In the 1920s the spectre of millions of deaths loomed behind them and the shadow of fascist and communist totalitarianism darkened the European's horizon. In the midst of this oppressive onslaught against the human spirit, one thinker looked westward for hope.
The British philosopher Herbert Read said that the strength of Americans lay in our unwillingness to become polarized into two warring factions, left and right. At that time he felt that the practicality, humor and good will of Americans prevented them succumbing to the mortal pettiness and rancor of the Europeans, with whom he included the Russians under Stalin. Read despaired of the one dimensional political hatred that was taking over all classes of global society, and he looked to the U.S. to provide a clear headed leadership grounded in humane values and practical intelligence.
This was remarkable for many reasons. Read was not a champion of the common man. He was a connoisseur of the arts, a philosopher, and a member of the elite of his nation and generation. So he wasn't just expressing the stereotyped support of a liberal or progressive intellectual mired in the crumbling aristocratic traditions of Europe.
He had what you might call a technical insight into the systemic problem which was driving Europe toward the devastation of World War II. He knew that simple two valued conflict between "left" and "right" drove both parties to extreme positions which were ultimately inhuman: totalitarian, whether fascist or communist. The circle was closed at the point of unsupportable violence against citizens within the nation's boundaries as well as mechanized warfare on an insane scale mounted against the "enemy." America represented at least three values in any conflict: the liberal, the conservative, and the skeptical. And in any given mileu the skeptic armed with humor was more likely to win an audience if not a constituency. For every Father Coughlin spewing simple minded hatred into the airwaves, there was the counter force of Will Rogers "calling it as he saw it", putting the pretentious in their place and elevating the common sensical and clearly observed to head of the table.
When Bush attacked Iraq, and a millenial chill settled into the bones of arguement in this country, I thought that the last vestige of Read's hope for the U.S. had been done in. Everywhere I looked and listened, the polarization proceeded at light speed. No one could present a balanced appraisal of anything important. There was the Patriot position and there was the Terrorist position, and every utterance in public was a litmus test of where the speaker stood between these two monoliths.
It was as though the national media had become a Boa Constrictor of the intellect, and each time the body politic exhaled, the censorius grip of intolerant polarization tightened, until there was little breath of wisdom or skepticism left.
But there is something in the gut of the average American, no matter how long they have been here, that has to say "wait a minute" when things get out of hand. It is at work at every lunch counter and office break room, every bar and family gathering in this country. It is laced with humor, braced with just enough logic, and motivated by a hugely uncontainable sentiment that believes, first and last, in the human spirit. And that humor, logic, and spirit will not be crushed by group think at the media level or immature jingoism at the level of national governance.
A nation that looks its leaders in the eye periodically and challenges the bill when it comes due is going to be resiliant. It will take in damaging blows to its self confidence and stagger for a while, but it will come back and speak up and look askance, and laugh. What should other nation's trust and honor in the spectacle presented by America at the present time? We are skeptical of our own excesses, not impressed easily by our own extremes, quick to laugh at our own foibles even as we persist in them.
There is hope for us yet. And in that hope for us, there is a certain untameable, unsuppressable hope for the spirit of every man and woman in the world.
20.7.04
The therapy of the macrocosm.
The first step in personal therapy is to get the voices of your mother and father out of your head.
You didn't know it was that simple, did you?
What is the source of the deepest disconnect between individuals and their immediate environment? I propose this construct, this trope.
The debilitating influence of parental echoes are greatest when the individual is in a situation where the nostrums and precepts of their parents are not only useless, but dangerous or overtly destructive. Consider someone raised in a parochial society that feared and reviled their neighbors. Now imagine that person is forced to move across the border and live among those feared and reviled. Obviously in order to find any peace, they would have to extirpate the bias they had been raised with. Something similar to this conflict scenario tends to be behind the pain many troubled people feel. The receipes of their youth do not match the dietary requirements of their adulthood, but until they can "get the voices of their mother and father out of their head" they cannot find peace. What a painful, but simple, dilemma.
This dilemma has been known for at least a thousand years among certain groups of people. In the 11th century, the Sufis created havens for troubled individuals who could be taken away from their immediate families and allowed to rest and clear their thinking. Jesus said you have to turn away from your parents to enter the kingdom of heaven, but he didn't mean following Charles Manson or other cult leaders as parental substitutes. He meant you literally have to evolve past the lessons that your parents inculcated with their stories and admonishment. Of course, people in trouble often revert to the atavistic comfort of parental messages. People who are deeply frightened or very angry are rarely in a position to use that emotional energy to make a forward leap of understanding or personal integration. On the other hand, Gurdjieff teaches that times of emotional turmoil are good for bootstrapping yourself to a more integrated psychological level.
The challenge for therapists is to extricate a person from the family of voices in their head until they can hear their own voice calmly and clearly again, and simplify the decision process to where it resembles sensible and safe behavior again.
There is a cost to meddling with the voices in people's heads. Any psychiatric social worker, bar bouncer, help-line volunteer, AA sponsor or school guidance counselor can tell you bluntly how difficult it is to deal with someone who is not following conscious urges and persists in the unconstructive behaviors. Change is possible, but there is always a cost. Sometimes the cost is simply the extremes of a personality. Sometimes it is a life. Sometimes it is just a protracted period of discomfort that can result in a new level of awareness. These things are too complicated to predict for any given individual, but the patterns are persistant across numbers of people. If you practice the professions named above you know what I am talking about. If you have a seriously troubled family member you know what I am talking about.
I use "voices in their head" advisedly, as I am aware that often these dynamics occur without conscious auditory phenomena, and are only experienced as deeply felt emotional urges that override reason. But in the spirit of Julian Jaynes' The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind I will refer to the phenomena as "voices in their heads."
(Jaynes supposes that until a few thousand years ago the voices in one's head were in fact due to a disconnect between left and right brain functions, and experienced as voices of gods. When he wrote his admittedly controversial book, "consciousness" was presumed to be unitary, exhaustive and sufficient. That means that each normal person was deemed to have one consciousness, which covered all their needs for thinking and awareness. Research since the 70's has followed many different routes, not least of which propose that there are different kinds of consciousness, or that different kinds of awareness and understanding do not always reach conscious levels before they are employed, or even that there is more than one legitimate consciousness in a healthy mind. I am not promoting Jaynes whole theory.)
But back to the voices. The first and most persistant voices are the parents, most often the mother. Now, I am not elaborating a technical construct here; only offering a kind of rule of thumb to those who might be interested in the idea.
Let's say, for the moment, that I am right.
As cultural and economic stress intensifies, people revert to the most primary level of guidance, and for most people that is their father/mother voices in their heads. When does this become a problem? When the reality of the current situation is in conflict with the values of the father/ mother voices. As cultural conflict and economic stress increase throughout society, we spend more of our conscious energy trying to figure out what we believe and whom we trust, and we spend more of our unconscious energy struggling with the gods of our ancestors who are blind to the present but very alive to the deep emotional truths of our existence.
Someone like Bush benefits superficially from our atavistic turmoil. He is accepted uncritically by a group of people who want someone who looks and acts like they could be the source of the voices in their heads.
It isn't working of course. We need the therapy of order, therapy of the social macrocosm. We need to get the voices of our parents out of our heads, while keeping their memories and love well established in our hearts. Bush can't help with that. I don't know if any politician can.
The first step in therapy is getting your parent's voices out of your head. The last step is letting them back in, without losing your own ever again.
If you have found your voice, use it.
If you have lost your voice, find it.
You didn't know it was that simple, did you?
What is the source of the deepest disconnect between individuals and their immediate environment? I propose this construct, this trope.
The debilitating influence of parental echoes are greatest when the individual is in a situation where the nostrums and precepts of their parents are not only useless, but dangerous or overtly destructive. Consider someone raised in a parochial society that feared and reviled their neighbors. Now imagine that person is forced to move across the border and live among those feared and reviled. Obviously in order to find any peace, they would have to extirpate the bias they had been raised with. Something similar to this conflict scenario tends to be behind the pain many troubled people feel. The receipes of their youth do not match the dietary requirements of their adulthood, but until they can "get the voices of their mother and father out of their head" they cannot find peace. What a painful, but simple, dilemma.
This dilemma has been known for at least a thousand years among certain groups of people. In the 11th century, the Sufis created havens for troubled individuals who could be taken away from their immediate families and allowed to rest and clear their thinking. Jesus said you have to turn away from your parents to enter the kingdom of heaven, but he didn't mean following Charles Manson or other cult leaders as parental substitutes. He meant you literally have to evolve past the lessons that your parents inculcated with their stories and admonishment. Of course, people in trouble often revert to the atavistic comfort of parental messages. People who are deeply frightened or very angry are rarely in a position to use that emotional energy to make a forward leap of understanding or personal integration. On the other hand, Gurdjieff teaches that times of emotional turmoil are good for bootstrapping yourself to a more integrated psychological level.
The challenge for therapists is to extricate a person from the family of voices in their head until they can hear their own voice calmly and clearly again, and simplify the decision process to where it resembles sensible and safe behavior again.
There is a cost to meddling with the voices in people's heads. Any psychiatric social worker, bar bouncer, help-line volunteer, AA sponsor or school guidance counselor can tell you bluntly how difficult it is to deal with someone who is not following conscious urges and persists in the unconstructive behaviors. Change is possible, but there is always a cost. Sometimes the cost is simply the extremes of a personality. Sometimes it is a life. Sometimes it is just a protracted period of discomfort that can result in a new level of awareness. These things are too complicated to predict for any given individual, but the patterns are persistant across numbers of people. If you practice the professions named above you know what I am talking about. If you have a seriously troubled family member you know what I am talking about.
I use "voices in their head" advisedly, as I am aware that often these dynamics occur without conscious auditory phenomena, and are only experienced as deeply felt emotional urges that override reason. But in the spirit of Julian Jaynes' The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind I will refer to the phenomena as "voices in their heads."
(Jaynes supposes that until a few thousand years ago the voices in one's head were in fact due to a disconnect between left and right brain functions, and experienced as voices of gods. When he wrote his admittedly controversial book, "consciousness" was presumed to be unitary, exhaustive and sufficient. That means that each normal person was deemed to have one consciousness, which covered all their needs for thinking and awareness. Research since the 70's has followed many different routes, not least of which propose that there are different kinds of consciousness, or that different kinds of awareness and understanding do not always reach conscious levels before they are employed, or even that there is more than one legitimate consciousness in a healthy mind. I am not promoting Jaynes whole theory.)
But back to the voices. The first and most persistant voices are the parents, most often the mother. Now, I am not elaborating a technical construct here; only offering a kind of rule of thumb to those who might be interested in the idea.
Let's say, for the moment, that I am right.
As cultural and economic stress intensifies, people revert to the most primary level of guidance, and for most people that is their father/mother voices in their heads. When does this become a problem? When the reality of the current situation is in conflict with the values of the father/ mother voices. As cultural conflict and economic stress increase throughout society, we spend more of our conscious energy trying to figure out what we believe and whom we trust, and we spend more of our unconscious energy struggling with the gods of our ancestors who are blind to the present but very alive to the deep emotional truths of our existence.
Someone like Bush benefits superficially from our atavistic turmoil. He is accepted uncritically by a group of people who want someone who looks and acts like they could be the source of the voices in their heads.
It isn't working of course. We need the therapy of order, therapy of the social macrocosm. We need to get the voices of our parents out of our heads, while keeping their memories and love well established in our hearts. Bush can't help with that. I don't know if any politician can.
The first step in therapy is getting your parent's voices out of your head. The last step is letting them back in, without losing your own ever again.
If you have found your voice, use it.
If you have lost your voice, find it.
16.7.04
Relationships and fear: two modern ideas whose time is past
We are not on this Earth to have "relationships" with people. We are here to love and fight others. The simplicity of this has been shattered by the subtle elevation of fear to the status of final arbiter of all public good. These two dissimulations: relationships as a goal and fear as a justification, need to be examined carefully in order to understand the damage they do to the trusting mind.
If someone says "I need a relationship" you know they are an idiot. They might be nice or dangerous, but they are an idiot. You have a relationship with everything and everyone. You don't know it until it becomes conscious, but the word "relationship" or "relation" simply means that two things exert some kind of mutual influence on each other. To say you need a relationship, or are in a relationship, or have a good or bad relationship with another person, begs the question of whether you love them or want to fight them or both.
Learn to discriminate the quality of affection and respect you have for others. Learn to develop your skills so you may act spontaneously and well in all settings. Then the "relationship" will take care of itself.
Now, if someone says "We did this because we were afraid of blah blah blah" you know they are an idiot. No one acts because of fear. They act out of desire. The term "fight or flight" became popular in the last century in the campaign to dehumanize choice and reduce us all to absurd bundles of reflexes. It implies that we follow, and don't lead, our impulses.
If you want to understand your behavior, figure out what it is that you desire. Admit what you want. Then you will understand why you do what you do. If you think about fear, it is like trying to figure out what the darkness looks like. We have elevated an absence to a place of pride in our cultural life, with the worship of ideas like terror and evil. The "scare" tactics of free-lance political guerillas are actually designed to outrage people and reveal the weakness of politicians. Fear is not really the issue, and its extreme form of "terror" simply becomes the trademark used to brand a whole industry of selfish behavior ranging from rudeness and lying to theft and murder. The average person is outraged by theft and murder and wants to stand up to the perpetrators. You don't want to cower behind some uniformed figure who takes your son out to be killed in battle while handing you a picture of a flag.
Try taking my stuff. Try hurting me or my family and I will show you what I mean.
In the meantime, figure out what you really want. And admit it to yourself.
If someone says "I need a relationship" you know they are an idiot. They might be nice or dangerous, but they are an idiot. You have a relationship with everything and everyone. You don't know it until it becomes conscious, but the word "relationship" or "relation" simply means that two things exert some kind of mutual influence on each other. To say you need a relationship, or are in a relationship, or have a good or bad relationship with another person, begs the question of whether you love them or want to fight them or both.
Learn to discriminate the quality of affection and respect you have for others. Learn to develop your skills so you may act spontaneously and well in all settings. Then the "relationship" will take care of itself.
Now, if someone says "We did this because we were afraid of blah blah blah" you know they are an idiot. No one acts because of fear. They act out of desire. The term "fight or flight" became popular in the last century in the campaign to dehumanize choice and reduce us all to absurd bundles of reflexes. It implies that we follow, and don't lead, our impulses.
If you want to understand your behavior, figure out what it is that you desire. Admit what you want. Then you will understand why you do what you do. If you think about fear, it is like trying to figure out what the darkness looks like. We have elevated an absence to a place of pride in our cultural life, with the worship of ideas like terror and evil. The "scare" tactics of free-lance political guerillas are actually designed to outrage people and reveal the weakness of politicians. Fear is not really the issue, and its extreme form of "terror" simply becomes the trademark used to brand a whole industry of selfish behavior ranging from rudeness and lying to theft and murder. The average person is outraged by theft and murder and wants to stand up to the perpetrators. You don't want to cower behind some uniformed figure who takes your son out to be killed in battle while handing you a picture of a flag.
Try taking my stuff. Try hurting me or my family and I will show you what I mean.
In the meantime, figure out what you really want. And admit it to yourself.
15.7.04
The soul and the spirit of a human being
The spirit flies free, and takes many shapes easily, but its destiny is to find a home. The soul is rooted deep into the earth, but it must travel and undergo change in order to become what it is. These two dynamics weave around each other and create the shape, color and music of a life.
The spirit does not take much notice of pain. The soul finds pain to be a directional beacon, a guide. The spirit must learn the nature of pain, and must learn to relieve the pain of others in order to find its own true limits. The soul must learn to forgo pain, to find its way without seeking pain as a proof of its existence.
The spirit wants to play with the angels and it must learn to serve the prisoners of the earth. The soul listens in the darkness and must learn to sing in the light.
No one can kill their spirit or ignore their own soul. Great discontent, great longing and tragic grief rip a person from their moment, but cannot tear them from the warp and weft of destiny: soul and spirit.
It doesn't help to know this. It does help to know you are not alone in your journey, and you will not be alone when you find your home.
The spirit does not take much notice of pain. The soul finds pain to be a directional beacon, a guide. The spirit must learn the nature of pain, and must learn to relieve the pain of others in order to find its own true limits. The soul must learn to forgo pain, to find its way without seeking pain as a proof of its existence.
The spirit wants to play with the angels and it must learn to serve the prisoners of the earth. The soul listens in the darkness and must learn to sing in the light.
No one can kill their spirit or ignore their own soul. Great discontent, great longing and tragic grief rip a person from their moment, but cannot tear them from the warp and weft of destiny: soul and spirit.
It doesn't help to know this. It does help to know you are not alone in your journey, and you will not be alone when you find your home.
14.7.04
The age of knowledge
Prior to the twentieth century, a majority of christian europeans assumed the bible to be literal in its setting forth the age of creation, which certain clerics calculated to be about 6000 years. They believed a lot of other odd things, too. By the 1970's Marschak, an anthropologist, threw established notions of prehistory all cock-a-hoop with the disclosure that orderly markings on an antler found near a paleolithic fire pit in Czechoslovakia were in fact lunar phase diagrams. And they were dated to 25,000 bc.
How old is knowledge? We still can't agree.
Lately I have come across two widely separated books with a common theme...the "hidden" science of the Rgveda. The Rgveda is the Indian scripture with a wealth of mysterious intellectual structures scattered about, a kind of reader's Stonehenge and Baalbeck rolled into a lengthy series of poems and stories. One book purports to establish a common hidden ancestry for all cultural musical norms, and another purports to discover hidden astronomical knowledge of an extremely high order hidden in the numerical structure of the poems stanzas.
Someday before I die I hope to read both books, and feel quite brainy as I do. In the meantime, I wonder if we are not in fact living at the end of the age of Knowledge, however long it has taken to get to this point. With men like President Bush governing the amassed destructive resources of our civilization based on feelings that originate from a point no higher than his belly button, I would guess that questions of the age of knowledge will become academic, even as the academies close and fall to ruin.
How old is knowledge? We still can't agree.
Lately I have come across two widely separated books with a common theme...the "hidden" science of the Rgveda. The Rgveda is the Indian scripture with a wealth of mysterious intellectual structures scattered about, a kind of reader's Stonehenge and Baalbeck rolled into a lengthy series of poems and stories. One book purports to establish a common hidden ancestry for all cultural musical norms, and another purports to discover hidden astronomical knowledge of an extremely high order hidden in the numerical structure of the poems stanzas.
Someday before I die I hope to read both books, and feel quite brainy as I do. In the meantime, I wonder if we are not in fact living at the end of the age of Knowledge, however long it has taken to get to this point. With men like President Bush governing the amassed destructive resources of our civilization based on feelings that originate from a point no higher than his belly button, I would guess that questions of the age of knowledge will become academic, even as the academies close and fall to ruin.
13.7.04
the universe
The universe exists to give all creatures exactly what they want when they want it. The problem arises when creatures don't know that they want exactly what they have, when they have it. Animals seem to obey this law better than humans. They sit with what they have until they want something else, then they go for that.
This flies in the face of therapeutic "wisdom" that makes fun of addicts, who "want what they want when they want it". But therapeutic wisdom ignores the fact that addicts don't want to get high, they just want to be in the presence of their lover. The problem with addiction begins when a child goes to a parent to simply be in the presence of their lover, and the parent gives them food, a toy, or some other distraction in order to avoid paying attention to the child. The child then is trained to go to the distraction on the way to love, and that becomes a way of life.
That doesn't make the problem of addiction easy to solve for anyone except the addict. When the addict wakes up and realizes whom they love, all they have to do is go to the presence of their lover, and they will find release from the cycle of distraction. Of course, for many people, the cycle of distraction is immensely attractive, because it is a kind of foreplay that enhances the anticipation of going to the presence of their lover.
The universe, with its mandatory aspects of space and time, provides a lover for every lover, and a direction towards that lover. The necessity of crossing space and taking time to get to your lover creates the multiplicity of life's sensations and experiences.
We are all going to be in the presence of our lover sooner or later. Maybe you were in the presence of your lover already today. What a great thing! What a beautiful thing to return to!
This flies in the face of therapeutic "wisdom" that makes fun of addicts, who "want what they want when they want it". But therapeutic wisdom ignores the fact that addicts don't want to get high, they just want to be in the presence of their lover. The problem with addiction begins when a child goes to a parent to simply be in the presence of their lover, and the parent gives them food, a toy, or some other distraction in order to avoid paying attention to the child. The child then is trained to go to the distraction on the way to love, and that becomes a way of life.
That doesn't make the problem of addiction easy to solve for anyone except the addict. When the addict wakes up and realizes whom they love, all they have to do is go to the presence of their lover, and they will find release from the cycle of distraction. Of course, for many people, the cycle of distraction is immensely attractive, because it is a kind of foreplay that enhances the anticipation of going to the presence of their lover.
The universe, with its mandatory aspects of space and time, provides a lover for every lover, and a direction towards that lover. The necessity of crossing space and taking time to get to your lover creates the multiplicity of life's sensations and experiences.
We are all going to be in the presence of our lover sooner or later. Maybe you were in the presence of your lover already today. What a great thing! What a beautiful thing to return to!
8.7.04
The Next Big Thing and me (and you, maybe)
My experience in Visualization of Management and Research Data
Jeff Beddow
Minneapolis. June, 2004
1970-71 As research Assistant to Dr. John Modell at the University of Minnesota, I worked to extract interesting patterns out of 1880-1890 U.S. Census data from Rhode Island. I imagined a computer program that would make literal visual patterns out of the tens of thousands of numbers, to aid interpretation.
1978-80 I experimented with variations on quilt patterns as a visual design exercise, and thought that the visual syntax and grammar of textile patterns might support the visualization of complex data.
1980-81 Took courses in computer science and programming to acquire necessary skills to create the program which would implement the idea of visualizing complex data sets through visual patterns.
1982-1984 Developed and published a graphics program with special pattern manipulation features, contacted ARPA and other potential sponsors for a visualization program.
1984-1987 Interviewed business owners, executives and managers in a broad range of fields including manufacturing, car rental, data-base management, retail store management, government economic forecasting, etc. to refine specifications of a program. I also intensified my research into the physiology of perception, the psychology of learning and interpreting visual information, and other fields relating to this project.
As a matter of interest, this was a time in the field of perceptual physiology, cognitive science, and the psychology of learning when the emphasis was splitting dramatically from conscious, purposeful thinking skills to machine learning on the one hand and pre-attentive cognition on the other. Triesman's and Livingston’s research represents leading work in the latter field.
Pre-attentive visual processing
Pre-attentive cognition is the processing of visual information such as color, contrast, shape, etc in order to navigate, avoid danger, recognize friends, and perform other complex perceptual/judgment skills without involving fully conscious mechanisms. It occurs almost instantaneously, without comparison, recollection, or decoding of encoded value schemes. It is known to occur at a much higher speed than linear thinking and analysis, since it involves the parallel processing of thousands of bits of visual information in coherent spatial patterns. Pre-attentive processing supports human judgment in all natural environments, but it has been forced out of most modern decision contexts. The careful application of the principles of pre-attentive design will simplify the task of extracting meaningful information from a mass of data in any circumstance.
I was swimming against the current of interest in artificial intelligence which dominated many fields of computer research at the time. I was committed to the idea of not only keeping the human “in the loop” as it was described, but maximizing the essential human aspects of judgment that I felt were never going to be replaced by machines.
Developments in pre-attentive processing were important to me because they supported my intuition that labeling and organizing information according to conscious categories had to be subordinated to perceptual figure-ground relationships between operationally relevant data and the data set in general. I decided at this time that I would not try to gradually evolve conventions of data pictorialism, i.e. pie charts and bar charts. Instead I decided to go directly to the strength of computers and the human visual cortex by displaying large amounts of data carefully organized to depict decision-critical aspects of these sets without summary methods. It would require thorough understanding of how figure ground visual relations should be mapped from decision making criteria.
Based on the results of this research and work, I designed a prototype visualization system on a microcomputer. It presented hundreds of data points in highly designed arrays that allowed a non-specialist the ability to easily separate the foreground data points from the background of the entire data set while keeping everything in view, and hence in perspective. The Vice President of Operations of Valspar paint company grasped the idea in its entirety the first time he saw the demonstration. He said that one of the hardest aspects of his job was having to sign off on exception reports every day, (hundreds of gallons of paint ruined for one reason or another) and that with a complete perspective on the whole operation those exceptions would not weigh so heavily on him.
The foreground data points were defined by the context of the decision to be made. They could be extreme points, average points, incidence of change, or change in certain directions. By moving the cursor over the display, the operator could read specific label information, and by clicking down, contextual information such as statistics relating to the item in question, or the entire data set, could be obtained easily.
As I refined this prototype, I worked with real businesses and researchers to use their data in the context of their management or research interests. The University Center for Urban Research, several start up technology companies, Valspar Paint Corporation and National Rental Car were some of the groups that I worked with in this pursuit.
1987-88 I worked with the Minnesota State Department of Economic Development’s small business unit to develop a business plan and make contacts among potential partners in developing this system. I approached the director of Information Technology at the regional government that employed me full time, but he felt that the approach of visual pattern emphasis would be confusing to the managers at the county who were more linear and verbal in their approach to decision making. Through the State office I was introduced to the President of McGraw Hill, Inc. He saw my demonstration and flew me out to McGraw Hill corporate headquarters in New York to make a presentation to the Executive Board of the corporation. They gave unanimous consent to start a pilot project with one of the divisions of McGraw Hill. I was teamed up with the product development group at California Testing Bureau, which provided tests and test score services to half of the 16,000 school districts in the United States. After initial meetings and review, I was given the challenge of developing visualization products for four very difficult areas selected by the scientists and marketing people. This included ways to present student achievement against probable performance estimates, and presenting individual student's performance on standard tests against their class and their class against the school district performance. I returned a few months later and demonstrated the solution to these problems to the team’s satisfaction. We could not agree to terms for further pursuit of the development at that time, but Gordon Wainwright, the Director of new product development, encouraged me with the assertion that I was only 10 years ahead of my time. I also demonstrated the approach to Carl Adams, a professor at the Carlson School of Management at the U. He characterized my methods as “...being to bar charts and pie charts what the integrated circuit was to the vacuum tube.”
I contacted NASA’s Godard Space Science Data center as a result of a Wall Street Journal article I had read, and met Dr. Lloyd Treinish, the director. He was heavily involved in visualization methods, and as a result of our conversations he invited me to participate in NASA and the National Science Foundation’s first Scientific Visualization conference. It was held at Jet Propulsion Laboratories in Pasadena, in 1988. I attended this conference as an observer, but was invited to chair a workshop on multidimensional, multivariate data visualization methods at the ensuing conference to be held at Stanford University in 1990. In the course of developing the workshop, I contacted researchers and developers in major universities and corporate research centers around the world.
1990 In February of 1990 I chaired the Multidimensional/Multivariate Data Visualization workshop at the second NASA/NSF Scientific Visualization conference at Stanford University. We met over the course of three days, and had presentations from Bell Labs, the Santa Fe Institute, Columbia University, Los Alamos National Laboratory, the University of California at Davis, IBM, and several other groups at the lead edge of visualization of complex data. One of the attendees was the head of the Information Science department of the Naval Research Laboratory. He invited me to submit a paper on my work to a conference he was chairing for the IEEE in June, in San Francisco. He also invited me to propose a workshop at the conference that would follow on the Stanford work.
In June I attended and presented at the first annual IEEE Visualization conference in San Francisco, and my primary publication on this work was included in the proceedings of that conference. I was invited to join the steering committee of the conference and plan the following year’s conference, and to have another workshop in multivariate data visualization.
The data I used for my paper consisted of a merged data set drawing upon sensors in orbit around the earth, on the ground, and in solar orbit. It depicted 13 parameters of the earth’s magnetic field and solar activity for 20 days on an hourly basis in one screen.
1991-1992 I developed and chaired workshops and a tutorial on Multi Dimensional Visualization for the IEEE conferences, and worked for Lawrence Livermore Laboratory part time to develop visualizations of engineering design alternatives for the International Thermonuclear Energy Reactor - a consortium project involving Japanese, Soviet, European and American science institutions trying to develop a workable hot fusion reactor. My work with Livermore resulted in several joint authorships of progress papers presented to sessions of scientists on the ITER project, and ultimately inclusion in a book on advanced visualization methods. I was invited to join the faculty at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell to help develop a visualization center in the Computer Science department, but my lack of academic credentials prevented any development in that area.
2003 The market was ready for what I had done finally. I purchased a Pentium IV computer and a copy of the Microsoft Visual Basic .NET development system and wrote the basic routines of a third major revision of the program. The current version supports the browsing and manipulation of 120,000 data points simultaneously on one high resolution screen, and has a refined set of essential features derived from the various generations of the program. The program is designed to be both an exploration and presentation tool for executive decision makers, managers, and operations supervisors who need to examine performance and resource use over a large organization. It can be used for research in any field that needs to establish the status of events or operational entities against the context of expectations, known performance parameters, or internal categories derived from arbitrary boundary and set inclusion definitions.
I have done the research and development completely independently on this program, in my spare time, on my own equipment and software. In 1988 a principal analyst in the Operations and Planning Department of Hennepin County saw the prototype and tried to create an accommodation for me at work, but the resulting contract was not acceptable. The Information Technology department passed on the project in 1988. In 2003 I again sought out managers in IT who might be interested in visualization, and they referred me to data warehousing and data mining groups who were not apparently active at the moment.
I am exploring the feasibility of patenting aspects of the process. It has gained recognition in small but prestigious circles both as a pioneering effort and a signature method of approaching the problem of seeing both the forest and the trees, as it were, in complex system operations and management.
Purpose of the program (“DataProspect”)
The purpose of the program is to help make operational decisions about large, complex systems, or to find relations of interest in complex data sets. The method used is to objectify the operational components or research objects and paint these objects in a meaningful color and shape on the screen, where they can be browsed and interrogated by the operator.
The definitive method involves normalizing the display of the operations as an array of objects, and allowing the operator to use sliders to assign the most visible colors and shapes to the most critical components. This can be done before loading the display through a table of critical thresholds, or it can be adjusted on the fly, just as a lens can be focused during use.
The lens is a good metaphor for the program. It looks at the entire system, but brings the critical components into the foreground and into clear focus.
The program is different from other visualization methods in its ability to keep the critical features within a complex data set in a simple foreground/background relation to all the data, without simplifying to the point of misrepresentation, or requiring an inordinate amount of specialization from the operator.
System issues
The current version is written in Microsoft’s .NET technology, which lends itself well to integration with enterprise databases (SQL), office automation standards such as Excel and Access, and Internet Information Server services. It could easily be written in Java2 to reside in a Linux, Unix, Windows, or OSX environment through browser technology.
The core technology is a mapping, manipulation, and interrogation technology that can reside on top of conventional or customized data management technologies.
State of the Current Development phase
Currently the program can access, manipulate and interrogate 45 variables on 3000+ cases on a single 1600 x 1200 pixel display. The demo data is census data from each of the United States counties. Once the data is in and parsed, system response on a Pentium IV 2.4 ghz machine is virtually instantaneous…that is, there is so little lag that it doesn’t interfere with the operator’s concentration.
While the primary technology is resolved (defined as subject to patent), there are some enhancements that need finishing. The strength of the program is that it has one conduit to existing enterprise technology: it only needs to be fed an accurate table through any channel, and it does not rely on any proprietary or brand of enterprise support for its function. If it is to be integrated into a browser delivery, this would change.
Specifically, a proof of concept for any given enterprise could be arranged within a short time, ranging from a few days to a few weeks depending upon the number of defining displays that needed to be construed and the state of existing data.
The system parses and organizes itself according to the dimensions and size of the data it is given, and then presents the results in a consistent and intuitive manner. This means that the tool can be managed by one person in an enterprise, and will scale up to any level.
Make an offer.
Contact me at Jeff@zeitguide.org if you are able and willing to lift this promising preliminary work to the level of supporting results and a full time staff.
Jeff Beddow
Minneapolis. June, 2004
1970-71 As research Assistant to Dr. John Modell at the University of Minnesota, I worked to extract interesting patterns out of 1880-1890 U.S. Census data from Rhode Island. I imagined a computer program that would make literal visual patterns out of the tens of thousands of numbers, to aid interpretation.
1978-80 I experimented with variations on quilt patterns as a visual design exercise, and thought that the visual syntax and grammar of textile patterns might support the visualization of complex data.
1980-81 Took courses in computer science and programming to acquire necessary skills to create the program which would implement the idea of visualizing complex data sets through visual patterns.
1982-1984 Developed and published a graphics program with special pattern manipulation features, contacted ARPA and other potential sponsors for a visualization program.
1984-1987 Interviewed business owners, executives and managers in a broad range of fields including manufacturing, car rental, data-base management, retail store management, government economic forecasting, etc. to refine specifications of a program. I also intensified my research into the physiology of perception, the psychology of learning and interpreting visual information, and other fields relating to this project.
As a matter of interest, this was a time in the field of perceptual physiology, cognitive science, and the psychology of learning when the emphasis was splitting dramatically from conscious, purposeful thinking skills to machine learning on the one hand and pre-attentive cognition on the other. Triesman's and Livingston’s research represents leading work in the latter field.
Pre-attentive visual processing
Pre-attentive cognition is the processing of visual information such as color, contrast, shape, etc in order to navigate, avoid danger, recognize friends, and perform other complex perceptual/judgment skills without involving fully conscious mechanisms. It occurs almost instantaneously, without comparison, recollection, or decoding of encoded value schemes. It is known to occur at a much higher speed than linear thinking and analysis, since it involves the parallel processing of thousands of bits of visual information in coherent spatial patterns. Pre-attentive processing supports human judgment in all natural environments, but it has been forced out of most modern decision contexts. The careful application of the principles of pre-attentive design will simplify the task of extracting meaningful information from a mass of data in any circumstance.
I was swimming against the current of interest in artificial intelligence which dominated many fields of computer research at the time. I was committed to the idea of not only keeping the human “in the loop” as it was described, but maximizing the essential human aspects of judgment that I felt were never going to be replaced by machines.
Developments in pre-attentive processing were important to me because they supported my intuition that labeling and organizing information according to conscious categories had to be subordinated to perceptual figure-ground relationships between operationally relevant data and the data set in general. I decided at this time that I would not try to gradually evolve conventions of data pictorialism, i.e. pie charts and bar charts. Instead I decided to go directly to the strength of computers and the human visual cortex by displaying large amounts of data carefully organized to depict decision-critical aspects of these sets without summary methods. It would require thorough understanding of how figure ground visual relations should be mapped from decision making criteria.
Based on the results of this research and work, I designed a prototype visualization system on a microcomputer. It presented hundreds of data points in highly designed arrays that allowed a non-specialist the ability to easily separate the foreground data points from the background of the entire data set while keeping everything in view, and hence in perspective. The Vice President of Operations of Valspar paint company grasped the idea in its entirety the first time he saw the demonstration. He said that one of the hardest aspects of his job was having to sign off on exception reports every day, (hundreds of gallons of paint ruined for one reason or another) and that with a complete perspective on the whole operation those exceptions would not weigh so heavily on him.
The foreground data points were defined by the context of the decision to be made. They could be extreme points, average points, incidence of change, or change in certain directions. By moving the cursor over the display, the operator could read specific label information, and by clicking down, contextual information such as statistics relating to the item in question, or the entire data set, could be obtained easily.
As I refined this prototype, I worked with real businesses and researchers to use their data in the context of their management or research interests. The University Center for Urban Research, several start up technology companies, Valspar Paint Corporation and National Rental Car were some of the groups that I worked with in this pursuit.
1987-88 I worked with the Minnesota State Department of Economic Development’s small business unit to develop a business plan and make contacts among potential partners in developing this system. I approached the director of Information Technology at the regional government that employed me full time, but he felt that the approach of visual pattern emphasis would be confusing to the managers at the county who were more linear and verbal in their approach to decision making. Through the State office I was introduced to the President of McGraw Hill, Inc. He saw my demonstration and flew me out to McGraw Hill corporate headquarters in New York to make a presentation to the Executive Board of the corporation. They gave unanimous consent to start a pilot project with one of the divisions of McGraw Hill. I was teamed up with the product development group at California Testing Bureau, which provided tests and test score services to half of the 16,000 school districts in the United States. After initial meetings and review, I was given the challenge of developing visualization products for four very difficult areas selected by the scientists and marketing people. This included ways to present student achievement against probable performance estimates, and presenting individual student's performance on standard tests against their class and their class against the school district performance. I returned a few months later and demonstrated the solution to these problems to the team’s satisfaction. We could not agree to terms for further pursuit of the development at that time, but Gordon Wainwright, the Director of new product development, encouraged me with the assertion that I was only 10 years ahead of my time. I also demonstrated the approach to Carl Adams, a professor at the Carlson School of Management at the U. He characterized my methods as “...being to bar charts and pie charts what the integrated circuit was to the vacuum tube.”
I contacted NASA’s Godard Space Science Data center as a result of a Wall Street Journal article I had read, and met Dr. Lloyd Treinish, the director. He was heavily involved in visualization methods, and as a result of our conversations he invited me to participate in NASA and the National Science Foundation’s first Scientific Visualization conference. It was held at Jet Propulsion Laboratories in Pasadena, in 1988. I attended this conference as an observer, but was invited to chair a workshop on multidimensional, multivariate data visualization methods at the ensuing conference to be held at Stanford University in 1990. In the course of developing the workshop, I contacted researchers and developers in major universities and corporate research centers around the world.
1990 In February of 1990 I chaired the Multidimensional/Multivariate Data Visualization workshop at the second NASA/NSF Scientific Visualization conference at Stanford University. We met over the course of three days, and had presentations from Bell Labs, the Santa Fe Institute, Columbia University, Los Alamos National Laboratory, the University of California at Davis, IBM, and several other groups at the lead edge of visualization of complex data. One of the attendees was the head of the Information Science department of the Naval Research Laboratory. He invited me to submit a paper on my work to a conference he was chairing for the IEEE in June, in San Francisco. He also invited me to propose a workshop at the conference that would follow on the Stanford work.
In June I attended and presented at the first annual IEEE Visualization conference in San Francisco, and my primary publication on this work was included in the proceedings of that conference. I was invited to join the steering committee of the conference and plan the following year’s conference, and to have another workshop in multivariate data visualization.
The data I used for my paper consisted of a merged data set drawing upon sensors in orbit around the earth, on the ground, and in solar orbit. It depicted 13 parameters of the earth’s magnetic field and solar activity for 20 days on an hourly basis in one screen.
1991-1992 I developed and chaired workshops and a tutorial on Multi Dimensional Visualization for the IEEE conferences, and worked for Lawrence Livermore Laboratory part time to develop visualizations of engineering design alternatives for the International Thermonuclear Energy Reactor - a consortium project involving Japanese, Soviet, European and American science institutions trying to develop a workable hot fusion reactor. My work with Livermore resulted in several joint authorships of progress papers presented to sessions of scientists on the ITER project, and ultimately inclusion in a book on advanced visualization methods. I was invited to join the faculty at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell to help develop a visualization center in the Computer Science department, but my lack of academic credentials prevented any development in that area.
2003 The market was ready for what I had done finally. I purchased a Pentium IV computer and a copy of the Microsoft Visual Basic .NET development system and wrote the basic routines of a third major revision of the program. The current version supports the browsing and manipulation of 120,000 data points simultaneously on one high resolution screen, and has a refined set of essential features derived from the various generations of the program. The program is designed to be both an exploration and presentation tool for executive decision makers, managers, and operations supervisors who need to examine performance and resource use over a large organization. It can be used for research in any field that needs to establish the status of events or operational entities against the context of expectations, known performance parameters, or internal categories derived from arbitrary boundary and set inclusion definitions.
I have done the research and development completely independently on this program, in my spare time, on my own equipment and software. In 1988 a principal analyst in the Operations and Planning Department of Hennepin County saw the prototype and tried to create an accommodation for me at work, but the resulting contract was not acceptable. The Information Technology department passed on the project in 1988. In 2003 I again sought out managers in IT who might be interested in visualization, and they referred me to data warehousing and data mining groups who were not apparently active at the moment.
I am exploring the feasibility of patenting aspects of the process. It has gained recognition in small but prestigious circles both as a pioneering effort and a signature method of approaching the problem of seeing both the forest and the trees, as it were, in complex system operations and management.
Purpose of the program (“DataProspect”)
The purpose of the program is to help make operational decisions about large, complex systems, or to find relations of interest in complex data sets. The method used is to objectify the operational components or research objects and paint these objects in a meaningful color and shape on the screen, where they can be browsed and interrogated by the operator.
The definitive method involves normalizing the display of the operations as an array of objects, and allowing the operator to use sliders to assign the most visible colors and shapes to the most critical components. This can be done before loading the display through a table of critical thresholds, or it can be adjusted on the fly, just as a lens can be focused during use.
The lens is a good metaphor for the program. It looks at the entire system, but brings the critical components into the foreground and into clear focus.
The program is different from other visualization methods in its ability to keep the critical features within a complex data set in a simple foreground/background relation to all the data, without simplifying to the point of misrepresentation, or requiring an inordinate amount of specialization from the operator.
System issues
The current version is written in Microsoft’s .NET technology, which lends itself well to integration with enterprise databases (SQL), office automation standards such as Excel and Access, and Internet Information Server services. It could easily be written in Java2 to reside in a Linux, Unix, Windows, or OSX environment through browser technology.
The core technology is a mapping, manipulation, and interrogation technology that can reside on top of conventional or customized data management technologies.
State of the Current Development phase
Currently the program can access, manipulate and interrogate 45 variables on 3000+ cases on a single 1600 x 1200 pixel display. The demo data is census data from each of the United States counties. Once the data is in and parsed, system response on a Pentium IV 2.4 ghz machine is virtually instantaneous…that is, there is so little lag that it doesn’t interfere with the operator’s concentration.
While the primary technology is resolved (defined as subject to patent), there are some enhancements that need finishing. The strength of the program is that it has one conduit to existing enterprise technology: it only needs to be fed an accurate table through any channel, and it does not rely on any proprietary or brand of enterprise support for its function. If it is to be integrated into a browser delivery, this would change.
Specifically, a proof of concept for any given enterprise could be arranged within a short time, ranging from a few days to a few weeks depending upon the number of defining displays that needed to be construed and the state of existing data.
The system parses and organizes itself according to the dimensions and size of the data it is given, and then presents the results in a consistent and intuitive manner. This means that the tool can be managed by one person in an enterprise, and will scale up to any level.
Make an offer.
Contact me at Jeff@zeitguide.org if you are able and willing to lift this promising preliminary work to the level of supporting results and a full time staff.
6.7.04
Midi Me
Over the last month I have been putting together a sound studio in our basement. It follows the basic pattern of midi controllers, synthesizers, sequencer, beatbox/drum machine, effects box, mixer and amp/speakers. Of course I have a pentium IV computer in the middle of the set up, which is capable of performing any or all of the functions the separate hardware provides, in addition to the hard drive recording capability.
Having no formal musical training, my initial interest has been making sound collages which include both musical and "noise" components. As I work and develop pieces, I realize I have a certain approach and sense of composition which requires that I develop more mastery over the musical end of things.
One of the happiest purchases I made was a Roland MC-505 beatbox. It contains the song elements of some 270 patterns drawn from a whole syllabus of modern dance music styles, with a little jazz and latin thrown in. I can switch it on and fill the basement with trance, hip hop, industrial, ambient, or hard rock loops, and move through a rhythmic sound scape with ease.
The key feature of my system is that all the hardware and software communicates with each other, and can be coordinated, through a technology called MIDI. It is a primitive but effective networking protocol for musical instruments which was devised in the early 80s by a consortium of electronic instrument manufacturers, and it hasn't evolved too much since then.
In essence, it allows someone like me with limited time and deep personal interest the ability to turn into a "one man band" with advanced electronic support and create compositions that satisfy some deep itch in my psyche.
Having no formal musical training, my initial interest has been making sound collages which include both musical and "noise" components. As I work and develop pieces, I realize I have a certain approach and sense of composition which requires that I develop more mastery over the musical end of things.
One of the happiest purchases I made was a Roland MC-505 beatbox. It contains the song elements of some 270 patterns drawn from a whole syllabus of modern dance music styles, with a little jazz and latin thrown in. I can switch it on and fill the basement with trance, hip hop, industrial, ambient, or hard rock loops, and move through a rhythmic sound scape with ease.
The key feature of my system is that all the hardware and software communicates with each other, and can be coordinated, through a technology called MIDI. It is a primitive but effective networking protocol for musical instruments which was devised in the early 80s by a consortium of electronic instrument manufacturers, and it hasn't evolved too much since then.
In essence, it allows someone like me with limited time and deep personal interest the ability to turn into a "one man band" with advanced electronic support and create compositions that satisfy some deep itch in my psyche.
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