What do we know? - update

After a handful of conversations with students who explain that they "know" the material, but still have trouble with the homework and the tests, I recall the numbers of similar conversations I've had over the handful of semesters since I started teaching. Maybe we need to be clear with the terms: what does "know" really mean? I picture a continuity spanning...

1. Absolute mastery of the core concepts and relationships with class discussions
2. Familiarity with course concepts
3. Recognition that the lecture sounds like something mentioned in class before
4. Recognition of some of the words used in class
5. Assumption that some of the words used in lecture are probably on Wikipedia somewhere

You hope for the best. Do you know what you don't know? As the cliche goes, the more you know, the more you know that you don't know. Or the flip side, if you don't know much, you can assume that there's not much to know- everything is simple.

But this isn't just about students- it's everybody. Back in the day when I've had to screen technical resumes, you wonder which one of the above applied- did they understand a technology, just play around with it, or just read some blurb about it. Worst case- did they just throw down a TLA that they read about online?

Does "absolute mastery" happen if you ace all the tests in school and get an A for that course? The real world applies plenty of tests on its own- being an "expert" supposedly takes 10 years and means absorbing 50,000 "ideas", though it would be almost impossible to discretely list them all, much less share them with others.

And, expert or not, there's a heck of a lot more than 50,000 ideas in any domain to absorb- so "expert" is in a narrow context. Which goes back to the main point: what do we really know?

Temporal Man

I'm in Professor Java's reading Temporal Man, a 1981 book about how time is conceptualized- I can't believe I'm doing a section of my lit review about time. Time, as in the march of... Geez- now I know I'm writing a dissertation. I may as well do a literature review about the color blue while I'm at it.
But, if I could put time in a bottle...
Time is a central theme in transportation research, the idea that transportation is a derived activity, and the whole notion of our activities as something we optimize under scarce resources- including of course time. Time is part of household production- turns out consumers not only consume, but provide a resource- time- that is used for producing other goods.
Time is experienced in three ways- by conditioning, by perception, and by control. What does that have to do with how we use transportation? I suppose one way is looking at how we routinize our daily lives, including the getting around part- by going backwards. We make choices, we act on them and "perceive" the relative benefits, and once settling on the most comfortable routine that requires as little thought as possible, while offering the possibility of control.
Basically, drive.

More information in more places

Information consumes our attention, or so I'm reading. To a point, it also helps us make better decisions. After that point (which seems to be in the eye of the beholder) it becomes a liability- the attention it consumes outweighs the benefits accrued through better decisions. After all, making the perfect decision is always expensive, but pretty good decisions can be relatively easy to make.

Or the difference is often not worth the cost.

So the whole point of ubiquitous computing as we currently see it is to just grab more information and carry it around with us, so our brains can process it wherever we are. Mobile devices are hard to read, so it takes even more effort to locate and extract information from these little devices. So if you use these little devices (read: PDA or smart phone) the cost of gathering information increases.

Are the benefits of information higher when you're mobile?

I don't know if we've answered that. If it means avoiding unnecessary travel, as in better contingency planning, maybe. Just maybe. But if you're trying to plan your day with just your mobile phone, it's the wrong tool for the job. Period.

So they're finding that planning beforehand (with a PC and Google, I'm guessing), and using mobile devices for reference (reminding yourself what to get from the store) works better. Maybe the mobile device can help with limited contingency planning, shuffling among a list of predetermined options based on context and "problems", or the observed gap between where you are and where you want to be, in general terms.

So I think that means that your mobile device, GPS, PC, and the Internet need to all talk to each other, in this ad hoc cloud of a partially disconnected Personal Area Network.

Between this and my earlier thoughts about how Personal Information Management sucks, I think the field hasn't even started to think about the basic problems that confront us.

Too boring to do a competent job

I'm doing a crash-course on Personal Information Management as a new framework for my dissertation- thinking that I've seen these little applications since the 80's that take a lot of work to use, and provide little benefit. Lots and lots of these projects in fact... I can't count the number of calendars I've seen go unused in various programs.
Then it finally hits me.
They all suck.
What does that really mean? They appear useful at first, but then once you try to use them, they quickly cost more effort than they're worth.
Can a PIM tool not suck? How?
Data interchange is one thought- you should be able to enter information once, and use/share it in lots of useful ways. What about the ability to reprocess it in novel ways? There must be ways in which these can be developed more imaginatively, other than the dull calendar-task-address book paradigm that has been propagated for 25+ years...

Who owns information and ideas?

The biannual nightmare of midterms are over- oh you R1 profs with a few dozen students and a handful of teaching assistants, how ever do you survive? Seriously though, with the ballpark of 150 students, weekly homework and quizzes, and no TA's, my baby steps towards automation have been my only hope of keeping a 60-hour workweek.

But I've realized I've held an increasingly morbid fascination with the news- namely the economy. How low can the Dow go? How low can crude oil go? How high can unemployment go? It has the feeling of watching a slow motion train wreck- you know it's going to be bad, and you can't do anything about it, but you have to watch anyways.

But I wonder in the middle of all these bankruptcies , what happens to the Intellectual Property these companies own? They own lots of copyrights and patents- when the last staffer gets booted, and the office furniture goes up for auction, who owns the ideas the company generated? I think they just go into limbo, the dead zone where they can neither generate revenues for compensating creditors, or otherwise be released for the public good- after all, if you haven't paid for your debts, you haven't really paid for generating those ideas in the first place. This is kind of useful for copyrights on things like computer software, and especially patents, which create a monopoly on the idea of the technology. These limbo IP protections essentially lock out the technology from the economy for years or even decades.

Not what we need when we're banking on a tech-led recovery. Don't let anybody kid you, the recovery depends on rapidly increasing levels of productivity, not on the whole nation suddenly returning to the $5 latte counter at Starbucks en masse. Increasing productivity has only meant one thing: technology.

We should really examine the nature of IP protections- have they gone too far? An information economy as we have allegedly become cannot be mired in these Gilded Age notions of monopoly- temporarily useful in the transition to an information economy. But the last Gilded Age ended after all with a Depression. As they say, trying the same things and expecting a different outcome is one definition of insanity. Strong IP creates monopoly and leads to stagnation and loss of innovation. This just feeds back to slowing the march of technology, and back to another bubble of increasing consumption and diminishing productivity- classic Malthusian economics.

Which brings up another point: who owns the information these companies have after they go bankrupt? I mean, after the servers are packed and sold at auction, and backup media are sold to scrap? I'm unaware of any regulations that require that the data is destroyed, and even if so, it's almost unenforceable against an entitiy that has ceased to exist.

We don't have privacy in the death of a company that owns our data, do we? I can only imagine what would happen if Facebook went under and that data was up for grabs.

So my idea is this- when the Feds bail out a company, they take ownership of the ideas and information that the company owns. They don't get to use the personal information- that has to be returned to the customer's ownership. But they do get to take ownership of the IP, to be either licensed out or placed into the public domain. I'd prefer Open Source, but that requires an owner entity, and that can just as well spring up out of the public domain as well.

After all, we should own our own information. And companies that lose their physical assets in bankruptcies should lose their IP assets as well- not just place them in limbo or hand them over to a rent-seeking IP monopolist as seems to be the case these days. There's too much public benefit lost even when we're paying for it anyway.

Personal Information Managers and Social Networks

During one of my lectures about specialized databases, I discuss the Personal Information Manager (PIM). I have a few versions of these tired, dull applications for tracking address lists, a date book / calendar, and a to-do list. My first PIM application came on a TRS-80 Model 100 computer (which I still have in the basement) circa 1982- and they haven't changed a whole lot since then...

And it hits me this morning: are there any social network-enabled PIM's out there? Or is a social network just a part of your Personal Information? I mean, your network is just your address book. Your calendar and to-do list overlap people in your network. Maybe the social network is just a subset of your PIM data... and you have other network information that is separate from your social network.

There there's the role of GIS - the idea that your calendar involves you being somewhere else- as does your to-do list. So at the end of the day, you have some vague network of resources and locations, a social network of people (social as a generic for the subset of the population you interact with), a list of desired activities, and a schedule of time, all of which interact in complex ways.

And I'm just looking at the transportation side of it, or how to get as much done with as little movement as possible. How much of this do I have to define right now?

Plant, don't just eat..

Just a odd thought after reading more doom-and-gloom headlines about the economy: is the sharp drop in business investment, in terms of computers and software, partly reflecting a shift to Open Source software? Because, the utilization of free software means a drop in spending, but a growth in assets- if you look at software as a factor in production capital. If you don't see it as a means to boost output, I don't know what it's for, really.

I'm more and more convinced that Open Source software holds a key to booting productivity -output per worker- relative to costs. Then there's the whole notion of infrastructure capital, or the idea that networks create value to the organizations that use them. I wonder if the ability to shape those networks freely will help build network value in ways that commercial software can't. OSS allows users to slice, dice, and reassemble in whatever ways best enhance their value.

The other phrase that sometimes comes to mind, about not eating your seed corn, deals with consumption vs. investment. Planting necessarily involves a lot of up-front investment for long-term gain. But it's an investment in pure sweat, in conjunction with last season's surplus- the stuff you didn't sell or eat last time around. Somewhere between direct consumption and trading for money for other consumption, is a direct investment in future growth through labor in-kind.

Can Open Source benefits permit a greater ability to use other OSS projects, yielding a beneficial cycle of increasing productivity and other in-kind benefits? Yea, maybe, to some limit. But it doesn't involve money, which is in short supply, and ultimately, productivity has to be revalued in cash. But I see it as a way out of this mess.