking", a term that Scott Ambler borrowed from (American) football to describe teams that create the facade of following the official software development methodology while behind the scenes doing what they think is best to deliver the software. Scott wrote about this behavior, in which some members of the team protect the agile process by Running Interference for the rest of the team, in a 2003 Software Development article.

Is it right to do this? As developers, do we want to live our lives doing one thing and saying that we do another? I'm leery of any prescription that requires me to lie, yet I see shades of gray here. I don't think that my employer or our client are better served by actually following a process that is likely to fail to deliver the software as promised. Or, if my team is capable of delivering the software reasonably using the official methodology, then why do I need to lie in order to use an agile process? For me, programming in an agile way is a lot more fun, so there is that, but then maybe I need to find a place that will let me do that -- or start my own.

As I mentioned last time, I have not been able to follow the list discussion 100%, and I can't recall if Kent Beck ever chimed in. But I can imagine what he might say, given the substance and tone of his postings the last few years. If you have to lie -- even if we give it an innocuous name like "blocking"; even if we view it as a last resort -- then something is wrong, and you should think long and hard about how to make it right. Agile developers value people over processes, and honesty is one way we demonstrate that we value people.

George Dinwiddie has a blog entry that considered a more pragmatic potential problem with blocking. We may be getting the job done in the short term, but blocking is shortsighted and may hurt the agile cause in the long run. If we give the appearance of succeeding via the official route, our employer and customer are likely to conclude that the official route is a good one -- and that will make it even harder to introduce agile practices into the workplace. There is a practical value in telling the truth, even it requires us to take small steps. After all, agile developers ought to appreciate the power of small steps.

... at the end of a long day.

1. I must be an old hand at blogging now. I let Knowing and Doing's third anniversary pass without comment. And I let my 500th post -- and my 512th! -- go by with no fanfare.
2. I continue to be amazed by Google and the blogosphere. While preparing to visit my old hometown for my upcoming high school reunion, I googled "Scott Merrell ARC" in hopes of finding out if the named Mr. Merrell still owned and operated ARC Sheet Metal, where I worked as a part-time sheet metal apprentice and installer of ductwork during several high school summers. Scott had met me at local chess tournaments and took me on for a job for which I had no training or particular native talent. He patiently taught me a few skills and endured a few mistakes. I thought it might be nice to stop in to see Scott after twenty years, introduce him to my wife and daughters, and maybe give him one more shot in his pet Lasker's variation against my Petrov's Defense. It was unlikely that a small local sheet metal shop would have a web page, but it cost me nothing to try.

   I found only one relevant link -- the first link on the results page, of course -- but it was not for the shop. Instead it included a blog entry written by a friend of Scott's son, which quoted the full text of the son's eulogy for his father. My good friend and former boss died this past March after a long battle with lung disease. (In addition to being a chess hound and a professional sheet metal man, he smoked far too much.) The eulogy almost brought me to tears as it reminisced about the decent man I, too, remembered fondly and respected so. I have no simple way to contact Scott's son to thank him for sharing his eulogy, but I did leave a comment on the blog.

   Not many years ago, the idea that I could have learned about Scott's passing in this way and read the eulogy would have been unthinkable. The connection was indirect, impersonal in some ways, but deeply personal. For all its shortcomings, our technology makes the world a better place to live.

3. I don't write a personal blog like the one that quoted Scott's eulogy, this entry and a few others notwithstanding. Dave Winer expressed one of the powerful reasons for writing a blog in his essay The unedited voice of a person. A blog like mine provides an outlet for thinking out loud, developing professional ideas in front of an audience, and sharing the small insights that would likely never appear in a refereed publication in a journal or conference. Writing without an editor creates a little fear, but soon the fear is counterbalanced by the freedom that comes from not having to carry someone else's reputation into the written word. By having readers, I do feel the weight of expectation, as I don't want to waste the valuable time of others. But the voice here can be mine, and only mine.
4. Besides, I like Winer's explanation for why comments are not the be-all, end-all of a blog. I've always told myself and anyone who asked why I don't have comments that I would soon, but I have remained too lazy or busy to set them up. The lightweight, shell-based blogging tool I use, an old version of Nanoblogger, doesn't support comments out of the box, and in fact seems to require magical incantations to make a third-party add-on to work with it. And I don't have the time or inclination to write my own just now.

   But I don't actually mind not having comments. I sometimes miss the interactivity that comments would enable, but managing comments and combatting comment spam takes time, time that I would rather spend reading and blogging.

5. Last summer, Brad DeLong wrote a fun but more academic essay, The Invisible College, for the Chronicle of Higher Education Review that describes well why I like to blog. Even without comments enabled, I receive e-mail from smart, interesting people all over the world who have read something I wrote here, discussing some point I made, offering alternatives, and suggesting new ideas and resources to me. My academic work benefits from this invisible college. With any luck, some of my ideas might reach the eyes of non-computer scientists and start a conversation outside the confines of my discipline.

   Oh, and he's spot on about that procrastinating thing.

Back to paradise.

My 25th high school reunion is next month. (I can just hear the pencils at work as students, current and former, figure out just how old I am.) So I took this opportunity to re-read Alan Lightman's novel Reunion, which is about a college professor's 30th college reunion. I first read this book when it came out several years ago, but the theme was more timely this time around.

I first learned about Lightman, a physicist-turned-novelist whose fact and fiction both rest on a physics foundation, from an endnote in David Bodanis's E=mc², which referred me to Einstein's Dreams, This was an unusual book, only a couple of dozen short chapters, that consisted of a few fictional vignettes of Einstein's thinking and discussion with Hans Bethe as he reconceptualized time for his theory of relativity, interspersed among twenty or so fictional dreams that Einstein might have had about worlds in which time behaves differently than it does in our world. For example, in one world, time passes faster when one is at higher altitudes; in another, one occasionally gets stuck to a single place in time; in yet another, time moves backward.

I found this book delightful, both creative and wonderfully written. The conversations between Einstein and Bethe sounded authentic to this non-physicist, and the dream chapters were both "whimsical" and "provocative" (words I borrow from a literary review of the book) -- what would it be like if different neighborhoods lived in different decades or even centuries? Lightman writes as a poet, spare with words and description, precise in detail. Yet the book had a serious undercurrent, as it exposed some of the questions that physicists have raised about the nature of time, and how time interacts with human experience.

Later I found Reunion. It's more of a traditional human story, and I expect that some of my friends would derogate it as "chick lit". But I disagree. First, it's a man's story: a 52-year-old man keenly aware that time has passed beyond his dreams; a 22-year-old man alive with promise unaware that he is reaching branches in time that can never be passed again. And while its structure is that of a traditional novel, the underlying current is one of time's ambiguity: looking back, looking forward, standing still. Lightman even resorts in the shortest of passages to a common device which in other authors' hands is cliché, but which in his seems almost matter of fact. It's not science fiction because it sticks close to the way a real person might feel in this world, where time seems to move monotonically forward but in which our lives are a complex mishmash of present and past, future and never-was.

I enjoyed Reunion again and, though it's a bit of downer, it hasn't diminished my anticipation of stepping back in time to see people who were once my friends, and who because of how time works in my mind will always be my friends, to reminisce about back-when and since-then, and what-now. Time's linearity will show through, of course, in the graying of hair and the onset of wrinkles...

Many folks like to make analogies between mathematics and art, or computer science and creative disciplines. But there are important ways in which these analogies come up short. Last time, I wrote about Reuben Hersh's view of how to teach math right. The larger message of the article, though, was Hersh's view of mathematics as a social construct, a creation of our culture much as law, religion, and money are. One of the neat things about Edge is that it not only gives interviews with thinkers but also asks thinkers from other disciplines to comment on the interviews. In the same issue as Hersh's interview is a response by Stanislas Dehaene, a mathematician-turned-neuroscientist who has studied the cognition of reading and number. He agrees that a Platonic view of number as Platonic ideal is untenable but then draws on his knowledge of cognitive science to remind us that math is not like art and religion as social constructs in two crucial ways: universality and effectiveness. First, there are some mathematical universals to which all cultures have converged, and for which we can construct arguments sufficient to convincing any person:

If the Pope is invited to give a lecture in Tokyo and attempts to convert the locals to the Christian concept of God as Trinity, I doubt that he'll convince the audience -- Trinity just can't be "proven" from first principles. But as a mathematician you can go to any place in the world and, given enough time, you can convince anyone that 3 is a prime number, or that the 3rd decimal of Pi is a 1, or that Fermat's last theorem is true.

I suspect that some cynics might argue that this is true precisely because we define mathematics as an internally consistent set of definitions and rules -- as a constructed system. Yet I myself am sympathetic to claims of the universality of mathematics beyond social construction.

Second, mathematics seems particular effective as the language of science. Dehaene quotes Einstein, "How is it possible that mathematics, a product of human thought that is independent of experience, fits so excellently the objects of physical reality?" Again, a cynic might claim that much of mathematics has been defined for the express purpose of describing our empirical observations. But that really begs the question. What are the patterns common to math and science that make this convergence convenient, even possible?

Dehaene's explanation for universality and effectiveness rests in evolutionary biology -- and patterns:

... mathematical objects are universal and effective, first, because our biological brains have evolved to progressive internalize universal regularities of the external world ..., and second, because our cultural mathematical constructions have also evolved to fit the physical world. If mathematicians throughout the world converge on the same set of mathematical truths, it is because they all have a similar cerebral organization that (1) lets them categorize the world into similar objects ..., and (2) forces to find over and over again the same solutions to the same problems ....

The world and our brains together drive us to recognize the patterns that exist in the world. I am reminded of a principle that I think I first learned from Patrick Henry Winston in his text Artificial Intelligence, called The Principle of Convergent Intelligence:

The world manifests constraints and regularities. If an agent is to exhibit intelligence, then it must exploit these constraints and regularities, no matter the nature of its physical make-up.

The close compatibility of math and science marveled at by Einstein and Dehaene reminds me of another of Winston's principles, Winston's Principle of Parallel Evolution:

The longer two situations have been evolving in the same way, the more likely they are to continue to evolve in the same way.

(If you never had the pleasure of studying AI from Winston's text, now in its third edition, then you missed the joy of his many idiosyncratic principles. They are idiosyncratic in that you;ll read them no where else, certainly not under the names he gives them. But they express truths he wants you to learn. They must be somewhat effective, if I remember some from my 1986 grad course and from teaching out of his text in the early- to mid-1990s. I am sure that most experts consider the text outdated -- the third edition came out in 1992 -- but it still has a lot to offer the AI dreamer.)

So, math is more than "just" a mental construct because it expresses regularities and constraints that exist in the real world. I suppose that this leaves us with another question: do (or can) law and religion do the same, or do they necessarily lie outside the physical world? I know that some software patterns folks will point us to Christopher Alexander's arguments on the objectivity of art; perhaps our art expresses regularities and constraints that exist in the real world, too, only farther from immediate human experience.

These are fun questions to ponder, but they may not tell us much about how to do better mathematics or how to make software better. For those of us who make analogies between math (or computer science) and the arts, we are probably wise to remember that math and science reflect patterns in our world, at least more directly with our immediate experience than some of our other pursuits.

My previous entry discussed the scientific study of language. It occurred to me that the scientists who object to computing as science might also object to the study of language as "real" science. Certainly, the biological and neurological foundation of language seems to meet the criterion that a phenomenon occur in the natural world in order to be in the realm of science. But what of syntax and semantics? Even if we computer scientists speak of "natural language" Do they occur naturally in the world?

According to Chomsky, the answer is 'yes': People are born with a universal grammar implemented in their brains, which makes it possible for us to learn what otherwise might not be learnable in a tractable way. This is a claim that is open to empirical study, at least in principle, though the story of the Pirahã shows how difficult it is to support and falsify claims in this area. (And according to the article I cited last time, there are some are who concerned with how engaged Chomsky himself is in empirical verification these days.)

But isn't natural language man-made? We grow and evolve our vocabulary with some degree of intention. Syntax changes over time, too, and at least part of that change is intentional.

Not everyone thinks of language as a designed artifact. Consider this quote from an essay at Design Observer

According to new book by linguist David Harrison, "Languages can package knowledge in radically different ways, thus facilitating different ways of conceptualizing, naming, and discussing the world." If languages package information, can they be considered design objects?

I'm a computer scientist, so my first thought was, "Well, duh." Had I written a separate blog entry on that piece, I would have titled it "Yet Another Example of Why Non-Computer Scientists Should Study CS". Maybe, though, I am betrayed by living in a world artificial -- designed -- languages. (Well, if you can call a language like Perl "designed".)

I'm not a linguist, so it is hard for me to say to what extent primitive languages such as Pirahã esp. pre-literate ones, are designed and to what extent they flow out of the machinery of the human brain.

Interestingly, a few years ago we had a multidisciplinary language science seminar at my university. You can see the web page from our last full semester of activity. It was a diverse crew, ranging from folks interested in the biological and neurological side of language, to a cognitive psychologist, to linguists, on up to teachers of modern languages and literature profs interested in the use of language in poetry and prose. And there was one person interested in artificial languages and their interplay with natural language -- me. The group is dead now, but I found it quite valuable both as a teacher and as someone interested in programming languages. I miss our biweekly sessions.

It's not often that one can be reading a popular magazine, even one aimed at an educated audience, and run across a serious discussion of recursion. Thanks to my friend Joe Bergin for pointing me to The Interpreter, a recent article in the The New Yorker by Reporter at Large John Colapinto. The article tells the story of the Pirahã, a native tribe in Brazil with a most peculiar culture and a correspondingly unusual language. You see, while we often observe recursion in nature, one of the places we expect to see it is in natural language -- in the embedding of sentence-like structures within other sentences. But the Pirahã don't use recursion in their language, because their world view makes abstract structure meaningless.

Though recursion plays a critical role in Colapinto's article, it is really about recursion; it is about a possible crack in Chomsky's universal grammar hypothesis about language, and some of the personalities and technical issues involved. Dan Everett is a linguist who has been working with the Pirahã since the 1970s. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on how the Pirahã language fit into the Chomsky, but upon further study and a new insight now "believes that Pirahã undermines Noam Chomsky's idea of a universal grammar." As you might imagine, Chomsky and his disciples disagree.

What little I learned about the Pirahã language makes me wonder at what it must be like to learn it -- or try to. One the one hand, it's a small language, with only eight consonants and three vowels. But that's just the beginning of its simplicity:

The Pirahã, Everett wrote, have no numbers, no fixed color terms, no perfect tense, no deep memory, no tradition of art or drawing, and no words for 'all', 'each', 'every', 'most', or 'few' -- terms of quantification believed by some linguists to be among the common building blocks of human cognition. Everett's most explosive claim, however, was that Pirahã displays no evidence of recursion, a linguistic operation that consists of inserting one phrase inside another of the same type..."

This language makes Scheme look like Ada! Of course, Scheme is built on recursion, and Everett's claim that the Pirahã don't use it -- can't, culturally -- is what rankles many linguists the most. Chomsky has built the most widely accepted model of language understanding on the premise that "To come to know a human language would be an extraordinary intellectual achievement for a creature not specifically designed to accomplish this task." And at the center of this model is "the capacity to generate unlimited meaning by placing one thought inside another", what Chomsky calls "the infinite use of finite means", after the nineteenth-century German linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt.

According to Everett, however, the Pirahã do not use recursion to insert phrases one inside another. Instead, they state thoughts in discrete units. When I asked Everett if the Pirahã could say, in their language, "I saw the dog that was down by the river get bitten by a snake", he said, "No. They would have to say, 'I saw the dog. The dog was at the beach. A snake bit the dog.'" Everett explained that because the Pirahã accept as real only that which they observe, their speech consists only of direct assertions ("The dog was at the beach."), and he maintains that embedded clauses ("that was down by the river") are not assertions but supporting, quantifying, or qualifying information -- in other words, abstractions.

The notion of recursion as abstraction is natural to us programmers, because inductive definitions are by their nature abstractions over the sets they describe. But I had never before thought of recursion as a form of qualification. When presented in the form of an English sentence such as "I saw the dog that was down by the river get bitten by a snake", it makes perfect sense. I'll need to think about whether it makes sense in a useful for my programs.

Here is one more extended passage from the article, which discusses an idea from Herb Simon, which appears in the latest edition of the Simon book I mentioned in my last entry:

In his article, Everett argued that recursion is primarily a cognitive, not a linguistic, trait. He cited an influential 1962 article, "The Architecture of Complexity," by Herbert Simon, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, cognitive psychologist, and computer scientist, who asserted that embedding entities within like entities (in a recursive tree structure of the type central to Chomskyan linguistics) is simply how people naturally organize information. ... Simon argues that this is essential to the way humans organize information and is found in all human intelligence systems. If Simon is correct, there doesn't need to be any specific linguistic principle for this because it's just general cognition." Or, as Everett sometimes likes to put it: "The ability to put thoughts inside other thoughts is just the way humans are, because we're smarter than other species." Everett says that the Pirahã have this cognitive trait but that it is absent from their syntax because of cultural constraints.

This seems to be a crux in Everett's disagreement with the Chomsky school: Is it sufficient -- even possible -- for the Pirahã to have recursion as a cognitive trait but not as a linguistic trait? For many armchair linguists, the idea that language and thought go hand in hand is almost an axiom. I can certainly think recursively even when my programming language doesn't let me speak recursively. Maybe the Pirahã have an ability to organize their understanding of the world using nested structures (as Simon says they must) without having the syntactic tools for conceiving such structures linguistically (as Everett says they cannot).

I found this to be a neat article for more reasons than just its references to recursion. Here are few other ideas that occurred as I read.

Science and Faith Experience

At UNICAMP (State Univ. of Campinas in Brazil), in the fall of 1978, Everett discovered Chomsky's theories. "For me, it was another conversion experience," he said.

Everett's first conversion experience happened when he became a Christian in the later 1960s, after meeting his wife-to-be. It was this first conversion that led him to learn linguistics in the first place and work with the Pirahã under the auspices of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, an evangelical organization. He eventually fell away from his faith but remained a linguist.

Some scientists might balk at Everett likening his discovery of Chomsky to a religious conversion, but I think he is right on the mark. I know what it's like as a scholar to come upon a new model for viewing the world and feeling as if I am seeing a new world entirely. In grad school, for me it was the generic task theory of Chandrasekaran, which changed how I viewed knowledge systems and foreshadowed my later move into the area of software patterns.

It was interesting to read, even briefly, the perspective of someone who had undergone both a religious conversion and a scientific conversion -- and fallen out of both, as his personal experiences created doubts for which his faiths had no answers for him.

Science as Objective

Obvious, right? No. Everett has reinterpreted data from his doctoral dissertation now that he has shaken the hold of his Chomskyan conversion. Defenders of Chomsky's theory say that Everett's current conclusions are in error, but he now says that

Chomsky's theory necessarily colored his [original] data-gathering and analysis. "'Descriptive work' apart from theory does not exist. We ask the questions that our theories tell us to ask.

Yes. When you want to build generic task models of intelligent behavior, you see the outlines of generic tasks wherever you look. You can tell yourself to remain skeptical, and to use an objective eye, but the mind has its own eye.

Science is a descriptive exercise, and how we think shapes what we see and how we describe. Do you see objects or higher-order procedures when you look at a problem to describe or when you conceive a solution? Our brains are remarkable pattern machines and can fall into the spell of a pattern easily. This is true even in a benign or helpful sense, such as what I experienced after reading an article by Bruce Schneier and seeing his ideas in so many places for a week or so. My first post in that thread is here, and the theme spread throughout this blog for at least two weeks thereafter.

Intellectually Intimidating Characters

Everett occupied an office next to Chomsky's; he found the famed professor brilliant but withering. "Whenever you try out a theory on someone, there's always some question that you hope they won't ask," Everett said. "That was always the first thing Chomsky would ask.

That is not a fun feeling, and not the best way for a great mind to help other minds grow -- unless used sparingly and skillfully. I've been lucky that most of the intensely bright people I've met have had more respect and politeness --and skill -- to help me come along on the journey, rather than to torch me with their brilliance at every opportunity.

Culture Driving Language

One of the key lessons we see from the Pirahã is that culture is a powerful force, especially a culture so long isolated from the world and now so closely held. But you can see this phenomenon even in relatively short-term educational and professional habits such as programming styles. I see it when I teach OO to imperative programmers, and when I teach functional programming to imperative OO programmers. (In a functional programming course, the procedural and OO programmers realize just how similar their imperative roots are!) Their culture has trained them not to use the muscles in their minds that rely on the new concepts. But those muscles are there; we just need to exercise them, and build them up so they are as strong as the well-practiced muscles.

What Is Really Universal?

Hollywood blockbusters, apparently:

That evening, Everett invited the Pirahã to come to his home to watch a movie: Peter Jackson's remake of "King Kong". (Everett had discovered that the tribe loves movies that feature animals.) After nightfall, to the grinding sound of the generator, a crowd of thirty or so Pirahã assembled on benches and on the wooden floor of Everett's [house]. Everett had made popcorn, which he distributed in a large bowl. Then he started the movie, clicking ahead to the scene in which Naomi Watts, reprising Fay Wray's role, is offered as a sacrifice by the tribal people of an unspecified South Seas island. The Pirahã shouted with delight, fear, laughter, and surprise -- and when Kong himself arrived, smashing through the palm trees, pandemonium ensued. Small children, who had been sitting close to the screen, jumped up and scurried into their mothers' laps; the adults laughed and yelled at the screen.

The Pirahã enjoy movies even when the technological setting is outside their direct experience -- and for them, what is outside their direct experience seems outside their imagination. The story reaches home. From their comments, the Pirahã seemed to understand King Kong in much the way we did, and they picked up on cultural clues that did fit into their experience. A good story can do that.

Eugene sez, The Interpreter, is worth a read.

Philip Greenspun recently posted a provocative blog entry called Why do high school kids keep signing up to be undergrads at research universities? If you've never read any of Philip's stuff, this might seem like an odd and perhaps even naive piece. His claim is pretty straightforward: "Research universities do not bother to disguise the fact that promotion, status, salary, and tenure for faculty are all based on research accomplishments," so why don't our brightest, most ambitious high school students figure out that these institutions aren't really about teaching undergraduates? This claim might seem odd considering that Philip himself went to MIT and now teaches as an adjunct prof there. But he has an established track record of writing about how schools like Harvard, MIT, the Ivies, and their ilk could do a better job of educating undergrads, and at a lower cost.

My thoughts on this issue are mixed, though at a certain level I agree with his premise. More on how I agree below.

As an undergraduate, I went to a so-called regional university, one that grants Ph.D.s in many fields but which is not typical of the big research schools Philip considers. I chose the school for its relatively strong architecture school, which ranked in the top 15 or 20 programs nationally despite being at a school that overall catered largely to a regional student population. There I was part of a good honors college and was able to work closely with published scholars in a way that seems unlikely at a Research U. However, I eventually changed my major and studied computer science accounting. The accounting program had a good reputation, but its computer science department was average at best. It had a standard curriculum, and I was a good enough student and had enough good profs that I was able to receive a decent education and to have my mind opened to the excitement of doing computer science as an academic career. But when I arrived at grad school I was probably behind most of my peers in terms of academic preparation.

I went to a research school for my graduate study, though not one in the top tier of CS schools. It was at that time, I think, making an effort to broaden, deepen, and strengthen its CS program (something I think it has done). The department gave me great financial support and opportunities to teach several courses and do research with a couple of different groups. The undergrad students I taught and TAed sometimes commented that they felt like they were getting a better deal out of my courses than they got out of other courses at the university, but I was often surprised by how committed some of the very best researchers in the department were to their undergrad courses. Some of the more ambitious undergrads worked in labs with the grad students and got to know the research profs pretty well. At least one of those students is now a tenured prof in a strong CS program down south.

Now I teach at a so-called comprehensive university, one of those medium-sized state schools that offers neither the prestige of the big research school nor the prestige of an elite liberal arts school. We are in a no-man's land in other ways as well -- our faculty are expected to do research, but our teaching expectations and resources place an upper bound on what most faculty can do; our admissions standards grant access to a wider variety of students, but such folks tend to require a more active, more personal teaching effort.

What Greenspun says holds the essence of truth in a couple of ways. The first is that a lot of our best students think that they can only get a good education at one of the big research schools. That is almost certainly not true. The variation in quality among the programs at the less elite schools is greater, which requires students and their parents to be perhaps more careful in selecting programs. It also requires the schools themselves to do a better job communicating where their quality programs lie, because otherwise people won't know.

But a university such as mine can assemble a faculty that is current in the discipline, does research that contributes value (even basic knowledge), and cares enough about its mission to teach to devote serious energy to the classroom. I don't think that a comprehensive's teaching mission in any speaks ill of a research school faculty's desire to teach well but, as Greenspun points out, those faculty face strong institutional pressure to excel in other areas. The comprehensive school's lower admission standards means that weaker students have a chance that they couldn't get elsewhere. Its faculty's orientation means that stronger have a chance to excel in collaboration with faculty who combine interest and perhaps talent in both teaching and research.

If the MITs and Harvards don't excel in teaching undergrads, what value to they offer to bright, ambitious high school students? Commenters on the article answered in a way that sometimes struck me as cynical or mercenary, but I finally realized that perhaps they were simply being practical. Going to Research U. or Ivy C. buys you connections. For example:

Seems pretty plain that he's not looking to buy the educational experience, he's looking to buy the peers and the prestige of the university.

And in my experience of what school is good for, he's making the right decision.

You wanna learn? Set up a book budget and talk your way into or build your own facilities to play with the subject you're interested in. Lectures are a lousy way to learn anyway.

But you don't go to college to learn, you go to college to make the friends who are going to be on a similar arc as you go through your own career, and to build your reputation by association....

And:

You will meet and make friends with rich kids with good manners who will provide critical angel funding and business connections for your startups.

Who cares if the undergrad instruction is subpar? Students admitted to these schools are strong academically and likely capable of fending for themselves when it comes to content. What these students really need is a frat brother who will soon be an investment banker in a major NYC brokerage.

It's really unfair to focus on this side of the connection connection. As many commenters also pointed out, these schools attract lots of smart people, from undergrads to grad students to research staff to faculty. And the assiduous undergrad gets to hang around with them, learning from them all. Paul Graham would say that these folks make a great pool of candidates to be partners in the start-up that will make you wealthy. And if strong undergrad can fend for him- or herself, why not do it at Harvard or MIT, in a more intellectual climate? Good points.

But Greenspun offers one potential obstacle, one that seems to grow each year: price. Is the education an undergrad receives at an Ivy League or research school, intellectual and business connections included, really worth $200,000? In one of his own comments, he writes:

Economists who've studied the question of whether or not an Ivy League education is worth it generally have concluded that students who were accepted to Ivy League schools and chose not to attend (saving money by going to a state university, for example) ended up with the same lifetime income. Being the kind of person who gets admitted to Harvard has a lot of economic value. Attending Harvard turned out not to have any economic value.

I'm guessing, though, that most of these students went to a state research university, not to a comprehensive. I'd be curious to see how the few students who did opt for the less prestigious but more teaching-oriented school fared. I'm guessing that most still managed to excel in their careers and amass comparable wealth -- at least wealth enough to live comfortably.

I'm not sure Greenspun thinks that everyone should agree with his answer so much as that they should at least be asking themselves the question, and not just assuming the prestige trumps educational experience.

This whole discussion leads me to want to borrow a phrase from Richard Gabriel that he applies to talent and performance as a writer. The perceived quality of your undergraduate institution does not determine how good you can get, only how fast you get can good.

I read Greenspun's article just as I was finishing reading the book Teaching at the People's University, by Bruce Henderson. This book describes the history and culture of the state comprehensive universities, paying special attention to the competing forces that on the one hand push their faculty to teach and serve an academically diverse student body and on the other expects research and the other trappings of the more prestigious research schools. Having taught at a comprehensive for fifteen years now, I can't say that the book has taught me much I didn't already know about the conflicting culture of these schools, but it paints a reasonably accurate picture of what the culture is like. It can be a difficult environment in which to balance the desire to pursue basic research that has a significant effect in the world and the desire to teach a broad variety of students well.

There is no doubt that many of the students who enroll in this sort of school are served well, because otherwise they would have little opportunity to receive a solid university education; the major research schools and elite liberal arts schools wouldn't admit them. That's a noble motivation and it provides a valuable service to the state, but what about the better students who choose a comprehensive? And what of the aspirations of faculty who are trained in a research-school environment to value their careers by the intellectual contribution they make to their discipline? Henderson does a nice job laying these issues out for people to consider explicitly, rather than to back into them when their expectations are unmet. This is not unlike what Greenspun does in his blog entry, laying an important question on the line that too often goes unasked until the answer is too late to matter.

All this said, I'm not sure that Greenspun was thinking of the comprehensives at all when he wrote his article. The only school he mentions as an alternative to MIT, Harvard, and the other Ivies is the Olin College of Engineering, which is a much different sort of institution than a mid-level state school. I wonder whether he would suggest that his young relative attend one of the many teacher-oriented schools in his home state of Massachusetts?

After having experienced two or three different kinds of university, would I choose a different path for myself in retrospect? This sort of guessing game is always difficult to play, because I have experienced them all under different conditions, and they have all shaped me in different ways. I sometimes think of the undergraduates who worked in our research lab while I was in grad school; they certainly had broader and deeper intellectual experiences than I had as as undergraduate. But as a first-generation university attendee I grew quite a bit as an undergraduate and had a lot of fun doing it. Had I been destined for a high-flying academic research career, I think I would have had one. Some of my undergrad friends have done well on that path. My ambition, goals, and inclinations are well suited for where I've landed; that's the best explanation for why I've landed here. Would my effect on the world have been greater had I started at a Harvard? That's hard to say, but I see lots of opportunities to contribute to the world from this perch. Would I be happier, or a better citizen, or a better father and husband? Unlikely.

I wish Greenspun's young relative luck in his academic career. And I hope that I can prepare my daughters to choose paths that allow them to grow and learn and contribute.

As a department head, I am occasionally invited to attend an event as a "university leader". This morning I had the chance to attend a breakfast reception thrown by the university for our six local state legislators. They had all been part of a strong funding year for state universities, and this meeting was a chance for us to say "thank you" and to tell them all some of the things we are doing. This may not sound like all that much fun to some of you; it's certainly unlike a morning spent cutting code. But I find this sort of meeting to be a good way to put a face on our programs to the people who hold our purse strings, and I admit to enjoying the experience of being an "insider".

I found our delegation to consist of good people who had done their homework and who have good intentions regarding higher education. Two or three of them seem to be well-connected in the legislature and so able to exercise some leadership. One in particular has the look, bearing, speaking ability, and mind that bode well should he decide to seek higher elected office.

I can always tell when I am in the presence of folks who have to market the university or themselves, as nearly every person the room must. I hear sound bites about "windows of opportunity" and "dynamic personalities in the leadership". My favorite sound bite of the morning bears directly on a computer science department: "The jobs of the future haven't been invented yet."

This post involves computing in an even more immediate way. Upon seeing my name tag, two legislators volunteered that the toughest course they took in college was their computer programming class, and the course in which they received their lowest grades (a B in Cobol and a C in Pascal, for what it's worth). These admissions came in separate conversations, completely independent from one another. The way they spoke of their experiences let me know that the feeling is still visceral for them. I'm not sure that this is the sort of impression we want to make on the folks who pay our bills! Fortunately, they both spoke in good nature and let us know that they understand how important strong CS programs are for the economic development of our region and state. So I left the meeting with a good feeling.

Several folks have already recommended Gerard Meszaros's new book, xUnit Test Patterns. I was fortunate to have a chance to review early drafts of Gerard's pattern language on the web and then at PLoP 2004, where Gerard and I were in a writers' workshop together. By that time I felt I knew a little about writing tests and using JUnit, but reading Gerard's papers that fall taught me just how much more there was for me to learn. I learned a lot that month and can only hope that my participation in the workshop helped Gerard a small fraction as much as his book has helped me. I strongly echo Michael Feathers's recommendation: "XUnit Patterns is a great all around reference." (The same can be said for Michael's book, though my involvement reviewing early versions of it was not nearly as deep.)

As I grow older, I have a growing preference for short books. Maybe I am getting lazy, or maybe I've come to realize that most of the reasons for which I read don't require 400 or 600 hundred words. Gerard's book weighs in at a hefty 883 pages -- what gives? Well, as Martin Fowler writes in his post Duplex Book, XUnit Test Patterns is really more than one book. Martin says two, but I think of it as really three:

• a 181-page narrative that teaches us about automated tests, how to write them, and how to refactor them,
• a 91-page catalog of smells you will find in test code, and
• an approximately 500-page catalog of the patterns of test automation. These patterns reference one another in a tight network, and so might be considered a pattern language.

So in a book like this, I have the best of two worlds: a relatively short, concise, well-written story that shows me the landscape of automated unit testing and gets me started writing tests, plus a complete reference book to which I can turn as I need to learn a particular technique in greater detail. I can read the story straight through and then jump into and out of the catalogs as needed. The only downside is the actual weight of the book... It's no pocket reference! But that's a price I am happy to pay.

One of my longstanding goals has been to write an introductory programming textbook, say for CS1, in the duplex style. I'm thinking something like the dual The Timeless Way of Building/A Pattern Language, only shorter and less mystical. I had always hoped to be the first to do this, to demonstrate what I think is a better future for instructional books. But at this increasingly late date, I'd be happy if anyone could succeed with the idea.

Another coincidence in time... The day after I post a note on Alan Kay's thoughts on teaching math and science to kids, I run across (via physics blogger and fellow basketball crazy