Stuff I can't prove

What better way to spend the first nice weekend in about 7 months than to work on my dissertation proposal. I'm facing a bunch of realizations, none of which are really a big shock- namely that I'm going off on a tangent about PIM and I need to reel it back in to the scope of my project. It's interesting, as is everything else, but there's only a subset that's relevant to this project, at this point. (I'm a little ticked that I can't do 2-level outlines in Blogger, though that may be because this is completely the wrong forum for what I'm doing anyway.)

1. distributed cognition- students need social ties to other students to help them gather information, keep track of tasks, and, in short, manage information overload.
   
2. CC students in particular may be more prone to information overload, and don't have distributed cognition (#1) available to improve outcomes.
3. CC students need formalized PIM tools to improve task/ time management and compensate for reduced social support for distributed cognition.
4. Oh yea, by the way, maybe they can carpool too.

Going backwards, a better PIM tool would help manage the complexity of not driving, and by the way, they'll do better in school too.

That's my entire dissertation.

Unfortunately, I'm suffering from information overload in my own way- in terms of how to navigate the stacks of articles, books, and my varyous outside obligations, to put together a coherent proposal. And just waiting until summer isn't a solution either.

The robots are coming!

I'm a bit interested in the sudden local interest in Social Robotics. Not so much about robots in general, but it means a framework for some other stuff I'm interested in: goal/task formation, activity planning, time, pattern recognition, pattern language formation, pattern grammars, and machine learning. And a lot of research seems to be a process of chasing grants to pay for the research to learn things that are analogous to what you're really interested in.

Yea, I'm interested in analog computing again, all of the sudden, and for no apparent reason other than watching Battlestar Galactica. That, and the sudden realization that my dad really spent the last 50 years of his life doing analog computing, the last decade of which was really in robotics, though under the heading of something else quite different.

But I think without "reimagining" or "rebooting" all the early research on analog computing, robotics will be highly limited. The digital-analog hybrid model would seem to solve a lot of the problems we're looking at here, as we look to adjust our Comp Sci curriculum to make the robots work. Even more of the interesting frameworks are going to come from other directions, like cognitive psychology, and I think, Personal Information Management, even.

I'm also psyched about the new Terminator movie. Clearly, we should not give the robots guns, no matter how good an idea it seems at the time.

Good Enough solutions

In the back of my mind, I've been struck with the phrase "good enough". As in, "Iraqi Good Enough" or the other places where we've exhausted our resources and have to settle for a lowest-common-denominator definition of "not failed". I'm wondering when we're going to start discussing a "good enough recovery" or a "good enough economy."

It's nice that we've opened up discussions and started to address all the problems of society. Pick a direction and point: economy, national security, environment, employment, manufacturing, energy, health care, education, poverty, transportation, social security.. the only problem is that we're trying to rebuild everything from the ground up, all at the same time. How far back to we go to hit the reset button and try again?

Or do we just do triage until the economy can just get back on its feet? And then cobble together more coherent attacks on the other structural problems in our society? The trick to juggling is that at a given time, one thing is in your hand while the others are temporarily in the air. Each item has an equal turn in one's grasp, or else it's dropped.

Cite!

Today's my birthday. I'm [larger prime number] years old. Next year, my age will be The Answer to the Ultimate Question. Things I've learned from high-end academic research in the past week:

• People use calendars to keep track of when they have to do things
• People who idealize the world too much (a.k.a. rate High in Irrational Beliefs) are annoyed by the little things too much (fail adequately to resume productivity from "daily hassles")
  
• It's not just where you go, but when and why
• Two people in the same car, on average, use less gas individually than one person driving alone.
• They do cooler research in Japan and Western Europe than here in the US

But on the good side, I can now state the painfully obvious with a citation at the end! Progress, I think, despite how tortuously each sentence is being built. How I miss all those undergrad and grad papers I typed out in one long coffee-induced citation-riddled stream of consciousness.

Networks in the brain

I'm trying to work on my dissertation proposal now, and I keep thinking about networks. How much time do people spend in social networks, just navigating from one link to the next? It's the lowest possible level of network analysis. How about groupware applications, where you pick who to share your calendar with and try to find people to hitch rides with?
It's occurred to me tonight that this problem, call it transportation networks, public transportation, social networks, graph theory, and even my brief interest in game theory traces back to this one type of problem I stumbled into when I was about 17 years old- or a bit more than a couple of decades ago.
Small world networks, big world networks, link analysis, shortest path, traveling salesman, citation analysis, Internet, Wikis, RDF, concept maps, partially connected ad-hoc networks, neural networks.
It's the network, stupid. I'm to networks like Forrest Gump's friend Bubba is to shrimp.
I have to finish my dissertation, so I can take up something else- like fishing. With a line.