Dave’s Whiteboard

I’m nearly done moving my domains and their blogs from the old ISP to the new one.  It hasn’t been that bumpy a ride–though it has been like getting lost in a part of the country you’re unfamiliar with.

By that I mean, if you’re lost in a place you know, you figure you’re going to get your bearings eventually.  But if you’re lost in a place you don’t know, then your brain’s restless urge to form patterns will fire right up, and you’ll be seeing all sorts of patterns that don’t support the meaning you lay on them.

This is why, in unfamiliar places, you keep seeing people who remind you of people you know. The small details — a pair of glasses, the set of a nose, even a gait — leap out from the whole, and your brain thinks, “That guy really reminds me of my cousin Frank.”  Your brain’s seized on one item and generalized it into a pattern.

In any event, while the changeover has been a bit tedious, it’s been mostly harmless.  The biggest puzzle is that somehow, a flock of accented letters ( Â , to be specific) seems to have descended on my past posts.  As near as I can tell, it shows up wherever I had had two consecutive spaces in the past.

(That’s an old typing-class habit, and I’ve been typing for more than 40 years, so it’s pretty deeply rooted.)

If you have any idea how I can root that out of an entire mySQL database, do let me know.

I’ve got some maintenance to do (the sidebar’s a bit messed up), but it’s good to be back.

Photo by Dano / Dan McKay.

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The 41st edition of the Brain Blogging Carnival offers an inviting collection of posts. A few that lured me in:

David Lewis says you lose weight as you get older. Unfortunately, the weight you lose is in your brain. Science and your long life brain, at Grey Matters. He has some good news to go with the bad news, though he does say you have to do housekeeping — not just mental workouts, but a more holistic approach that includes diet, exercise, relaxation… and optimism.

At SharpBrains, Bill Klemm suggests that memory problems can be related to (surprise, surprise) multitasking. Klemm frowns at things like MySpace, instant messaging, and even cell phones — though in terms of distraction, I think they’re more contributing factors than ultimate causes. It’s not that the invitation to shift attention is electronic, per se; it’s that we attend to the invitation. Something like the moderation principle with regard to Scotch: a wee drappie o’ it’ll dae ye nae harm.

And at Treatments for Depression, a new blog, Mike (who doesn’t seem to have an about page) discusses experiments in treating depression with transcranial magnetic stimulation. TMS is a far milder approach than electroconvulsive therapy (which induces seizures).

Photo by _guu_ / Gustavo Marin.

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Apparently my dad is the reason Chrysler’s in trouble but Toyota isn’t.

The New York Times’s David Leonhardt looks at what would be a meme, if the Times were trendier and talking only online: the average Big Three auto worker makes $73 an hour.

It turns out that folks on the line are not in fact grossing $146,000 a year.  Leonhardt’s analysis of what makes up that $73:

• Wages (including overtime and vacation pay):
  $40 an hour  (For the record, when I worked at Chrysler’s Warren Stamping Plant, I made $3.575 an hour, straight time.)
• Cost of benefits like health insurance and pensions:
  $15 an hour (Few people see this broken out on their paychecks.)
• Costs for retirees: $15 an hour

As Leonhardt points out, companies like Toyota and Honda haven’t had North American operations long enough to have retirees.  Pull that $15 an hour out of the equation and try the comparison.  Wages and benefits for Big Three workers: $55 an hour or so.  For the foreign-based companies?  $45.

He writes, “The Big Three and the U.A.W. had the bad luck of helping to create the middle class in a country where individual companies — as opposed to all of society — must shoulder much of the burden of paying for retirement.”

He goes on to point out that if the government took over two-thirds of the retiree costs, and the Big Three lowered their wages and benefits to that $45, the net effect would be to lower the cost of the average vehicle by… $800.

For $800 less, would you buy an Impala rather than an Accord?  Me, neither.

What’s unfolding, in the media and in Washington, is a frantic search for simple solutions to complex problems.   On one hand, GM (which has lost more market share than Ford ever had) seems still to yearn for the days of Al Sloan and Charlie Wilson*.

*  Not the congressman in the recent movie, but a GM exec sometimes called  Engine Charlie who became Eisenhower’s secretary of defense.  Wilson said during confirmation hearings that “…for years I thought what was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa.”

Workers, meanwhile, note that Firms Too Big to Fail are giving up bonuses.  (In an article on attempts to introduce clawbacks into Wall Street compensation, I found an “employment lawyer” huffing that such a thing might not even be legal.  I guess because these folks have contracts — unlike, you know, the United Auto Workers.)

(Added later:  I had meant to say, as Leonhardt does in his article, that labor costs account for ten percent of the cost of a car.  Not the percentage *I* would have guess — how about you?  You can argue whether the wages are too high, but not about who’s been calling the shots at the company. )

This post is somewhere between a rant and an elegy, with more than a few glances at what the various subsystems of the auto companies (and yes, the union) have produced.  Geary Rummler would be the first to point out that the marketplace (we folks who buy cars) has also had influence — people buying SUVs larger than their first apartments, disdain for public transit (or for paying for it) that produces floods of single-occupant vehicles.

Plymouth Fury photo by gt_hawk63.
Hearse photo by justmakeit / Rachel.

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Many reports today of the death of Henry Molaison at age 82,  like this from the New York Times.

Over 50 years ago, he underwent brain surgery to treat repeated, strong seizures.  The operation removed part of his hippocampus and left him unable to form any new memories.

From the Times:

For the next 55 years, each time he met a friend, each time he ate a meal, each time he walked in the woods, it was as if for the first time.

At the time, scientists believed memories were stored all over the brain — almost no one imagined that a small bit of the hippocampus could have such a dramatic effect.  Researchers like Dr. Brenda Miller, working with Molaison (known in scientific literature only as H.M.) built up evidence of two types of memory.

Declarative memory is sometimes called the know-what: factual information that’s stored and retrieved.  It’s explicit.  Procedural or tacit memory is the know-how.

As the Times said, Molaison “left a legacy in science that cannot be erased.”

From a post on MindHacks:

• A link to an NRP radio program.
• A review of H.M.’s contributions to brain research (2002, pdf).

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Chris Chatham at Developing Intelligence looks at new research related to transfer – which is pretty much the entire reason for organizational training and learning.

In Building Expertise, Ruth Colvin Clark described near-transfer tasks as ones that “must be performed consistently each time they are done and by each worker who does them.”  I’ve worked with thousands of tasks like this — hotel or transportation reservation systems, tracking software for drug trials, procedures for evaluating health claims.  They may be enormous, like a financial system to support the work of tellers and officers at a bank branch, but individual elements are straightforward, like the steps for opening a certificate of deposit.  You don’t want a lot of innovation there.

Far-transfer tasks, Clark says, “require the worker to use extensive judgment… there are no set steps for all cases.”  She offers sales an an example — the successful salesperson treats each sales opportunity as a new event.  (When you go to a car dealership and the guy starts with a canned approach, you’re seeing someone using near transfer in a far-transfer setting.)

Sometimes judgments like Chatham’s seem obvious — well, of course training can improve your ability to perform.  I do think, however, that far more people claim to belong to the Church of Evidence-Based Practice than ever show up at services.

He cites a study dealing with tasks that activate a particular part of the brain (the left inferior frontal gyrus).  In theory, the left IFG helps “bias” activity when associations aren’t clear.

For example, you may need more of such “biasing” when trying to come up with a verb that’s related to “giraffe” than one that’s related to “lion” (lion has some obvious associates [roar! eat! hunt!] and is therefore less likely to require any help from [the left] IFG). This is an example of a verb generation task; like many other similar tasks, it engages the left IFG.

So, can training related to a specific kind of task improve performance in other areas, which is what far transfer is really about?   The study in question (PDF), by Persson and Reuter-Lorenz, deals with “interference resolution.”  How can the brain cope when a previously-learned task interferes with performance on a similar task?

From the study:

Eight days of training on high-interference versions of three different working memory tasks increased the efficiency with which proactive interference was resolved… participants training with noninterference versions of the tasks did not exhibit this effect….

An improved ability to resolve interference was also transferred to different working memory, semantic memory, and episodic memory tasks, a demonstration of far-transfer effects from process-specific training.

The researchers suggest that transfer may occur only when the same brain regions are activated in both the training and transfer tasks — which seems to argue that, however you do your training, the trainign tasks must demand the same kinds of brain activity as the desired performance.

No big secret here: if you want people to handle customer complaints or improve work flow or advise high school students, then the training requires increasing approximations of realistic situations.  The design element involves identifying high-value or high-importance cases — even though the universe of cases is vast — so as to strengthen a person’s ability to transfer what he’s learned to a new situation.

Complexity photo by PhOtOnQuAnTiQuE.

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