Strange Aeons

According to Arthur C. Clarke anyway. My own blogging has had to take a back seat over the past month as I have been busy with teaching related activities and getting the websites associated with my various courses up and running again after an over enthusiastic rm-ing session on the wrong web server last summer. I had kept MySQL dumps of everything but not of the various sites themselves so I had the content but not the presentation and it takes time, a precious commodity, to get these things going. Anyway my argumentation site is up and running, as is my linux site and my agents site, covering the three broad topics that I am teaching this year. The plan has been to use publically accessible blogs, rather than blackboard, to keep a record of everything that occurs in relation to each of my modules. I have an adverse reaction to the locking up of knowledge inside little blackboard websites because they are distinctly not open. When I have been interested in various modules being delivered by my colleagues I have had to go through a process of getting added to the module lists so that I can get access. When all I really want to do is read through the slides to satisfy some sort of academic craving. What are the plans for this year you wonder. Well no resolutions. Some half-hearted, fairly vague, back of the mind ideas for things I want to do over the next year or so. Some of these things are fairly practical;

• getting to inbox 0 (currently at inbox 2 as I have 2 emails from friends that I want to give thoughtful and considered replies to) and other hacks to increase my productivity,
• getting a fellowship application in (although this is actually half-hearted as it would mean little or no teaching for 3 years or so and I now realise that it is the healthy balance of teaching and research activities that currently make me (reasonably) happy in my job),
• getting some research funding (this is more whole hearted as I want to stop self-funding my visits, get some better equipment and books, and because it is a necessary part of getting onto the career ladder as a scientist - it is not solely about what you know but increasingly about how much money you can bring to the table),
• getting those two journal papers off of my desk that have been in various states of done-ness for too long,
• getting my small publishing business up and running (as it has been in the back of my mind for a couple of years during which time several friends have written and print-on-demanded various books but would rather have turned that over to someone they know to manage so that they could write more). It should be noted that this is also a strategic move in that it looks increasingly as though only those who have a business interest in copyright will have any say in the near future over how the copyright landscape erodes. By developing a non-traditional publishing model based off of openness and sharing perhaps it will give me a stronger basis from which to argue against increased restrictions,
• finally get my personal consultancy changed over from a sole trader business into a limited company and try to build an extra income stream,
• get some new websites up and running. I have one on cooking (partnering with a friends baking website (which I also have to get running)), one for the publishing company, and one for my book blogging.

I think that that is enough to get started with...

Given that my last post talked about habits, their refinement, and occasional replacement I ran across an article that talks about the rituals and habits of effective coders. Of particular interest was this:

"To me, programming is really the 'last mile' to getting something done. When I do the planning and specifications, I go on lots of walks, take lots of time with my wife, and really do as little work in front of the computer as possible.  The more I plan (in my head, on paper, on a whiteboard) the less I program; and all of my rituals are to that end" - Issac Kelly, Lead Developer at Servee.com

I use a version of this technique also but for most of my research related activities. Instead of sitting at my desk worrying away at a problem I also go for walks or sit outside, or at least hang-around somewhere other than at my desk. All the while the particular problem that I am working on moves round and round until I have enough detail worked out that I can make some progress. It is at this point that I sit at my desk and blitz through my ideas, whether coding or writing, making more progress than if I had just sat at my desk chipping away at the problems. Of course I have a number of things that necessitate that I stay at my desk, meetings, marking, and general administrivia, but otherwise I like to get away from it whenever possible. For this to work for me though requires a decent support system: good filing so that I know where everything is, a decent paper notebook so that I can make notes and not forget stuff, a whiteboard at each base, home and office, so that I can work through ideas when I have finished perambulating, and a diary so that I know where I should be at any given point. NB. I have tried and failed to move to an electronic diary and note-taking regime. They just don't work for me. They are slower than paper, less flexible, less robust, and are never there when you need them.

An interesting post over at Study Hacks that suggests that changing study patterns can help you to study better. I think that changing your work patterns can also make you better at what you do regardless of whether you are a student or not. Asking yourself  "is this the best way to achieve my goal?" or "is there a better way to do this?" or otherwise just realising that "this is stale I want to try something different and let serendipity help me along" can help you to break out of those patterns that you just fall into. Taking into account the results of this kind of reflection can lead to an improvement in your work habits. Sometimes though we do need to take a step back, tear down the set of habits and work patterns that we have constructed, and start to build something new and ideally more effective. Some of the benefits of this approach are listed in the Study Hacks article, e.g.

1. It frees you from the grasp of particularly devastating hidden assumptions.
2. It acknowledges the fact that you learn more about studying as you progress through your career.
3. It introduces novelty.

I have edited benefit 2 however because I don't think that this is a good technique only for students, as an academic at the start of my career I am still trying to refine effective work habits that will lead to a sustained output of high quality research. Partly this is of course just down to putting in time and hard work, just like in everything else, but I can improve my chances by improving my work habits.

I finally bit the bullet and spent some time this week auditioning new mail clients. Since moving off OS X I have been using Thunderbird but never quite got to love it. It is not offensive, in fact it is pretty good, but it seemed slow, in a personal opinion, completely subjective manner. So I tried out Evolution which has been installed on all my Linux desktops because I have been using Ubuntu exclusively for the desktop since jumping to Linux full time. I had tried Evolution years ago and didn't like it much then because I have an aversion to integrated everything and the kitchen sink type software which I think is the antithesis of the Unix philosophy. I just want small robust tools, with an appropriate default feature set, that can be extended either through plug-ins or through connecting to other small tools. This search lead me to Claws Mail, a spin off project from the Sylpheed mail client, which is small, fast and feature rich. It is easily extensible through plugins and can be scripted, using filters and processing rules, to work with the full complement of Linux shell tools to do significant processing of email. The only hitch in the giddy up was that I couldn't easily incorporate my existing S/MIME certificates into Claws Mail, it does support them but the process is not currently straightforward. It was easier to just bite the bullet and create a new GPG key pair for my email account so that I can let my recipients ensure that the email that I sent is the email that has arrived because in these days of phorm we can't be too careful. I should also mention OfflineIMAP, another tool I found whilst exploring the mail client ecosystem. It makes a local offline copy of your IMAP folders so that you can make an easy backup of your IMAP stored email.

If you are using the Mac OS X Mail application, as I still do on my laptop, you will probably have noticed the flurry of spam emails in recent months purporting to come from your own email address. I think that individual cryptographic certificates are one tool for tackling spam email in general, but a problem that I had experienced was how to reject emails that say that they come from me but which don't have a digital certificate, because there is no clear way to reject unsigned emails in the existing rules and I don't have enough applescript foo to be able to remedy this. I have found though that you can turn off the automatic white-listing of your own email address under the Junk Mail pane of the Mail App. preferences. That, inconjunction with a rule whitelisting my certificated email, should hopefully be enough for now.

I shall probably regret saying this but I am over the busy hump of the semester. At least as far as time-tabled business is concerned anyhow. It is halfway through the second semester of the academic year and most of my active teaching related stuff, e.g. heavy regular lecture load, concentrated into the first half of the semester leading to a nice graceful curve down towards the end of the semester. In theory this means that I can begin to start ramping up my research activities again until the pattern repeats itself next academic year. The good thing is that I have a bit more time to spend posting here and at the other place because most of my blog posts have been on the websites for teaching modules that I am involved in. So, in summation, half semester gone, heaviest load of lectures gone, second semester exams written and ready to go the external examiner. A busy time! I have also managed to get a KTP proposal submitted so I am managing a few research related jobs. I just need to get my ARGMAS reviews finished tomorrow and it will have been a good week.

As somebody who is frequently a customer, so knows how it feels to do business with both good and bad companies, but also as somebody who has worked in small businesses and the retail and service industries I can find fault with the recommendations made by Simon Caulkin in his Observer management column. He suggests the following:

"Quit thinking about cost - give people what they want. Customers aren't interested in your costs. They are only interested in being able to get from you a product or service with the minimum of fuss and the maximum of convenience - their convenience"

This is achieved according to the following guidelines:

1. Forget productivity, work on quality
2. Stop obsessing about scale: think flow
3. Size doesn't matter
4. Stop trying to performance-manage people; focus on improving the system
5. Forget about competition and build co-operation

This basically sums up to:

"Do good business, please your customers and cut costs at the same time".

Over at the third bit there is a post introducing the thesis hat. The basic idea is to have a container into which anonymous research ideas are placed by a community of scholars. Periodically those scholars gather together to draw ideas out of the hat one by one for subsequent discussion. The scholars then collaborate on any ideas that they want to investigate with the aim of fostering collaboration, interdisciplinary research, and enabling researchers to spread their wings amd move away from their comfort zones.

1. Allow events to change you. You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites for growth: the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed by them.
2. Forget about good. Good is a known quantity. Good is what we all agree on. Growth is not necessarily good. Growth is an exploration of unlit recesses that may or may not yield to our research. As long as you stick to good you'll never have real growth.
3. Process is more important than outcome. When the outcome drives the process we will only ever go to where we've already been. If process drives outcome we may not know where we’re going, but we will know we want to be there.
4. Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child). Joy is the engine of growth. Exploit the liberty in casting your work as beautiful experiments, iterations, attempts, trials, and errors. Take the long view and allow yourself the fun of failure every day.
5. Go deep. The deeper you go the more likely you will discover something of value.
6. Capture accidents. The wrong answer is the right answer in search of a different question. Collect wrong answers as part of the process. Ask different questions.
7. Study. A studio is a place of study. Use the necessity of production as an excuse to study. Everyone will benefit.
8. Drift. Allow yourself to wander aimlessly. Explore adjacencies. Lack judgment. Postpone criticism.
9. Begin anywhere. John Cage tells us that not knowing where to begin is a common form of paralysis. His advice: begin anywhere.
10. Everyone is a leader. Growth happens. Whenever it does, allow it to emerge. Learn to follow when it makes sense. Let anyone lead.
11. Harvest ideas. Edit applications. Ideas need a dynamic, fluid, generous environment to sustain life. Applications, on the other hand, benefit from critical rigor. Produce a high ratio of ideas to applications.
12. Keep moving. The market and its operations have a tendency to reinforce success. Resist it. Allow failure and migration to be part of your practice.
13. Slow down. Desynchronize from standard time frames and surprising opportunities may present themselves.
14. Don’t be cool. Cool is conservative fear dressed in black. Free yourself from limits of this sort.
15. Ask stupid questions. Growth is fueled by desire and innocence. Assess the answer, not the question. Imagine learning throughout your life at the rate of an infant.
16. Collaborate. The space between people working together is filled with conflict, friction, strife, exhilaration, delight, and vast creative potential.
17. ____________________. Intentionally left blank. Allow space for the ideas you haven’t had yet, and for the ideas of others.
18. Stay up late. Strange things happen when you’ve gone too far, been up too long, worked too hard, and you're separated from the rest of the world.
19. Work the metaphor. Every object has the capacity to stand for something other than what is apparent. Work on what it stands for.
20. Be careful to take risks. Time is genetic. Today is the child of yesterday and the parent of tomorrow. The work you produce today will create your future.
21. Repeat yourself. If you like it, do it again. If you don’t like it, do it again.
22. Make your own tools. Hybridize your tools in order to build unique things. Even simple tools that are your own can yield entirely new avenues of exploration. Remember, tools amplify our capacities, so even a small tool can make a big difference.
23. Stand on someone’s shoulders. You can travel farther carried on the accomplishments of those who came before you. And the view is so much better.
24. Avoid software. The problem with software is that everyone has it.
25. Don’t clean your desk. You might find something in the morning that you can’t see tonight.
26. Don’t enter awards competitions. Just don’t. It’s not good for you.
27. Read only left-hand pages. Marshall McLuhan did this. By decreasing the amount of information, we leave room for what he called our "noodle."
28. Make new words. Expand the lexicon. The new conditions demand a new way of thinking. The thinking demands new forms of expression. The expression generates new conditions.
29. Think with your mind. Forget technology. Creativity is not device-dependent.
30. Organization = Liberty. Real innovation in design, or any other field, happens in context. That context is usually some form of cooperatively managed enterprise. Frank Gehry, for instance, is only able to realize Bilbao because his studio can deliver it on budget. The myth of a split between "creatives" and "suits" is what Leonard Cohen calls a 'charming artifact of the past.'
31. Don’t borrow money. Once again, Frank Gehry’s advice. By maintaining financial control, we maintain creative control. It’s not exactly rocket science, but it’s surprising how hard it is to maintain this discipline, and how many have failed.
32. Listen carefully. Every collaborator who enters our orbit brings with him or her a world more strange and complex than any we could ever hope to imagine. By listening to the details and the subtlety of their needs, desires, or ambitions, we fold their world onto our own. Neither party will ever be the same.
33. Take field trips. The bandwidth of the world is greater than that of your TV set, or the Internet, or even a totally immersive, interactive, dynamically rendered, object-oriented, real-time, computer graphic–simulated environment.
34. Make mistakes faster. This isn’t my idea -- I borrowed it. I think it belongs to Andy Grove.
35. Imitate. Don’t be shy about it. Try to get as close as you can. You'll never get all the way, and the separation might be truly remarkable. We have only to look to Richard Hamilton and his version of Marcel Duchamp’s large glass to see how rich, discredited, and underused imitation is as a technique.
36. Scat. When you forget the words, do what Ella did: make up something else ... but not words.
37. Break it, stretch it, bend it, crush it, crack it, fold it.
38. Explore the other edge. Great liberty exists when we avoid trying to run with the technological pack. We can’t find the leading edge because it’s trampled underfoot. Try using old-tech equipment made obsolete by an economic cycle but still rich with potential.
39. Coffee breaks, cab rides, green rooms. Real growth often happens outside of where we intend it to, in the interstitial spaces -- what Dr. Seuss calls "the waiting place." Hans Ulrich Obrist once organized a science and art conference with all of the infrastructure of a conference -- the parties, chats, lunches, airport arrivals — but with no actual conference. Apparently it was hugely successful and spawned many ongoing collaborations.
40. Avoid fields. Jump fences. Disciplinary boundaries and regulatory regimes are attempts to control the wilding of creative life. They are often understandable efforts to order what are manifold, complex, evolutionary processes. Our job is to jump the fences and cross the fields.
41. Laugh. People visiting the studio often comment on how much we laugh. Since I've become aware of this, I use it as a barometer of how comfortably we are expressing ourselves.
42. Remember. Growth is only possible as a product of history. Without memory, innovation is merely novelty. History gives growth a direction. But a memory is never perfect. Every memory is a degraded or composite image of a previous moment or event. That’s what makes us aware of its quality as a past and not a present. It means that every memory is new, a partial construct different from its source, and, as such, a potential for growth itself.
43. Power to the people. Play can only happen when people feel they have control over their lives. We can't be free agents if we’re not free.

1. Find a place you trust and then try trusting it for a while.
2. General duties of a student: pull everything out of your teacher, pull everything out of your fellow students.
3. General duties of a teacher: pull everything out of your students.
4. Consider everything an experiment.
5. Be self-disciplined. This means finding someone wise or smart and choosing to follow them. To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way.
6. Nothing is a mistake. There is no win and no fail. There is only make.
7. The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something. It’s the people who do all of the work all the time who eventually catch on to things.
8. Don’t try to create and analyse at the same time. They’re different processes.
9. Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It’s lighter than you think.
10. “We’re breaking all of the rules. Even our own rules. And how do we do that? By leaving plenty of room for X quantities.” - John Cage.