Tuesday, December 25, 2007

A new engineering?

I just took a course exploring current work in engineering decentralized systems and found an interesting clash, mostly within myself, as to the best way to make such engineering tractable. I work for an educational non profit interested in helping people deal with complexity. How do we manage systems that are more complicated than one person can understand? Such systems exist, large corporations, governments, societies and living systems, and in cases where such systems are given a leader, we have to understand that this person has very litle clue what they are doing and can do.

NECSI, my employer, is interested in developing tools that help such people understand and predict the consequences of such interventions. We are also interested in the tools behind designing such unmanageable systems, for all their benefits, in a way that they accomplish tasks planned by their designers. You can see it as a new kind of engineering, and it involves a new kind of thinking, or a new language to think in. Much of my thinking in the course was from the angle, 'How do I think in the language of this system'?

This contrasts with the approach of the majority of my classmates, and that of the instructor. They were all engineers of one sort or another, and I found that the class worked towards understanding 'How do I conceptualize this in terms of the engineering process'? Essentially, 'How do I make the system work in a way that I'm used to thinking?'. This included simplifying the system and finding independent 'basis' behaviors that can act as predictable building blocks to be combined into novel systems.

So: think like the system, or make it think like you? My first stab at an answer was 'Do normal engineering for 'easy' problems and change your thinking for 'hard' ones'. My second stab is a little better, it defines easy problems (and hard) operationally as problems normal engineering can solve. My latest attempt at a heuristic is "Do normal engineering when you can (1. when the system has parts that can be black-boxed and 2. interventions have effects independant of each other that can be cleanly measured and 3. there is a well-defined goal) and in other cases use approaches better suited to complicated systems (What approaches? Well, the official contents of the complex systems toolkit are still up for grabs.).

The second stab will not be the last, I still have some questions about weaknesses built inherent in 'The Engineering Method'. I am trying to determine for myself whether short term thinking is built into traditional engineering approaches. If this were true, it would be because of something like the following: The metrics used to determine success are restricted to those things which are measurable, and short term effects are more measurable and almost inevitably play a larger role in influencing decisions made.

We see a lot of people from business and policy soming to courses at the Institute. At first, I disparagingly assumed that this was because they are more vulnerable to buzzwords, but I eventually changed my angle: The people 'in charge' of social bodies are the ones who see most clearly the need for methods of managing complexity and intervening in the systems that they only have the illusion of controlling. For now my take is that if such people could (can) use existing methods they would (should).

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Il Mio Manifesto (hey, at least they're better than New Year's resolutions!)

In the last few days I have had discussions with old pals from the Fourth Estate. It is doing well and the jewels and minks will only be sold to those of fine breeding, namely Roger Ailes. They have informed me that my plight in academia is a grim one: namely research can only get a privileged few very far, because most of the time faculty is desperately trying hammer one of its futile proposals for research down a foundation's throat. At then the thankless teaching load, especially for younger faculty, includes such courses as the following three-credit masterpiece: FYC 4003 Family Financial Management.

I harken back to the old aphorism that the ass is leaner on the other hide, though, because when I was set to plunge myself into the thankless anonymity of writing for the Palatka Daily News or assistant editor of Fleet Owner Magazine I would have died to be an academic, in part because it didn't look like I would be writing copy for the NY Times or broadcasting for the BBC any time soon.

So what I suppose I've always hankered for is the possibility of working in the jungles and godforsaken veldt while at once capturing something uniquely narrative. I'm nowhere near that now, but I've got the seed of an idea.

Many efforts have been made to marry journalism with academia in the past, and most of them haven't been that successful. Journalism departments typify this perhaps the most, attempting to create scholarship and scholars out of something which is by it's very nature not a scholarly process. But the same can be said for the news media, which for whatever reason seems to think that reporters can become experts on all range of subject matters despite their acute focus on only the most pertinent details to a contemporary story. This is most egregious when a cable news channel will put on the TV some cockamamie fool who can pronounce mujahideen but whose credentials nor more recommend them as a Middle East expert to CNN than to CVS.

So I've decided to combine my work in both disciplines, and specifically my work on resilience theory and natural hazards, to my ongoing sensibilities as a storyteller, for toxic effect. The project is protean, the aim ephemeral, the desire simple: try something that has never been done before, either because there's no audience or because it's too damn complicated.

In a sense, this is a call to arms on my part. I want to actually challenge myself and others to see if a utilization of blogs and other multimedia can move the material in question, in this case probably resiliency work in southeastern Mexico, or whether it is doomed to just be conjunctive. I've seen what's out there, and as a result I wish to see what I can modify myself and put intro practice. Hopefully it will be something grand, but if it fails to be anything more than an effort that mirrors this self-promoter, then I want nothing of it.

Wednesday, December 5, 2007

It's 1 2 3, what are we payin' for?

One of the most amazing aspects of the United States Department of Defense has been its ability to innovate what eventually becomes broadly accessible civilian applications. The Internet is one, thanks to DARPA, and remote sensing is another, thanks to the needs of the Union Army. While taking a class whose purpose is to analyze remote sensing in all its detail, I've come to feel that the technology should have stayed within the confines of the Pentagon, I am tortured so).

The question becomes: What will the next generation of DoD innovations evolve to become? With this query I mind I searched the Department's archives to locate all the gizmos I had remembered seeing in magazines and Berkeley coffee houses that traffic in paranoia. There were the microwave rays, or Active Denial System; the robotic wasps that
explode C4 cartridges in the craws of unsuspecting enemies; even the gun that shoots out balls of an adhesive material reminiscent of the glue-like thread material Spider-Man stored in his spinnerets.

But I can't imagine that these would have widespread utility, at least not in the constructive way imagined by the teams that put the foundations for remote sensing and the Internet into place (once they had gotten past the hot air balloon stage.) Doubtless there are apparatuses being envisaged at the moment that no one outside the deepest chambers of Arlington can speak of, but my guess would be not. Why? There are any number of explanations. It's inarguable that the military-industrial complex has shifted to a self-serving enterprise, where military technology is now more expensive than at any time before, where the budget for the Defense Department rewards investments in junk projects like the Osprey, which seemingly crashes or blows up every few years, or Predator drones, which to date have managed to blow up an Afghan wedding, mortally wound a US service member, and kill an innocent civilian on the basis that he looked like Ayman al-Zawarhiri. Sure the DoD's budget as a percentage of GDP is less now than it was even during the Vietnam War, but such a statistic does not take into account the supplementary budgets use to fund Iraq and Afghanistan, or the secret budget outlays for, among other things, defense intelligence.

The gluttony of the Pentagon will no longer allow it to innovate outwardly. Technological tautology is now supreme, and old technologies will persist as long as they serve the central aim of taking out a target with as little collateral damage as possible. But then MRE's may show some promise for long distance runners...