Dave’s Whiteboard

Yesterday started off reasonably enough. I had gotten behind schedule on a deadline, but I received a stay of execution — the project manager more or less agreed with changes I proposed that ended up slowing things down.

Settled in to work bright and early. Open the in-progress documents, launch the browser to reach the content-sharing site.

Hmmm. Nobody home. Check e-mail. Hmmm.

I can reach the wireless router (though it’s hard going once I get there; the new interface was written originally in Korean, I think, and rewritten in Estonian before translated again to English). But I can’t get past the router.

My usual solution is to kick the modem. Not literally (I had to pay for it). I just go down to the kitchen, unplug the Digit Twins, pretend to wait 40 seconds, and plug them back in again.

Still no good. More troubleshooting-by-walking-around: I went down to the basement to check the TV.

Hmmm — we’re getting cable pictures. We’re just not getting cable data.

Back to the office. I call the cable company. Six voice-mail presses and 20 minutes later, I get a customer service rep whose previous job had been announcing departures at the Port Huron bus station. The outcome: they can’t even see my modem. Earlier service call? Tomorrow between 11 and 3.

I work for a while, rekick the modem (see “superstitious behavior“). Later, breaking from the excitement of actual work, I click a few shortcuts on my browser — and I can get to my blog. Not a cached page, either — the real thing.

I was about to shut off the firewall, as a test, but instead I lowered its setting. Bingo — mail, Google, the whole shebang. So I complained via my Facebook status and got back to work.

Hours passed in which the only thing I looked at online was the Legal Information Institute at Cornell. I went back to Facebook to find a note from Kate. Her partner had fallen victim to another Microsoft security update which just happened to knock thousands of ZoneAlarm users off the internet.

I’m not really that connected — I can go days with my cell phone in the side pocket of my car (which I don’t use every day). I have Twitter, but I’m not sure why: following 10 people isn’t enough, but I have no desire to follow 500. And I believe that a company buying one of those picture-and-text ad on the left side Facebook is doing the digital equivalent of selling leisure suits.

I am glad, though, that I took the time to rant, and that Kate responded. And my wife, who also uses ZoneAlarm, was even happier — because I could warn her about this tiny glitch.

“Lock gates” photo by Simon Lieschke.

The tireless Don Clark links to a Scientific American interview with Marco Iacoboni, who studies mirror neurons. Iacoboni says, “Mirror neurons are the only brain cells we know of that seem specialized to code the actions of other people and also our own actions.”

He also says:

…the hype can backfire and mirror neurons may lose their specificity.

I think there are two key points to keep in mind. The first one is the one we started with: mirror neurons are brain cells specialized for actions. They are obviously critical cells for social interactions but they can’t explain non-social cognition.

The second point to keep in mind is that every brain cell and every neural system does not operate in a vacuum. Everything in the brain is interconnected, so that the activity of each cell reflects the dynamic interactions with other brain cells and other neural systems.

More on mirror neurons in a Brain Connection column by Robert Sylwester. Nice clear examples. For instance, if you stick your tongue out at a baby, even one who’s a day old, the baby will stick hers out. This isn’t a coincidence. “The infant’s observation of her parent’s projecting tongue fires the premotor neurons that represent her tongue and this priming activates the related motor cortex neurons that project her tongue out in mimicry.”

Faking, in sports, also depends on motor neurons. Here the idea is that you move in such a way that your opponent’s mirror neurons (which assess the movements of others) decide you’re going to go here. Of course, you try to go there.

…and then you think, well, he’s expecting a fake, so I’ll make a fake fake…

So why does so much formal training and formal learning seem to leave out modeling?  Blah blah, facts, key points, nobody actually doing the work.

Jen Jones’s post on Social Networking for Humans talks about how “the balance of our attention shifts back and forth between people and tools.” She mentions that she’s tried various tools that show the connections between people in her networks, but that she’s not satisfied with the results — in part because for her it’s the communication that’s important, not the hardware (and software) that facilitates it.

She reminded me of an undergrad course in modern sociological thought (hey, I’m slow getting started this morning). I enjoyed the course, though I realized even at the time that I spent about 80% swimming over my head. I had a lot of difficulty with the work of Talcott Parsons, who wrote in a language that resembles English, except that all the nouns are abstract and all the adjectives, polysyllabic.

One of his many concepts is pattern variables, “‘the principle tools of structural analysis outlining the derivation of these categories from the intrinsic logic of social action.” (See what I mean about this English-like language?) Among the five sets of such variables is the notion of specificity versus diffuseness.

Dr. Bauder explained that in a specific relationship, you have to justify including some new action or behavior, while in a diffuse relationship, you have to justify leaving something out.

She gave the example of the grocery store. In general, your relationship with the cashier is: you put the groceries on the belt, the cashier rings them up. Conversation fits into the buying-groceries relationship. You’d have to have a reason for saying to the other person, “You know, that outfit makes you look kind of heavy.”

Then Dr. Bauder asked what type of relationship exists between a teacher and a student. Thinking of the free exchanges that characterized her classes, I said, “Diffuse.”

“Okay,” she said. “What are you doing Saturday night?”

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Here’s how I see this fitting with Jen’s comments about social network tools: having someone as a friend on Facebook, following someone’s tweets, commenting often on someone’s blog — these things in themselves don’t make my relationship with that person diffuse. That requires time — as in the proverb that to know someone, you have to eat a bag of salt together.

Of course the more specific relationships have value (ideally for both parties). But the transformation of any one relationship is subtle and easily overlooked. As Jen says, “You may have thousands of virtual friends, readers and followers, but if you don’t have two-way communication with them, the connections are truly virtual and will not withstand the potential failure of the social networking tool.”

I’m not too concerned about having thousands of virtual friends. Jen’s post and my own musings remind me to focus more on what I communicate, to whom, and why; the how, to me, is far less important.

Advice photo by QwirkSilver / Kristine.

Series: The brain rules!

For this final post based on John Medina’s Brain Rules, I’m looking at Rule 12. That says, “We are powerful and natural explorers.” What Medina highlights is the way in which we learn about the world. From infancy, we’re busy figuring out what things are and how they related to each other.

When my oldest child was turning two, I came across a phrase I’ve always used in place of “the terrible twos” — “first adolescence.” The idea was that two-year-olds, like their teenage counterparts, have just acquired a clutch of physical and mental skills. They can walk, they can talk, they can form ideas and set out to put them to work. But they’re constantly running into limitations and setbacks.

Here’s how Medina sees the world to the two-year-old:

You push the boundaries of people’s preferences, then stand back and see how they react. Then you repeat the experiment, pushing them to their limits over and over again to see how stable findings are, as if he were playing peekaboo. Slowly you begin to perceive the length and height and breadth of people’s desires, and how they differ from yours. Then, just to be sure the boundaries are still in place, you occasionally do the whole experiment over again.

One tool for the miniature experimenter: the mirror neuron. This class of brain cells, discovered within the last 15 years, apparently helps us monitor activities around us and helps us plan our own activity.

It seems clear these mirror neurons played a major role in our evolution. When we came down from the trees, says Medina, we didn’t say, “Give me a book in a lecture and a board of directors so I can spend 10 years learning how to survive in this place.”

Turning to education, Medina argues for expanding the medical school model. Med school, he says, has three components: a teaching hospital, faculty who work as well as teach, and research labs. What does this mean for the student?

• Consistent exposure to the real world — med students constantly move through the teaching hospital, encountering real-life medical problems.
• Consistent exposure to people working in the real world — students learn from not only the medical faculty but also dozens if not hundreds of working professionals.
• Consistent exposure to practical research programs — students discover that the best research is an ongoing activity, that by nature it’s tentative, and that it connects to problems worth solving.

Consider the implications of this model both for how adults learn to teach and how children learn to learn better.

Years ago, I served as a Teacher Corps intern in a rural high school. Corena, he master teacher who led our intern team was also the office education instructor at the school. One of her most successful programs placed office ed students in jobs with businesses in the three small towns that comprised our school district.

So Cindy, Carolyn, and their classmates at 16 or 17 were already learning what really happens in a workplace. Some had more positive experiences than others; as their teacher, Corena would work at trying to improve the experience, or at trying to turn it into an occasion for learning.

That was a small program with the limited but very practical goal. How many other school experiences could profit from a combination of real-life experiences, guidance from trained adults, and exposure to continuing attempts to learn more?

Baby investigator photo by coreyt / Corey Thompson.

When I was growing up in Detroit, I looked forward each year to the Freedom Festival — a cross-border celebration that included Canada Day (known in English-speaking Canada as Dominion Day until 1982) and the Fourth of July.

Some Americans don’t know much about Canada (including how to pronounce “Newfoundland”). Maybe, as Pierre Berton suggested in Why We Act Like Canadians, it’s the lack of a revolution or a civil war. So, for those who missed the 15 minutes spent on Canada during high school, July 1st is the anniversary of the 1867 agreement by Upper Canada (now Ontario), Lower Canada (Québec), New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia to form what Sir John A. Macdonald and Viscount Monck wanted to call the Kingdom of Canada.

Back to the border: my parents, two brothers, and I had emigrated from Nova Scotia; Detroit and Windsor were and are filled with other members of the Cape Breton Island diaspora. We’d shuttle back and forth over the bridge or through the tunnel, and day trips to watch the massive fireworks (shot from barges in the Detroit River) were a prelude to our annual summer trip down home.

No quotation marks to set those last two words off– like Hemingway’s Paris, Cape Breton Island is a moveable feast. My dad arrived in the States in 1951, but when he says “down home,” there’s only one place he means. Me, too.

So July 1st takes me back home (as do shortbread, fiddle music, and the sound of waves). And as July 4th approaches, I always think of John Adams, wrong in a small thing but on the mark with the big picture, as he wrote to Abigail:

The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. . . . It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfire and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.

To fill out these three days (July 1st, July 2nd, and today), David Hackett Fischer in today’s New York Times adds the name of Samuel de Champlain, who founded the city of Québec on this day in 1608.

Showing he had his priorities straight, nearly two years earlier he founded l’Ordre du Bon Temps. Whichever holiday you mark, and whenever you mark it, may you like Champlain’s companions be joyful and of good cheer.

Photo of the Bluenose II under sail in Halifax harbor by learningful_rcb.