Grantchester meadows, February

I was up early and out for a walk across the Meadows south of the College.  It’s been a worrisome week, nothing that can’t be, won’t be, solved, but only with a clear mind, gentle heart, and quiet spirit.  And so, the Meadows.

  

The Meadows lie along the Cam near the old village of Grantchester, once the favorite haunt of Rupert Brooke and his Group.  The canvas chairs in the Orchard are empty in February, but they still serve tea and encourage reading of The Old Vicarage, an ode to youth and the town:

The men observe the Rules of Thought.
They love the Good; they worship Truth;
They laugh uproariously in youth;
(And when they get to feeling old,
They up and shoot themselves, I'm told) . . .

Say, is there Beauty yet to find?
And Certainty? and Quiet kind?
Deep meadows yet, for to forget
The lies, and truths, and pain? . . . oh! yet
Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?

 

The church, the clock, the Vicarage (now home to Jeffrey Archer) are all much as Brooke and his group saw them in 1909; the fields beyond have probably looked this way for millennia before the Group first took tea beneath the trees. 

 

It was a crisp, quiet morning, perfect for listening to the birds, the wind, and the stray thought.  Here, as scholars, writers, and philosophers have for 800 years.

How will we be writing books?

I went down to the bookstore yesterday to look for a copy of The Dinner, by Dutch author Herman Koch.  Recently recommended by the Economist, who called it “Irredeemably Dutch”, I wanted both the English and Nederlands versions for practice.

Why go to a bookstore: why buy two paper versions?  I can go from one to the other, checking my comprehension, making annotations, working anywhere without power or being online.  I may be retro, but thee isn’t a content consumption device (yet) that replaces the utility and experience of a book.

I have gravitated away from paper newspapers, though: I like my online subscription to the FT and read all the Dutch dailies electronically.  I think it’s because the articles are short and I enjoy chaining through related links.  The only place I enjoy a paper newspaper is on the train.  Magazines are still somewhere between: long-form analyses (the Economist) or narratives (the Atlantic or New Yorker) just feel both longer and harder to read without a paper copy..

So the way I consume print media is changing (and I rue what it is doing to newsrooms and bookstores). But I think a similar change, less noticed, is going on in the way print media is produced.

Imagine you wanted to write an account of the Amsterdam Fashion Week, in the style of Seven Days in the Art World, viewing the ecology of fashion merchandising from various participant perspectives.

The Pitch may be to the participants directly, rather than to an agent.  Their cooperation enables the work to be completed; online research and remote interviews fill in the necessary background.

The Funding would come from crowdsourcing rather than a publisher.  What will a week of travel and research cost: 5-10K$?  Well within the reach of Kickstarter and others.  Promise small investors copies of the finished work, souvenirs from Fashion Week, tickets to the next Fashion Week for big donors.

The Work would be a tightly scripted project, note and photography, maybe a small documentary, produced more like a movie.  A tight plan, a good local staff, a week of intense work, a sack-full of material to go home with and start writing.

The Writing is done chapter by chapter, posted for both subjects and investors to read, comment on, and correct as the book develops.  While there is an outline and timeline to structure the process, the execution is fluid, taking advantage of opportunities from the network of collaborators and ideas from critics.

The Publication is done electronically, using  variations on Kindle Singles that makers of electronic readers are using to publish new works for their users.

The Book Tour is done using social networks, tracking hits, purchases, reviews, and comments real-time, much as journalists do with their articles today.  It’s supported by YouTube video and real-time interviews.

It feels like an alternative publication ecosystem I rapidly taking shape which will change the way books get written, making them much more author driven, investor collaborative, and reader enhanced.

‘Different’, but I’m not convinced (yet)  ‘better’.  I’ll miss going to the bookstores, miss notating paper copy, miss reviews like the Economist’s and the anticipation of a good story.

The country that, some claim, produces the tallest, blandest men in Europe—a nation of tolerant, easy-going liberals who appear to have solved all their major social problems—turns out to be something quite different. The Netherlands’ political correctness is, in Mr Koch’s telling, a smokescreen for all manner of inchoate prejudices and dislikes…

What skills can’t be automated?

The day is fast coming when machines will surpass human abilities in all but six skills.

This sobering (or exhilarating) prediction comes from MIT researchers Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, related in their book Race Against the Machine.  Their report, covered by  the Financial Times this week, suggests that what’s already happened to manufacturing is now spreading to sales and will shorty arrive at management.  At some point, like ever more erosive austerity, the burden will bring displaced workers to the streets.  But it won’t change the long-term trajectory of displacement.

The six skills that the authors argue will remain under human purvey are statistical insight, managing group dynamics, good writing, framing and solving open-ended problems, persuasion, and human nurturing.  To this, the FT adds “decision-making”, although I disagree.  It’s easy to make decisions:

IF (this OR that) THEN do OR don’t;

Instead, as the primate exhibit at Brookfield Zoo observes, being human is about enumerating and making choices.

On reflection, there are other qualities that I would also change or replace, arriving at:  creative expression, intuitive reasoning, negotiation, framing and solving open-ended problems, nurturing, and framing choices.

I was thinking about this in the context of CamStent’s first-ever shareholder meeting on Monday.  It’s a real milestone for our young company, and humbling to look around the room at our Board, shareholders, scientists, and management group.   It takes diverse skills, selected from experience and organized around a purpose, to complete  the things we’ve accomplished in the past two years. It’s remarkable.

Can those skills be automated?  Not today, probably not in my lifetime, perhaps never.  I like to think that there is a unique way of processing information, coloring it with emotion and desire, thinking and choosing, organizing and acting, that can’t be reduced to deterministic algorithms and pattern recognition.  The deep search and combinatorial approaches of ever-faster machines can, indeed, solve ever wider problems.

One might argue whether entrepreneurship is relevant in the coming age of machines. But if it is, then it still needs at least six, and perhaps dozens, of  human skills can’t be replaced by computational horsepower alone.   In the jobs at the end of the universe, we’ll still need to strive for symbiosis, not dominance, with our machines.

Weekend miscellany

A bit of a windy start to the New Year here in Cambridge.  The weather is warm and wet, but very strong winds rattling the windows and whistling over the roof.  No damage, but an artistic layout of the trash cans in front of the apartment.  I righted them, but they were back in the same arrangement an hour later.  There’s no winning against Nature.

I have a lot of catching up to do in the coming week (I’ve been joking that I’m not even able to keep ahead of organizing my to-do list, much less shrinking it…

• Clean your apps:  mypermissions.org is a free website / utility suggested to me by a US-based friend.  It scans your add-ins for Facebook, twitter, Google, etc and brings the permission settings out into the open.  Most settings can be modified through the app, and I’s a great tool for getting some transparency and control over your social networking sites.
• Wire your money:  I’m paying my business invoices and hit an especially large one from a vendor in the Netherlands that needs to be paid with cash in the US.  I asked the bank to fill in all the wire details and track / verify the transaction, always a good practice since money that goes astray because instructions are mis-typed is not easy to recover.  I checked the exchange rate: the WSJ rate is $1.277 /euro: the bank quotes $1.322/ euro plus a $30 fee.  On a 10K transfer, that is a $450 excess charge.  It doesn’t depend on how fast the money is sent, only on the amount: more than 25K$ must go to get a better differential.
  • Western Union, World First,  and American Express offer somewhat better rates: their service are free, but involve filling in a lot of paperwork and getting interviewed.  I suppose that’s a sign of our political and economic times.
  • Frustratingly, after three days of emailed questions, AMEX rejected my application out of hand, despite a longstanding business card relationship.  Their condescending note refused to give a reason, but their interview questions centered on what a BV is and why my US  company address matched my home address.
  • Anyone have better ideas?
• Understand your British (or Americans):  It took me a long time to sort out that when you ask Brits whether they want something, “I don’t mind” means yes.  In the US, it’s sort of a grudging acceptance at best (“if you must”, unless you say the whole “Don’t mind if I do”, which means “Yes!”).  Reciprocally, it’s become obvious that their ear is not tuned to the difference between “That’s fine”, which means  ‘yes, I would, please’, and “I’m fine”, which is ‘no more, thank you’. 
  • Only the Dutch is more confusing, in which ‘yes’ sometimes means ‘yes, I don’t want any more’.  I’ve taken to just leaving the plate of cookies in the middle of the table.  I know, very un-Dutch.
• Catch up on your reading:  Growing up, I read a lot of science fiction.  Over the years, I fell away from it as the genre was overtaken, first by New Wave literature that was nonlinear and unreadable, then by fantasy, and finally by serializations of TV shows and movies.  Classically “Hard SF” is difficult to find,   I subscribe to author David Brin’s twitter stream (and I’m a big fan of Startide Rising and his writings on information privacy), and he recommended Best SF Books, a very nice compilation of SF authors, titles and reviews.  This will leaven my sparse diet of Dutch language, China analysis, and “how to fix the financial system” readings of recent months.

For some reason we’ve been getting some really spectacular sunrises and sunsets lately. With all of the wind and rain, the atmosphere should be pretty well scrubbed, so I’m not sure what’s causing it.  But I am enjoying it.

Disclaimer:  All opinions are my own; I have not been solicited nor compensated for these comments.

A bit of light reading

I’m buried with Dutch and work today, so this will be a short take on some literature that I found engaging.

  -- I wrote Friday about the central role that good, crisp decision-making plays in effective organizations.  Over the weekend I came across an HBR Working Knowledge article that proposed a “Litmus Test” to determine if you have what it takes to be an entrepreneur.  Their key questions are:

• Are you comfortable stretching the rules?
• Are you prepared to make powerful enemies?
• Do you have the patience to start small?
• Are you willing to shift strategies quickly?
• Are you a closer?

I generally do well on this: I can do wonders at finding creative approaches, getting a lot done with a few resources, recruiting partners, staying flexible, focusing and prioritizing work, and leveraging early results.

‘haven’t made any powerful enemies yet, thank goodness.

Closing, in the article, means both coming to closure on decisions, which I do well, and closing deals, where I have a mixed record.  I am good at communicating and getting consensus, at negotiating to common ground and building goodwill.  But drilling down to the sale, getting the money, taking favorable terms, is hard.  A deal slipped through my fingers over the weekend because of a moment’s wrong choice.  It’s frustrating.

But then I nailed another one today.  So, I’m not hopeless. Just not good at landing the big fish, in time, every time.

  -- The Financial Times ran an article about looming tax penalties for US expats.  Where expats from most countries need to file returns only where they’ve earned income, US citizens need to file both home- and work-country returns.  Hypothetical US tax is calculated on income earned abroad, then foreign taxes are deducted: you pay the difference (no refunds or carry-forward, generally).  This has generally worked by the honor system, but from 2013 “banks across the world will be required to hand over details of accounts containing at least $50,000 belonging to US clients or face a withholding tax”  Failure to comply means a penalty of 20% of the value of the account.

I have accountants in the Netherlands and the US who watch over me, and file diligently in both countries.  Even so, I had to do a reset of my situation last week: the complexity of paying US, Dutch, and UK taxes had overwhelmed my system.

It’s not just taxes.  It’s getting correct VAT advice and refunds, establishing the correct reporting basis for the business at inception (you live forever with what you choose), and securing tax breaks (eg: the wonderful Dutch 30% Rule).  Truly vast amounts of money can drain away to state coffers unless you take reasonable care (and pay about $1000 per year per country for advice and filings)

Expert or prodigy?

I was listening to a discussion of Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, her memoir of parenting two child prodigies, on the drive into London this morning.  The ethics of driving exceptional children to excel are central to the discussion, along with provocative ideas about levels, Asian / American stereotypes, over- vs. under parenting, and where the lines lie in treating or mistreating children.

However, I’ve been thinking more about the implied question of whether prodigies can be created in a child gifted with strong but not exceptional talent.

Ms Chua drives both her girls into severe musical training at 3 years old, although there is no way to know whether her children had prodigal talent, much less of what type.  One does, finally arrive at Carnegie Hall as an accomplished pianist at age 8 (the other, a violinist, rebelled).  She credits talent and discipline for developing her daughter’s innate prodigy.

Alternatively, Malcolm Gladwell holds that with 10,000 hours of practice, one can become a world-class expert at virtually anything.  Is that the case here, that a perhaps an ordinary girl became extraordinary through intensively accumulating the requisite hours?  Or did it take something more?

I want to make two cases.

1)  Gladwell’s rule is more applicable to physical tasks than to intellectual ones.

Constant practice improves athletic strength, coordination. stamina, and judgment.  I think that this applies directly to musical ability as well: the nuances of fingering, rhythm, pitch, and confidence all build with repetition.  There are good neurophysiologic correlates of strengthened synapses and hypertrophied muscles that develop directly from practice.

But, in the absence of a defined physiologic center, can practice be said to strengthen the neural basis for a talent?  Repetition of sums does not hypertrophy a mathematical organ; repetitive writing does not develop synapses in some literary center of the brain.  Intellectual skills are inherently different than physical ones, they have different substrates and localization (indeed, intellectual skills seem to have no localization in the brain at all).

2)  Gladwell’s rule is more applicable to declarative knowledge than procedural knowledge.

Spelling and geography prodigies, naturalists who recognize birds by color or call, trivia experts, all operate with declarative knowledge: a knowledge of facts.  There is no doubt that drill strengthens memory and recall (a side note: these are also localized functions in the hippocampus), building a store of knowledge that is better organized and more quickly accessed as practice continues.

Procedural knowledge, a knowledge of skills, builds with experience rather than repetition.  One cannot become a great writer simply by writing.  There must be mentoring and learning,growth and maturity, developing the skill of communicating and the expressive touch to reach others through writing.  Again, these draw on diffused skills rather than focused ones.

I think it comes down to technical proficiency vs. true art.

A young Olympic gymnast is technically dazzling, but it results from thousands of hours of practice, not innate prodigal talent.  Anyone with the requisite physical substrate could be brought to that level.  Similarly, a quiz-show prodigy or a chess master can result from acquiring a vast store of knowledge, developed through devoted drill given a requisite level of intelligence and focused drive.

I believe that the distinguishing test is to see what happens when a new situation is encountered.  For a literary student,“Is it a great book?” can be answered by knowing whether the work is on the list, or being able to mimic a great style successfully.  For a literary prodigy, it is answered by intrinsically recognizing and producing great works regardless of the state of the canon.  A mathematical talent can solve problems at an expert level; a mathematical prodigy sees the answer intuitively, differently.

I have known many talented people, and a few that I consider genius.  The difference is not in how hard they work or how many hours they’ve spent, but in their insight, in the way that they conceptualize problems and express answers.

So, in Amy Chua’s case, I think that her talented children were brought to exceptional levels through practice and training in the physical skill and declarative knowledge of playing an instrument.  I think that others could do this (not that they should).

However, I do not think that her children are prodigal or genius, and I don’t believe that her methods would have worked to produce accomplished authors or mathematicians.  Intellectual skills and procedural knowledge build with introspection and experience, and her training would not strengthen these traits.

Hyperreality syndrome

A few weeks ago I went looking for a thread of modern philosophy and landed, fittingly, on postmodernism (Po-Mo).  The ideas are fascinating, skeptical and questioning: it’s a provocative perspective. I particularly like the idea of “hyperreality”: the inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from fantasy.

The idea is best illustrated by the Disney parks, filled with themed exhibits designed to echo other times and places. “"The beauty of Holland and the crisp Dutch costumes of its people are admired by guests cruising the seven seaways of 'It's a Small World' ” (Ref)  People see the wooden shoes and windmills set in a sea of Delft-blue tulips that they expect of the Netherlands,  recognizably and uniquely Dutch.

But postmodernists hold that there’s actually a circular reinforcement occurring.  When people see what they expect, then they further believe their preconceptions: at its limit, the simulation becomes reality.

Umberto Eco, in his very readable essay”Travels in Hyperreality” argues that this kind of model serves as “An Absolute Fake”.  Whereas fantasy or virtual reality is an escape where the participant acknowledges that he’s left the real world, the hyperreal becomes natural truth for people, vivid belief in something that, in fact, never existed.

It’s a seductive part of our culture. But is it a good thing?

Belk (1996) suggests that the uncritical acceptance of compelling simulations leads to three main problems.

• They filter and tailor people’s perceptions, reinforcing comfortable stereotypes and superficial prejudices.
• They minimize real cultural differences, fostering unrealistic expectations and hindering communication.
• They make the complex world seem more uniform and rational, giving the illusion of predictability and efficiency.

I’d argue that they are also efficient vehicles for political and commercial messaging and persuasion.

But it can all be good fun too.  They provide a plastic framework to hold up against reality to provide context and contrast while traveling.  They are a useful point of reference when describing unfamiliar places to people who’ve never visited there.  It’s a simple shared illusion to adopt during Carnivale.

The trick, or course, is to know the difference and not to lose touch with reality when tempted by the simulacrum.  And the best way to do that, of course, is by substituting real experiences: travel and, well, expatriate living.

Actually, for me, the true “hyper” in my reality is the flow of new events and ideas that have to be assimilated every day I live in a new culture.

Innocents Abroad in Istanbul

I’m back in Maastricht after a wonderful break in Istanbul, aided by cheap fares from Frankfurt on Condor Air (SunExpress) and some favorable hotel prices in the old city of Sultanahmet.   There’s always lots of experiences and ideas to share after an expedition like this one, where the history and culture are so rich and different, and I was looking for a place to start.

A note from Nick at The Expat Files caught my attention: he’d been reading about American author Mark Twain’s visit to Istanbul and hoped that my experiences were better.

It completely diverted me last night. The book is Innocent’s Abroad: Twain’s account of his Grand Tour of Europe and the Middle East in 1867.  The book is widely available for free download and there are both contrasts and overlaps in perspectives shared across 140 years.

“Seen from the anchorage or from a mile or so up the Bosporus, it is by far the handsomest city we have seen. Its dense array of houses swells upward from the water's edge, and spreads over the domes of many hills; and the gardens that peep out here and there, the great globes of the mosques, and the countless minarets that meet the eye every where, invest the metropolis with the quaint Oriental aspect one dreams of when he reads books of eastern travel. Constantinople makes a noble picture.”

The first impression is of endless high-rise apartment blocks, filling the dry landscape as the plane arcs in towards the Sabiha Gokcen airport on the Asia side.  I remember how small-scale developments of only a few buildings ended badly in Chicago’s south side; here they crowd in the hundreds, apparently successfully.

But the old city, a World Heritage Site, retains much the same  surface character from the water as it must have presented in Twain’s time.

 “Ashore, it was--well, it was an eternal circus. People were thicker than bees, in those narrow streets…The shops here are mere coops, mere boxes, bath-rooms, closets--any thing you please to call them--on the first floor…Crowding the narrow streets in front of them are beggars, who beg forever, yet never collect any thing…A street in Constantinople is a picture which one ought to see once--not oftener.”

Sultanahmet is is, indeed, a jumble of narrow streets lined with piled-upon buildings: stores capped by apartments crowned by terraces and sheet-metal bedrooms.  But each avenue is meticulously maintained and full of life, full of friends greeting one another, goods being bought,  moved, sold, watched from every doorway by alert shopkeepers eyeing every potential customer.

 

The Grand Bazaar is a monstrous hive of little shops--thousands, I should say--all under one roof, and cut up into innumerable little blocks by narrow streets which are arched overhead…The place is crowded with people all the time…full of life, and stir, and business, dirt, beggars, asses, yelling peddlers, porters, dervishes, high-born Turkish female shoppers, Greeks, and weird-looking and weirdly dressed Mohammedans from the mountains and the far provinces--and the only solitary thing one does not smell when he is in the Great Bazaar, is something which smells good.

No evil smells, but the Bazaar is, indeed filled with shops selling brightly-colored/everything-imaginable, shouting outlandish claims of value and murmered in closely negotiated cash prices.

I do not think much of the Mosque of St Sophia…thirteen or fourteen hundred years old, and unsightly enough to be very, very much older. Its immense dome is said to be more wonderful than St Peter's, but its dirt is much more wonderful than its dome, though they never mention it…The inside of the dome is figured all over with a monstrous inscription in Turkish characters, wrought in gold mosaic, that looks as glaring as a circus bill; the pavements and the marble balustrades are all battered and dirty; the perspective is marred every where by a web of ropes that depend from the dizzy height of the dome, and suspend countless dingy, coarse oil lamps…The people who go into ecstasies over St Sophia must surely get them out of the guide-book.”

Unfortunately, Hagia Sophia seems much as described: dark and peeling, massive and abandoned.  Smithsonian Magazine recently published an insightful article about the political and technical struggles to save the structure; the central space is filled with restoration scaffolding.

Golden mosaics are crumbled, faded, probably eroded by both man and nature. Islamic and Christian artifacts compete for space: the mihrab crowds the alter, yet interestingly angled purposefully just a few degrees off of the main axis of the building.

Everywhere are similar questions and inconsistencies.  The building is an artifact that feels washed up from millennial time and epochal struggles, worn and brooding like the Swedish Vasa.

Keeping up with the literature

I’ve never been good at keeping up with Literature.

In times past, the department librarian would circulate journals with a list of names stapled to the cover. Researchers were asked to scan the table of contents, read the articles of interest, and pass it on within a day.  Within a week, the publication would get back to the library.  In reality, it would hang up in a pile on someone’s desk, out of reach.

Scheduling a half day to go to the library, browsing the shelves or pulling a stack of journals, is similarly impractical: time at work is too fragmented and scheduled, and time at home requires taking away the journals overnight (our librarian was always checking me for filched issues).

The Internet has changed a lot of that: we have broad on-line archives stretching back many years and fully indexed by topic, keyword.

About once a week I need to search a clinical topic in depth: I like using Stanford’s Highwire interface over Pubmed.  Their links to cited and citing literature, and to related literature and reviews, are marvelous. I can complete a substantial research project in an afternoon, building a .pdf archive for the project and printing a few key papers to read on the exercise bike.

It’s still hard to browse an e-journal, though.  Circulation comes by email, JAMA and the New England Journal offer podcast updates, but neither has access to full-content. To get an article, I have to log into the company server, route through many security screens, then drill down to specific issue and article.

I do like using RSS feeds to aggregate content across sources. InCirculation  feeds about 30 summaries each day, and Medworm also looks promising.  I collect new literature into Netvibes, along with blog updates and news feeds, and dispatch it all over coffee in about 30 minutes.

Unfortunately, I’ve found nothing in the technical or business literature that offers the same broad, deep, cross-linked access capability.  I’ve tried subscribing to Wired (too much) or IEEExplore (no detail) for technology, or EBSCO (no access) for management information, but it’s really unsatisfactory.

Worse, I’ve found that I really have to play with technology to learn about it.  Today I saw a reference to Curl in a tweet from Adam Curry; it’s a new language for creating rich internet applications developed at MIT.  Wikipedia gave me a bit of background and a couple of key links, but I feel like I’ll need to invest days to really understand what it’s all about.

All of which begs a recurring question: What matters to me as a manager?  My role is

1. Support management with informed strategic insights and accurate project estimates,
2. Supply cross-functional teams with technology details and clinical data for planning and resourcing, and
3. Lead and evaluate the work of scientists and engineers in my group, evaluating their proposals and intermediate results and coaching them on alternative approaches and career development.

So, in my role (circa 1985, right) I need to be top-line familiar with the latest medical news and research findings, and can increasingly do that from feeds and searches for clinical literature.

But it’s the details of technologic innovations where I worry: I can apply a process to assessing the quality of results, and an intuition to whether an engineer is getting lost.  But I can’t help redirect them unless I’m prepared to invest a lot more time in learning, or trust outside experts with the task.

The expat and the immigrant experience

I listened to Tom Ashbrook’s interview with filmmaker Wayne Wang this morning: he created “The Joy Luck Club” and is now releasing two independent films mirroring the Chinese-American experience.  I was surprised at all of the ways that this conversation resonated with me.  Their immigrant experiences were a mirror to many of my expatriate experiences, and, in turn, I understand the nuances of their stories much better than I ever did before moving overseas.

I understood immigration through the myth of the Melting Pot, as an extended process of assimilation. People learn the new language, come to understand the culture, raise their children to be part of their new communities as they abandon their traditional practices and extended families.

But the show helped me to realize that first-generation immigrants never fully assimilate: there is always a tension of merging their past and future lives, synthesizing or partitioning practices, making decisions about what to keep and what to discard.  They always stand apart, outside their adopted culture, forever separated by formative experiences guiding  their perceptions and actions.

My own experiences in the Netherlands are similar inside / outside experience.  The people are welcoming and the culture is open to me, and I navigate it easily and feel comfortable in it.  But I still am not a part of it, and never will be.  While the obvious gap is language, a subtler part is missed social cues and shorthands, and there is always going to be a root difference  from having a different heritage.

Ironically, I felt outside of American culture too, not as interested in sports and pop culture, more likely to embrace travel and reading, almost complementary to the in/out qualities here.

It’s an odd separation to have persist, because the gap between Americans and Dutch is much less than the gap between Americans and Chinese.  Still, it exists. DeTocqueville was the first to describe it, but I think that we all  note the many differences and wonder how they came to be.  We were a common people four generations ago, and America began as an extension of the intellectual, cultural, and social traditions practiced on the Continent for centuries.  The US still identifies strongly with its European heritage.  Even so, we are different: less class conscious, but more material; living on a larger scale, yet willing to change perhaps too fast.

I think that a lot of that came from the westward expansion: as settlers broke out of the New England communities they encountered the vast prairies and mountains, unlimited open space and resources so unlike home.  And it changed them, led to a more ambitious and individualistic culture and economy.

Listening to the Chinese-Americans tell their stories, I realized that the reality must be more complex. Immigrants come from unique subcultures, each bringing different perspectives and traditions.  Which communities would they identify with; which traditions would shape their actions in new societies?  Life in a new land is not lived in  isolation, it is a stage play watched by new neighbors and by distant relatives.  How do immigrants reconcile disparate views of what their ‘right’ behavior should be?  Children are not rooted in the prior culture and don’t struggle with the cultural blend that their parents see. Their totally different experiences must create gaps and estrangement as parent’s conflicts seem irrelevant and outdated?

The conversation ranged over all of these questions, and I needed to pause several times to think about my own answers. I know that I do carry my American practices among the Dutch, despite people complementing me on how well I fit in.  I suspect that while I take on some local guidance, I always wear it more lightly than I (or they)might think.

I struggle with the provincialism of people in the US who argue for me to join their ideal communities, but I’m sure that I am equally incomprehensible to them. Last month, one confessed to feeling sorry for me, away from the big house, friends, and familiar things.  It set me back: I never felt that way about the living here.

I like being the parent or uncle who lives differently in distant lands and hosts exotic holidays. But that distance is also a source of disengagement, perhaps headed ultimately towards alienation?   If the shared experiences are rare, and the stories lose their relevance and resonance, do I also lose engagement as perceived by friends and family?

Barak Obama famously consulted Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals” to draw on lessons of past administrations to shape his own.  Similarly, I think that there are ideas in immigrant stories that that are relevant to making sense of our own expatriate experiences.

Visual and aural concentration

I wish I liked Audiobooks.

I’m a member of Audible.com, and I like the idea of having books being read to me as I drive, exercise, or lie in the predawn darkness.  I avidly devour podcasts.

I bought The Bourne Ultimatum, a simple thriller, and only made it 2/3 of the way through before giving up.   The aural narrative seemed to flow over me in a steady, relentless stream. My mind drifts, first losing concentration, missing important transitions or expositions, and finally losing my place.  The end of the trip seldom coincided with logical breaks in the narrative.  It was hard to keep continuity with names and places within and between sessions.

In contrast, I find books to be much more forgiving of my style. I can pause while reading, looking up to think for a moment, looking back to check a name, making a note.  Punctuation and paragraphs visually organize the text.  As a result, I concentrate more fully, engaged with and immersed in the narrative.

How much this aural / visual distinction generalize?  Does it explain why outline notes clarify lectures, and why PowerPoint slides are required for pitches.  A passage in Cohen’s A Guide To Teaching Practice seems to bear this out:

“Talk is an oral and aural medium; many people cannot sustain oral and aural concentration for very long without a visual focus – be it on pictures, the chalkboard, a video, a piece of work, etc  One can learn from the televisual medium that concentration is highest when people have both an aural and visual focus,.  Without a visual focus a free-floating discussion can easily float off into irrelevance and indiscipline.”

There’s no question that I can process information more effectively, understand better, and remember more when there’s at least a visual aid.  There doesn’t seem to be a corresponding benefit to enhancing aural narrative by having the book or pictures available to supplement the reading.

Still, there are many who swear by the medium of audiobooks.  ‘sorry, Audible: ‘just not my style…

What happened to Science Fiction?

I spent the afternoon at the Mall of America ahead of my plane back to the Netherlands, buying clothes, a little melatonin, browsing for Christmas presents, getting a haircut, enjoying a plate of beef brisket at Famous Dave’s BBQ restaurant. I browsed the bookstore for some reads for the long-cold Dutch nights to come: Daniel Silva’s Secret Servant, David Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, Robyn Meridith’s The Elephant and the Dragon, and Emanuel Derman’s My Life As A Quant.

Once again, I bypassed the science fiction section.

Growing up, science fiction was my genre. I collected the Tom Swift Jr. series, fell in love with the future through Asimov, Clarke, Bradbury, and Wells, begged to go to the biggest-screen showing of 2001: A Space Odyssey when it opened.

Today, though, I can’t remember the last SciFi novel I read, or the speculative collection of short stories that I tucked into a travel bag. Curious. I wandered back over to survey the current offerings, and quickly uncovered five reasons why I fell out of love with Futureworld.

1. The intrusion of Fantasy. I read Tolkien, and enjoyed most of Eddings’ Belgariad and Malloreon series. But two things tarnished the brand for me. Fantasy became lazy: magic was invoked as a simplification, making fantastic things happen without the need to worry about why. Just give the hero a wand , a medieval cloak, and competition (or temptation) from black arts, and the story was finished. Second, the D&D / Warcraft influence became too pervasive: the action overwhelmed the ideas and the plots were dumbed down to computer-game quests.
2. The emergence of spin-outs. I enjoyed the early Star Wars and Star Trek a lot, but they have now spawned endless derivative products. Today everyone from Dr. Who to Heroes have their own series, metastasizing across colorful columns of shelving. The resulting monoculture is neither interesting nor stimulating.
3. The challenge of the New Wave. In the late 60’s writers started experimenting with alternative styles of writing science fiction, shunning narrative in favor of nonlinear and artistic techniques that made stories virtually unreadable. Short story collections (e.g.: World’s Best SF) went heavily into New Wave , in particular, and I remember just giving up after struggling through the Dangerous Visions anthology.
4. The depression of Cyberpunk. I liked the alternative “high tech and low life” feel of the sub-genre. It was refreshingly novel and genuinely stimulating in early versions (Gibson’s Neuromancer and Dick’s short stories) and I was thrilled with Stephensons’s Snow Crash and the Blade Runner movie. But the dystopic visions of drug addicted and mechanized humanity is profoundly depressing in novel-length doses, and my interest waned even before the authors stopped writing.
5. The lack of speculative ideas. Clarke’s Childhood’s End was a wonderful book, speculative and insightful, an immersive story of people like us confronted with scientifically plausible and completely overwhelming events. Short story collections like Tales of the White Hart combined good humor with unexpected consequences of technology. Authors like Larry Niven (Ringworld) and Ursula Le Guin (The Dispossessed) created wholly realized worlds that mortal readers could explore and think about. The books were filled with challenging ideas and provocative visions, yet were wholly realistic. The Lathe of Heaven, for example, extrapolated technologic advance to explore social, ethical, and philosophical implications in a very profound way that I still think about today.

Why we blog

A number of people whose blogs I enjoy reading have stopped writing.  While some have run out of time or things to day, others seem to have reached a point of existential concern about the very nature of their work: has their blog drifted from it’s original purpose, or has it become too personal, too revealing, or too demanding. I’m surprised at how I’ve come to know them through their writing, and that I miss their correspondence once they’ve gone.

Andrew Sullivan recently published a fascinating essay touching on this topic, “Why I Blog”, in the Atlantic Magazine.  In it, he begins by defining blogging as the “spontaneous expression of instant thought”.  He goes on to describe how this drives the main characteristics of blogs: their  impermanence, interactivity, and superficiality.  I found a lot that resonates with my own motivations and experiences writing here, and agree with his tag that blogging is “Writing out loud”.

Returning to issues brought up by my fellow expat bloggers, he counters that this medium is, by it’s nature, personal and demanding.  Blogs are “the least veiled of any forum in which a writer dares to express himself” because they captures events, emotions, and perceptions without the perspective of time and the cooling of passions.  Blogs are also social acts that generate discussion and connect as conversations, actively engaging both writers and readers.  Unlike personal journals or newspaper columns, the form will invariably tend to become an extension of the writer and their audience, whatever the original intent.

I’ve subscribed to Andrew’s feed for a couple of weeks now to see how this plays out in practice.  Returning to his article again this morning, I find that I still agree with him philosophically, but diverge from him in how this gets implemented as style.

Andrew’s blog is a stream of dozens of brief posts each day, many consisting of short snippets of text, links, and commentary.  They strike me as well-informed Twitterings, aggregated within his overall theme of politics and media.  Reading them, I feel informed, sometimes intrigued, but seldom stirred.  There is no reflection or insight: I feel like volume and superficiality overwhelm the personal and communal aspects that he rightly champions.

In contrast, I blog to reflect on the ideas and experiences that I have in the Netherlands, and to break free of the isolation of living as an expatriate. I tend to write an entry in a single sitting, but never more than once a day and seldom for less than half an hour.  I never revise prior posts except to correct factual or (obvious) grammatical errors.

Thus, I think of my blog (and others) more as personal essays: short narratives that focus on a central idea about the writer, supported by a variety of incidents from the writer's life, and, often, connected to some larger idea.

My style is heavily influenced by essayists who I enjoyed long before: Robert Waller, Robert Benchley, Isaac Asimov, David Sideris, Barbara Kingsolver, and many others who have filled my bookshelf and backpack for years.  “Excavating Rachael’s Room”, in Waller’s Just Beyond the Firelight, is a wonderful example, reflecting on his college daughter’s life while sorting through the childhood things she left behind.

Many of the blogs that I follow take similar time to reflect on their lives and write in ways that connect out to others.  They describe human moments that touched them or larger events that made them aware.  They arrive at insight through analysis or juxtaposition, sometimes just stimulating connections into my own experiences and ideas.

In this sense, I think bloggers best capture the  benefits that Andrew values through a more personal and introspective style than he uses.

It’s interesting that the expat bloggers in the Netherlands seem to have universally arrived at a similar form, adopting an essayists prose.  And so many are natural storytellers who do it well.  I guess that I note this in the hope that some will still see the personal and social value in their writing, and not draw back because it feels too personal.

Hodo-hodo zoku

The words literally translate from Japanese as “so-so folks”, and the Wall Street Journal says it’s the newest trend among salarymen.  They are workers who are refusing promotions, shunning civil-service exams, and forgoing raises in favor of slow careers.  “Not everybody needs to become a leader…Forget goals, and stay true to yourself”.

  In contrast to the young hodo-hodo, I’ve been a lifelong learner and striver.  But I wonder if there will come a time when I willingly make a transition to a slower career, or to none at all.

I thrive on the creative challenges of medical diagnostic innovation, the competitive sport of releasing products to customers, and the social rewards of seeing patient’s lives changed for the better.  I’ve always been ambitious about wanting to lead projects, programs, and businesses, and I’m fortunate that my career has opened those opportunities for me.

I am close to peers and colleagues who are finding themselves at  crossroads, where reorganizations have isolated their function, where bosses no longer count them as ‘high potential’, where the flow of new opportunities slows.  Some make a transition out of operations and development into positions where they network, mentor, or consult.  Others, faced with health or family problems, drop out all together.

Maybe this is an inevitable part of our evolution in life: at some point, we all ‘go hodo.

I do know that I haven’t reached that stage: I still have visions of needed products and drive to work with talented people.  I even still harbor desire to advance within the organization.

But I’m also know that I’m spending increasing amounts of time on complementary pursuits that matter to me.  I’m developing a Diagnostics course module that I’ll be teaching with others during  winter term at Cambridge.  I love the travel and photography that I’m doing.  I want more time to read books, draw charcoals, and practice Dutch.  I’d like to find ways to do more teaching and mentoring.

Scary: it’s starting to sound a bit like regret…

Earlier this week, I had an open evening in Lausanne, and I ended up drifting into the MIT OpenCourseware archive.  Silly, but I spent an hour watching a fascinating physics lecture on magnetism by Walter Lewin.  Three thoughts, on that evening:

• Don’t we live in a remarkable time, able to casually tap into these resources,
• I wish I had more time to watch the whole series,
• Walter Lewin never had a hodo-hodo moment.

  and, I suppose, neither will I.

Keeping perspective

This morning, I caught up on recent blog posts authored by a US-based friend of mine. Although they are a long way from the sights and thoughts found along a later stroll through Amsterdam’s center, they do remind me of the force that Tuesday’s election has back home.

She writes passionately about the upcoming election, feeling their significance and worrying about the potential consequences of an upset. I followed her links to typical Letters to the Editor and agree that it is getting ugly out there (as it is in my home state: the Seattle Times, the Tri-City Herald). It’s easy to get upset at the distortions written and misunderstandings expressed as people try to sway one another’s votes.

At the same time, it’s not something that I can take personally. These voices are out there, and the papers try to reflect that diversity to reflect the national dialog. But in the end, we all get one vote, the country will move on with a popularly elected leader, and we will undertake the serious work of undoing the social, economic, global, and constitutional damage done by the last one.

Truth be told, I’ve actually been encouraged that the press has not focused on the whispered innuendo and biased slogans from either side, and that they have fact-checked statements and contrasted positions to a much greater degree than in the prior decade.

And, in the end, I do trust that centrist people will make a wise choice.

It’s also not so consequential in the long term: the future will turn on larger themes and bigger events than those we are debating today.

Touring the 16th century canal houses and 18th century villas that dot Amsterdam, I’m always struck by how quaint the technologies, fashions, and perspectives of that time are when viewed from our own. Yet they were the height of progress and sophistication in their time, deadly serious for their people.

The message from the US is real enough, and my friend’s reactions are justified. I have similar feelings of sadness and frustration as I follow the McCain / Palin message and messengers.

But I think that in the heat of this moment we can all see events larger than they really are, and credit dissident voices with more influence than they have. I know that sometimes I do.

And I recognize that we all need to keep the longer perspective.

And so, I’ll share a passage from science fiction writer Olaf Stapledon which I used as a preface to my doctoral thesis and which has always been effective at reminding me of that:

Men of your day, when they look back into the history of their planet, remark not only the length of time but also the bewildering acceleration of life's progress. Almost stationary in the earliest period of the earth's career, in your moment it seems headlong. Mind in you, it is said, not merely stands higher than ever before in respect of percipience, knowledge, insight, delicacy of admiration, and sanity of will, but also it moves upward century by century ever more swiftly. What next? Surely, you think, there will come a time when there will be no further heights to conquer.

This view is mistaken. You underestimate even the foothills that stand in front of you, and never suspect that far above them, hidden by cloud, rise precipices and snow-fields. The mental and spiritual advances which, in your day, mind in the solar system has still to attempt, are overwhelmingly more complex, more precarious and dangerous, than those which have already been achieved. And though in certain humble respects you have attained full development, the loftier potencies of the spirit in you have not yet even begun to put forth buds.

Last And First Men, Olaf Stapledon, 1930