Baby steps… again

I came home tonight in a bit of a funk.  The rain was dripping from the spruce branches, and it was already dark outside. The music to Barrios’s La Catedral sat on my stand, neglected for months. But that first movement, played slowly, reminds me of the soundtrack one might hear in a movie, as the camera focuses on rain droplets trickling down a window pane. I pick up my guitar, fingers cramping into the upper frets for the first few bars. The high string cries in soprano, while thumb and finger pluck the harmonies. After 10 minutes my hands are spent after too many weeks of not playing, but it’s a start.

Use it or lose it – one of those universal lessons. It’s so easy to stop practicing something when other live events intrude – playing music, jumping a mountain bike. And the body, eager to conserve resources, begins to atrophy the neural-muscular network that enables these activities. One saving grace is that we never have to completely start over; the body retains echoes of memory, the fingers find their places without conscious thought. Yet, it’s frustrating to expect the experience to “flow,” and to have to stumble like a toddler learning to walk, brow furrowed in concentration as I remember how one foot goes in front of the other.

Blogging is another skill that atrophies with neglect; let’s see if I bring this back as a regular practice.

I’m a data scientist!

At a recent Cyberlearning Research Summit organized by some colleagues, Bill Finzer proposed that we think about the Data Sciences as a distinct educational goal. Briefly, the data sciences exist at the intersection of three domains: math & statistics, a substantive area of knowledge (economics, psychology, education, etc.), and “hacking” or the ability to construct algorithmic solutions to problems.

What Bill described was essentially my current professional life. It usually takes me a couple of minutes to describe what I do when I meet someone at a party (I don’t have a simple job descriptor like “tax lawyer”).  Now I can tell people “I’m a data scientist!” (Of course, they won’t know what that means, and it’ll take me two minutes to explain that, anyway).

Still, I’ve felt like I’ve assembled an odd hybrid of skills and interests in my professional life, and I’m not eager to part with any of them.  I’ll take the bit of external validation I got from watching this video.  :-)

I haven’t been blogging much over the past months, but I have a collection of ideas starting to backlog and will be writing more frequently in the near future.  Stay tuned.

Chasing the unknown

I had a small epiphany last weekend, and it shouldn’t have come as a surprise:  I really enjoy tackling problems that nobody has ever solved before.  That’s what led me into a career in research, and that excitement (and the mirror attribute of high uncertainty tolerance) was captured in this recent essay The Importance of Stupidity in Scientific Research.

The epiphany wasn’t so much remembering what gets me excited – it was how other challenges feel by comparison.  Lately I’ve been considering building another classical guitar project in the wood shop.  I built my last (and first) guitar while still in college 25 years ago.  Guitar building requires extraordinary patience and a high degree of exactitude in certain operations (namely the cutting of frets and placement of the bridge & saddle).  But the rewards are great – the home builder can take the time to fine-tune the sound board and use high quality woods that would normally be found in guitars retailing for several thousands of dollars.  The more I contemplate setting up my shop for instrument building, the more excited I get.

So here’s the epiphany – while there is a personal challenge in rising to the technical proficiency needed to execute another guitar, that problem has largely been “solved.”  Sure, the challenge is new to me, but there are plenty of people out there who know how to build a decent guitar. What I’d really like to do is branch out and explore alternatives to the standard design. Recently some luthiers have tinkered with using space-age composite materials in the sound board, and several now include sound ports on the side of the guitar near the neck, both as “monitors” for the player as well as to enhance the overall tonal palette.  Oh, and let’s not forget “fan fretted” guitars – these instruments look like they were built while the maker was staring into a fun-house mirror. All of these are innovations that solve particular problems of playability.

But… as anyone who has invested years in research will tell you, it takes a long time to become acquainted with a domain and develop that instinct of where the interesting problems (and solutions) lie. As the article cited above points out, most of the time you fail, but you get a little more insight into how to ask the question better, and which avenues might be more promising next time. And researchers benefit enormously from reading about the trials of their peers (I’d argue that we don’t publish enough about our failures – the community benefits from hearing those stories, too).

Will I ever know enough about instrument building to branch out into a promising innovation? It’s a daunting prospect, but then again, what else do I have but time? Bob Taylor in his book Guitar Lessons points out the virtues of getting an early start.  He regretted not planting a particular tree back when we wasn’t sure whether he’d be keeping his current house – had he planted the tree, it would have matured by now and he could be enjoying (literally) the fruits of his labor. Sometimes innovations are begun on a hunch and take 10 years to reach fruition. But if I don’t begin, I’ll never know.

Stay tuned for a progress update as the days grow shorter and I start spending more evening time at the work bench.

Main power restored

That line – “main power restored” – always seemed to mark the turning point of a Star Trek episode. Scotty or Giordi or Chief O’Brien would work their magic, the captain would receive word in the nick of time, and the crew would begin to claw its way out of whatever trouble they were in.  The situation would flip from dire hopelessness to a promising light at the end of the tunnel.

That is what recovering from obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) feels like.

After a brief false start, I’ve now been on CPAP therapy for about a week.  It truly feels like a second chance at life. I was lapsing into depression, had stopped even trying to exercise after work, could barely drag myself out of bed in the morning… basically, life was a drag. After a week my body is starting to feel like its old self (I put in a couple of intense biking days last weekend), and the rest of my mind/spirit is sorting itself out.  I’m not sure how long full healing will take, but I’m feeling very patient now that treatment is at hand.

People ask how long I’ve been suffering the effects of OSA, and it’s difficult to pinpoint. My best guess is that it started setting over the winter, but the effects can be gradual and cumulative, so it might have been even earlier.  You’d have to ask the people around me – when did I start acting like the walking dead?  ;-)

My enthusiasm for work (both small-w work and the Work of Life) is returning, but I’m still feeling a bit out of sorts. I hope to return to updating this blog on a more regular basis soon, but again, am remaining patient.

It feels good to be back among the living!

Is this how new parents feel?

Chronic sleep deprivation. Fuzzy-headedness.  Not being able to recall names or facts or those words on the tip of the tongue.  Craving a nap at all hours of the day, coming home after work and feeling like I’ve already been up past midnight. I’ve given up on evening bike rides or practicing music or anything else that requires concentration. One silver lining is that I’m catching up on reading (which I usually don’t do much of when the sun is still shining outside).

I took the home sleep test last week (wired up to a few sensors that all fed into a wrist-watch data recorder), but will probably have to wait another week for results, and then more time to see a doc and get the next steps of treatment rolling.  For sanity’s sake I’ve set July 1 as the day when I’ll be getting a proper night’s sleep again.  I can suck anything up for another month.

I miss writing, and playing music, and having that inner spark that smiles at life. Right now I feel like I’m just existing.  Have to remember that this too shall pass…

Till next time!

Taking a time out

I’ve got a backlog of topics I want to write about, but I’ve been stricken with this pervasive sense of fatigue lately. After deciding that, no, it’s not extended seasonal depression, and no, it’s not just bad Spring allergies, I finally called my doctor. Her first guess is that I could have a sleep disorder, so I’m going to get tested in June (not happy about the wait, but this is what “managed care” cost containment looks like).  Stay tuned…

What this means practically is that other than work and some exercise, I’ve really been off the grid lately. Whenever I’m even slightly cognitively impaired (illness or fatigue) my writing is the first thing that suffers, so I just haven’t had the juice to blog lately.  I’m confident my energy and writing will come back; I just need to be patient.

This is just a quick post to blow some dust off the blog spot – I look forward to posting more regularly in the future.

Teaching first- and second-hand knowledge

I’m still ruminating on themes of “practice” and “mastery” I touched on in some previous posts. This blog is starting to serve as a “parking lot” for ideas that I hope to weave together into a more coherent form someday.

I’m not sure what exactly sparked off this latest thought, but I’ve been noticing the distinction between teaching first-hand and second-hand knowledge.  Teaching something we know first-hand is pretty obvious – I can teach a child how to tie a shoelace, or a colleague how to specify a statistical model. I don’t have to draw on external resources to provide the content, although teaching aids (pictures, text books, etc) can help embellish an explanation.

Secondary knowledge is something I don’t have direct experience with, and here it gets interesting.  Most of us adults (who aren’t professional historians) know something of the founding of the United States, the framing of the Constitution, the Revolutionary War, etc.  We can also tell these stories to our children, but how sure are we about the knowledge we’re imparting?  Telling any sort of cultural myth generally entails passing along a story or knowledge that one has not directly experienced; we serve as conduits for a communal story.

Okay, so far no problem – there are things we know directly (and teach/coach) and other things we pass along (such as historical narratives).  Now think of middle school science teachers.  Are they teaching primary or secondary knowledge? It’s an interesting question.  Many are probably generally well-versed in textbook knowledge (they may have even majored in a science), but to what extent have they internalized the knowledge as their own?  I could probably do a decent job of teaching a basic physics class, but I was never really a practicing physicist, and know little beyond the first year college course.  So what would I be doing, other than interpreting/explaining what was already in a text book? What would I add of my own?  And does it matter?

A while back a friend of mine asked me how to get rid of these whitish rings that had appeared on his dining table. I knew I’d read about those in a book on finishing, and sure enough I was able to look it up and respond with a remedy – try mild heat, and perhaps gentle abrasion with steel wool.  But I also warned him that I had never actually tried any of these remedies myself, so couldn’t vouch for them or for unforeseen consequences.  It was an unsatisfying experience.

In a similar vein, I’ve certainly read about wood movement (the tendency of wood to expand and contract along particular dimensions with varying humidity) and how to design for it, but I’ve never actually experienced, say, a panel blowing out of a frame or a drawer getting stuck in its casing.  On the other hand, I’ve both read and experienced what can happen if an off-cut catches the back part of a spinning table saw blade, or what a bowl feels like as it flies off of a lathe and into my face shield. I know that you shouldn’t brake around corners on a fast mountain bike descent, and I know why you shouldn’t do so (having done it and experienced the consequences).

So back to my question: when does it matter that a teacher possesses first-hand, experiential knowledge of a subject, versus largely second-hand, “received wisdom?”  We intuitively prefer the former, and I suspect there are varying degrees of the latter. That is, I was never a math major, but have a reasonable intuition about some aspects of middle- and high-school math.  I certainly know real-number algebra inside-out.  But – although I took a course in abstract algebra as an undergraduate – I know I don’t have the deeper connection to theories of algebras, how systems of domains and operators come together coherently. So I can help a high school freshman struggling with his or her algebra homework, but there are limits to what I can teach.

I’m starting to examine my own balance between first- and second-hand knowledge, both at work and in general life. It’s starting to feel like exploration – we go out and cover some territory, come to know it well, but hear from fellow travelers about what lies over the next hill.  Perhaps we even pass that folklore along to others, along with our own hard-won knowledge of familiar terrain. And we make judgments about risks – the consequences of mis-informing a fellow traveler about the safety of that frozen river, for example, could be catastrophic.

As I wrote, this will become a thread I’ll broaden and deepen; it weaves through a number of areas of my life/experience.