Cogito, Ergo Sumana for 2006 October 1

# 01 Oct 2006, 10:09AM: Difficulty: A Malcolm Gladwell blog entry reminds me that domain expertise changes one's perspective mightily.

Yesterday I visited the Wired NEXTfest. I stopped by the Pfizer booth because their exhibit on using RFID to secure the supply chain reminded me of an article I'm reading for class (Gillette is figuring out a similar problem).

I asked a lot of questions. What sort of products don't take well to RFID tagging? Water-based liquids require HF frequencies (instead of UHF), or an air gap between the tags and the liquids. If you're tagging boxes that have metal in them (e.g. the Benadryl blister-packs), you need to air-gap the boxes. If you slap the tags on the sides of the boxes that show outward on the pallet, and you have to arrange the boxes and tags to stop liquids and metals from messing things up, doesn't that slow down the packing? Maybe, yes. Do retailers and shippers have to choose between HF and UHF RFID tags and readers? No, you can get machines that do both. We discussed handheld vs. stationary scanners, barcodes, false negatives and false positives, and a tiny bit of the chicken-and-egg problem in getting this infrastructure into the shipping channels.

One of the Pfizer guys asked if I were an expert. Knowing what questions to ask might be the hallmark of an expert. I had a tiny bit of domain knowledge, which helped. But a journalist or scholar worth her salt would also learn the trick of asking the right questions, intuiting which paths lead to interesting insights.

Here's a question that usually gets an interesting answer: "Where's the bottleneck? What problem do you wish someone would solve for you?" The three robotics scientists at the robot entertainment panel had three different answers. Dr. Kosuge said that physical components (processors, batteries, etc.) are getting better all the time, but that the cycle of communication between a robot and its environment is his fundamental problem. A robot needs to understand and respond to stimuli appropriately, and boy is that hard. Jan Zappe, who makes big ol' crane-looking bots that draw and play music, has a hard time getting them to walk. And the guy from the Ensemble project (a Python user!) said that he wishes computers would do what he wants them to do, not what he tells them to do.

The first and the third engineers are facing what seems to me a really tough bottleneck: getting a machine to spontaneously act like an expert. Then again, it can be mindbogglingly tough to teach myself to act in constructive ways, or even stop doing self-destructive things, despite crystal-clear signals from my environment.

Once upon a time, ten years ago, my sister and I had to do some boring family thing, like spend all day at a Hindu temple where we knew no one while my parents performed incomprehensible rituals. I complained aloud. My sister said, quite reasonably, that since my complaints wouldn't make any difference, why didn't I just accept the situation and make the best of it?

I paused, considered, and replied, "That is not my way."

We still laugh about that. I hope it is my way, now.

A geologist at Green Bay wrote about thar, the honor motif in many Earth cultures. In thar cultures, "that is not our way" is the end of the argument.

If you believe that your identity is bound up in acting precisely as you act, how can you ever learn? What if the essence of being human is learning, reacting intelligently to your environment? If you think the main facts of your life are immutable, then there's no point in changing, but you have to change if you're going to cope with change in the world. And if you're going to thrive, you have to cope first.

There are people to whom adjusting to change does not seem difficult, at least to this outside observer. Talk about envy. Envy is "I want that and can't have it." Admire is "I want that and I'm working to get it." How path-dependent is my life, anyway? I have the most domain expertise and the least perspective.

Music: "Mandelbrot Set"

P.S. That was about as long as one of my weekly columns. It's way easier to write longer pieces when I can link, allude, and use two-bit words as much as I like.

# 01 Oct 2006, 12:50PM: Perspective: We Can't Be Equal While reminded me:

Once I was at a party with a lot of tech folk, and talked a bit with a woman, and one of the things we talked about was that we were both in a tiny female minority at our jobs. I happened to mention this while talking about the party with some work people, and Tyler asked, "Does that conversation ever get old?"

At the time, I said, "Sure, if you're talking to a boring person," but in retrospect it's a pretty shocking question. John and I spent a few minutes at the start of our acquaintance establishing that we were the only geeks on our twenty-person Russia trip. US kids who speak Spanish better than English probably swap tips and stories. Immigrants, women in tech, outsiders and minorities of all sorts get a lot out of connecting with the rare people like us.

If I ever work in a tech environment where women are a third or more of my colleagues, the hello-fellow-stranger conversation would lose relevance. If I had it with the same person over and over, it would get old.

The overwhelming male majority in tech, like climate, stupid customers, and lunch, got old decades ago. But that's what we have.