James Drogan

I have advised students to interview the potential employer.  Steve James has posted Questions You Absolutely Must Ask Your Interviewer over at TalentZoo.com.

It is, after all, your career.

The title of this post is the title of a contribution by Massimo Pigliucci, Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, to the Project Syndicate blog.

Two pithy paragraphs are:

But the need for critical thinking has never been as pressing as in the Internet era. At least in developed countries – but increasingly in underdeveloped ones as well – the problem is no longer one of access to information, but of the lack of ability to process and make sense of that information.

Unfortunately, colleges, high schools, and even elementary schools are unlikely to mandate introductory courses in critical thinking on their own. Education has increasingly been transformed into a commodity system, in which the “customers” (formerly students) are kept happy with personalized curricula while being prepared for the job market (rather than being prepared to be responsible human beings and citizens).

Be sure to page down and read the comments, especially that by Dr. Gary Hurd.

There is work to be done to tame the present and secure the future.

From time to time I engage in conversations with students regarding opportunities to be pursued and the essentials required to secure those opportunities.  At the core of these discussions lies the need for the pursuer to come to grips with the four items (4Rs) in the title of this post.  Given a good specification of these, the student is better prepared to set off in the world.

Success is also contingent upon having an understanding of a range of future scenarios for the development of the world.  One of the more informed and provocative sources of looks at the future is Irving Wladawsky-Berger. 

This morning I want to call attention to his recent post, A Great Stagnation or a New Golden Age of Innovation?  How does Wladawsky-Berger's view of future color your consideration of the 4Rs?  What does the result thus suggest about imminent actions you are about to take or should be about to take?

In A Scholar's Workbench I referred to the stack of books and papers accumulated as a result of my first seminar in the MDY program at Norwich.

Here's the workbench at the end of the sixth seminar.  The stack (books to the left; printed material and papers to the right) didn't grow as much as I thought it might, but the machine in the middle managed to accumulate 250 meg in 615 files in 21 folders.  The citation database, managed by Zotero (great tool) contained 398 entries.

I think the brain was also suitably transformed which, of course, was what this adventure was all about to begin with.

A one week residency culminating in graduation in mid-June remains.  The assumption, of course, is that I won't find some way to fall out of the boat between here and there.  And between here and there I have in mind to write a paper, the working title is Synthesis, to gather together the experiences over the last 18 or so months, draw some conclusions as to the return on investment, discuss how I can bring the learnings to bear in my teaching, and perhaps make some recommendations to Norwich.

I find myself increasingly thinking about the world as it is and might be.   This emphasis has been heighted by my recent 18 months of study at Norwich (see Back to School).  This makes me especially sensitive to information that bears upon the tenses mentioned in the title of this post.

Two items have caught my eye and ear over the last few days.

The first is Joseph Nye on Global Power Shifts from TED Talks.  The abstract for this talk is:

Historian and diplomat Joseph Nye gives us the 30,000-foot view of the shifts in power between China and the US, and the global implications as economic, political and "soft" power shifts and moves around the globe.

The second is Bob Herbert's last Op-Ed in The New York Times of today, Losing Our Way, the opening paragraph of which goes:

So here we are pouring shiploads of cash into yet another war, this time in Libya, while simultaneously demolishing school budgets, closing libraries, laying off teachers and police officers, and generally letting the bottom fall out of the quality of life here at home (Herbert, B. (2011, March 26). Losing Our Way. The New York Times, A23).

Both items provoke thinking about the what we may need to do to prepare for developments.  Hence, thye are recommended to your attention.

A couple of words about the title of this post.  It's intended to convey the notion that future is not as far off as it used to be.

There are many arguments on both sides why blogs and their ilk will, on the one hand, trump traditional journalism and, on the other hand, why this wil not be so.

An example that makes the case in favor of journalism that has caught my eye is The Gulf War: Were There any Heroes in the BP Well Disaster from The New Yorker.

From the abstract

ABSTRACT: A REPORTER AT LARGE about the response to the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. It has become conventional wisdom that the BP-funded response to the spill was a chaotic and mismanaged affair, driven by corporate avarice, lacking in urgency, and at times willfully negligent of the problem’s scope—the idea being that any organization that had caused such a catastrophe, and that was so clearly unprepared for it, could not in good faith clean up the scene of the disaster. The evidence for this is much like the imagery of heavy oiling: vivid and convincing upon first consideration, but also fragmentary, anecdotal. At the peak of the cleanup effort, forty-seven thousand people were fighting the oil, a community equivalent in size to Annapolis, or the workforce of G.M. In just half a year, the response expended nearly sixty million man-hours, roughly nine times what it took to build the Empire State Building. The logistical demands on the effort, which spanned the entire Gulf coast—a region of varied geography and political culture—were immense. President Obama was not exaggerating when he announced in June, “This is the largest response to an environmental disaster of this kind in the history of our country.” Discusses the evolution of contingency planning for oil spills, dating back to the 1967 Torrey Canyon spill off the coast of England. Tells about the roles assumed by the Coast Guard, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and other government bodies, including local responses that ran parallel to the federal effort. Describes the work overseen by the Houma Incident Command Post and the difficulties, early in the spill, in determining how much oil was leaking from the wellhead and what its chemistry was. Tells about the debate among the responders over the use of booms, berms and dispersants to fight the spill. Also discusses the way that public opinion and press coverage influenced decisions made in the response effort. Tells about the actions of Billy Nungesser, Roger Laferriere; Admiral Thad Allen, E.P.A. administrator, Lisa Jackson, President Obama, Governor Bobby Jindal, and other officials during the spill response. A team of federal scientists had estimated that the total amount of oil that came from the well was 4.9 million barrels. Writer accompanies NOAA scientists on board a ship looking for oil plumes beneath the surface of the Gulf. Research in the Gulf has in many ways been encouraging. At the shoreline, pockets of oil will certainly linger. Although certain species may be at severe risk from the remaining oil, many others, such as sea turtles, do not seem to be under great threat, and the marsh as a whole does not appear to be ecologically devastated. All told, the spill killed fifty-six hundred birds, a dismaying number, but a small fraction of the quarter million that died in the Exxon Valdez spill. Oysters have suffered gravely, though this appears to be from the change in salinity caused by allowing the Mississippi to flow more forcefully into the Gulf. Luck certainly played a role in sparing large portions of the coast—a turn in the weather could have made the impact much worse—but a strategy based on dispersing the oil offshore appears to have helped prevent a great deal of crude from hitting land.

Khatchadourian provides a comprehensive and thoughtful view that, it seems to me, is impossible to produce via blogs, and similar near-horizon and consequently shallow-thinking sources. The pace of change in the system of the word has, admittedly, shortened the SIDAL cycle and made it increasingly difficult to be as thoughtful as one might like.

Decision windows becomes increasingly smaller and action in the face of growing uncertainty must be taken. Nevertheless, from time to time thoughtfulness and thoroughness ought to reign in order that we might better learn how to improve our condition.

From time to time I have commented in this blog on the subject of leadership and leaders (search on "leader" for a sample).  Of late, we are continually reminded of the importance of leadership in addressing major issues, and we are simultaneously reminded how short current leadership, especially political leadership, is of the mark.

This morning's New York Times brings a very interesting article, The Quest to Build a Better Boss, that warrants attention (Bryant, A. (2011, March 13). Google’s 8-Point Plan to Help Managers Improve. The New York Times).  The following paragraph is illustrative of the provocative nature of this item.

What employees valued most were even-keeled bosses who made time for one-on-one meetings, who helped people puzzle through problems by asking questions, not dictating answers, and who took an interest in employees’ lives and careers.

This, of course, requires an open-mind, balance, patience -- things that require not only time, but a willingness to confront one's own biases.  Hard work, this.  Perhaps this explains the shortage of leaders.

...this blog using the word "ethics" would result in a reasonably large number of hits.  It would be fair to conclude that this is a subject that has been, and continues to be very much on my mind.  Each semester Prof. Ferritto is kind enough to invite me to address incoming graduate students on the subject.  All courses I teach have a module on ethics.

Whence this interest comes is, I suspect, my small town upbringing and my long career at IBM.

I have, from time to time, commented that I prefer the word "integrity" to "ethics" for the former seems to me in require action while the latter is satisfied with compliance or even no action at all.

Recent allegations against Rajat Gupta, formerly of McKinsey and Company, have caught my attention.  I especially call your attention to this morning's FT op-ed, McKinsey Model Springs a Leak (Gapper, J. (2011, March 10). McKinsey Model Springs a Leak. Financial Times, 9.).  It is synopsis of the effort required to build integrity, the overriding importance of the quality, and quickness with which it can all fall away.

Without integrity, not much else is of lasting value.

The title of this post refers to a recent article by Christopher Caldwell (Caldwell, C. (2011, February 18). Jeopardy is Just the Start for Watson. Financial Times, 7).  In the past I have commented on the impact of technology on the human (Turkle + Technology = Something to Think About, et. al.).  I invite you give some though to what I found to be the provocative paragraph from Caldwell.

This misrepresents the way computers change social relations and individual human beings. They do so not by replicating human judgment and reasoning but by offering tempting alternatives to it. In many areas, reliance on computers erodes human inventiveness, curiosity and perseverance to the point where human judgment becomes less reliable [emphasis added]. Industrial technology has enabled us to unlearn all sorts of primal things our ancestors knew – how to recognise rain by looking at the sky, how to make a fire without matches.

This is happening at a time when human inventiveness, curiosity, perseverance and reliable judgment is increasingly in demand to address the significant issues we face.

"We have met the enemy and he is us."  Pogo

From IT Conversations come this fascinating interview.

The Mobile Sensing Group at Dartmouth College is helping lead the way in turning the everyday mobile phone into an open global mobile sensing platform for personal, social-nets and societal-scale sensing. Led by faculty member Andrew Campbell, the group is working to be involved in new ways to use mobile devices. He gives an overview of the work carried out at Dartmouth with his colleague Tanzeem Choudhury, starting with such challenges as privacy, and discusses how the group uses Jigsaw. He also gives some examples of possible applications.

Campbell paints a picture of very sophisticated technology that, to borrow from Sherry Turkle of MIT, changes us and our communications patterns.

It is worth a listen.