Reed's Ruminations: A Blog by Dan Reed

Doctoral Comedy: Which Way Is The Door?

One of the great lessons of sociology is the power of shared experience, whether positive or negative, to create deep and lasting human bonds. From the horror and misery of war and abduction (Stockholm syndrome) through the fun and excitement of athletic camaraderie and competition to the caffeine and adrenalin fueled pressure of a "ship or die" venture-funded startup, shared experiences can define one's life. This even extends to pursuing a Ph.D., where the long, sometimes strange and unpredictable journey can create its own ethos and breed a certain gallows humor.

This is why I am enjoying the great comic strip, Piled Higher and Deeper, also known as PhDComics, drawn by Jorge Cham. As an aside, the phrase "piled higher and deeper," of course, is an old and hoary wordplay on the progression from B.S. through "more of the same" (M.S.) to – all together now – "piled higher and deeper." (Ph.D.) If you ever spent Saturday night working in the lab, and every graduate student has, you understand the stable cleaning analogy.

The first time I saw the PhDComics strip, I knew that Jorge must have been a Ph.D. student, because only someone who has experienced graduate school and faculty life, particularly in a technical discipline, could have that much insight regarding the joy and misery of graduate student life and the trials and foibles of faculty members. I spent thirty years in that world, and I recognize myself, my friends and my colleagues in the strip. (No, not thirty as a graduate student, though it certainly seemed so at the time!) Perhaps the following anecdotes will trigger some memories of your own.

The Netherworld

As a graduate student, you live in a netherworld, not quite a student nor a faculty member either. The undergraduate students see you as faculty, especially if you are a teaching assistant, and the faculty members see you as a student, especially if you have not yet crossed the River Styx, otherwise known as the Ph.D. qualifying examination. From the university's bureaucratic perspective, you are a chameleon, classified as either a student (see parking privileges and health benefits) or staff (see student discounts and athletic tickets) when convenient.

One of my Illinois Ph.D. students came to our weekly group meeting absolutely furious. He'd driven to the Digital Computer Laboratory (DCL) about 3 A.M. that morning to check on the progress of some research simulations. When he returned to his car about 15 minutes later, he found a ticket on his windshield. My student was absolutely adamant that it was unfair and that he would not pay the fine. It looked like a mano-a-mano smackdown – irate graduate student versus implacable bureaucracy.

I was sympathetic; after all, Urbana at 3 A.M. has a surfeit of parking places. I asked him on which of the streets near DCL he'd parked his car. He asked why it mattered. I patiently explained that some of the streets were within the jurisdiction of the university police, whereas others were within the jurisdiction of the city of Urbana. The city – and by extension, the U.S. government – might have the power to fine him, jail him or even deport him, but the university wielded a far more important power over his fate and future. It could prevent him from graduating by simply encumbering his records for failure to pay a parking ticket. Because he had parked on a university street, he had no choice; he wanted a Ph.D.; he paid the fine. Final score: university 1; graduate student 0.

The Weekly Meetings

If you have been a graduate student or a faculty member, you remember the weekly meetings with your advisor (advisees) and the group meetings and seminars. Each brings certain perspectives, and they become conjoined over time, whether it be foraging for free seminar food, trying to impress people by asking questions or simply staying awake and trying to look interested.

One my first Ph.D. students, a truly fantastic researcher who is now a very successful computer science faculty member himself, once asked me at a professional conference if there had ever been intervals where I had wondered if he were doing anything useful in the lab. After confessing that it had crossed my mind a time or two, he laughed and said he understood, as he now wondered the same about his own students.

How Many Years?

At some point during my graduate career at Purdue, I was having dinner with the parents of a friend of mine. Her mother asked when I expected to graduate, and I said, "In a year or so, I think." She replied, "That's what you said last year." In fact, I had said the same thing the year before, and both times I had been hoping it was true. Of course, she didn't know that asking a graduate student when they will finish their thesis is a bit like asking someone about their weight or their income. As the PhDComics strip notes, it's best not discussed in polite company.

In that spirit, I also distinctly remember leaving a Friday night, midnight campus showing of The Deer Hunter, thinking the odds were high that my tombstone would list me as an A.B.D. graduate student with the epitaph, "Felled by one last thesis revision." That one sentence captures so many elements of the graduate experience. First, I left the movie alone and on foot, because I had no date and no car. Second, I was attending a midnight $1 movie because I living on rather miniscule graduate fellowship stipend with little discretionary money. (See my previous comment about having no date and no car.) Third, it was The Deer Hunter, a great movie but a truly depressing moral meditation on war and death, perhaps not the best choice for a midnight screening, especially for a graduate student. Without hesitation, I walked directly back to my office in the Purdue Mathematical Sciences building and worked all night on my dissertation. I had to graduate, and I did!

Crazy Thesis Topics

My dissertation was on a wild and crazy idea – building parallel computers using large numbers of microprocessors and programming them via message passing. Like most dissertations, nothing came of it, because we all recognized the importance of purpose-built parallel systems that balanced computation, communication and I/O and that were programmed using new languages and tools that focused on human productivity. A long-term, industry-government-academic partnership in the early 1990s produced the balanced, highly productive, near-exascale systems we use today for breakthrough computational science and national defense.

What's that you say? You mean we are using commodity microprocessors and message passing for parallel computing? Bummer! I must have confused this reality with a parallel earth in a many worlds quantum interpretation.

Shared Experiences

Like most humor, the rueful elements of truth are what make PhDComics fun. I formed some of my most intense, lifelong friendships in graduate school, both with my fellow students and with faculty, especially my thesis advisor. (Yes, we called him Herb, and he was a great guy) The highs and lows, the parties, the late nights in the lab, the uncertainty and the satisfaction – they are what make research in academia a special place.

PhDComics captures all of this. It's a smash hit in the academic community, with appearances in Science, Nature and a host of other places. Here's to Jorge and continued success. (Hint, buy the books and read the strip.)

Twitter Is Three

Yesterday (March 21, 2009), Twitter, the microblogging service, turned three years old. I've been twittering for two years now, watching the evolution of social networking and the nature of the participants. (Yeah, I had a Blackberry back in 2000-2001, long mobile email became an international addiction, but then I'm a gadget geek.) Twitter is now growing exponentially according to Nielsen Wire, with unique visitors up over 1000 percent since one year ago.

Twitter would not have been possible in the U.S. a decade ago, as we lacked the ubiquitous smartphones and broadband coverage needed for mobile access. However, if one recalls the popularity of the short message service (SMS) in Europe and Asia, Twitter could easily have appeared as a value-added service long ago. After all, GSM has been around since the 1980s. It remains an open question, however, if Twitter can be a profitable business.

Extended Friends

Like its big brother, Facebook, Twitter has gone mainstream, with attributions and social discussions in the popular press. Indeed, some have argued that Twitter is the new Facebook, favored by the digerati. All of this reminds me of Yogi Berra's famous remark about a restaurant, "Nobody goes there anymore; it's too crowded."

In both the Facebook and Twitter worlds, it does seem crowded. I am now being "friended" by some people I barely know, and by others I do not know at all. (I am sure many of you have had the same experience.) I am not complaining; rather I have realized that friend in this context is a very elastic thing, ranging from long-time personal friend to an extended network of business acquaintances. Who would have thought one would need information visualization tools like Friend Wheel to track one's "friends"?

Interacting Networks

Like web search engines and the social insights one can glean from tracking queries (e.g., Google's tracking of flu trends), analyzing and visualizing tweets can illuminate social dynamics and behavior. Watching Twittervision, Twitter StreamGraphs or TwittEarth can at times be fascinating but can also overwhelm one with the minutia of daily life. (A trip to the gas station is not an event of historic proportions.) Such is the nature of a global social dynamic.

I also find it interesting that these extended social networking sites are themselves increasingly interconnected. For example, my Twitter updates appear on my blog and my Facebook page. Conversely, excerpts and links from my blog posts appear on Twitter via TwitterFeed and are also replicated on Facebook, LinkedIn and FriendFeed. In between, there's microblogging (a tumblelog) with Tumblr – hpcdan.tumblr.com).

Perhaps in the limiting case, all of my social networks can simply chat about me among themselves. They are probably more interesting than I am.

Blogging at CACM Also

When I was a graduate student at Purdue, just after the dinosaurs died and the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event was recent news, I was an avid reader of the Communications of the ACM. CACM, pronounced Kak-M, was an ACM research journal that contained great articles that spanned the breadth of computing. As the ACM attempted to deliver greater value to the majority of its members, who were practitioners, rather than researchers, CACM morphed into a practice-oriented publication. Those of us in research gradually turned to other publication venues and rarely spent much time reading CACM. All of that has now changed.

My friend, Moshe Vardi (Rice University), is the new editor-in-chief of CACM, with a mission and mandate to revamp CACM and make it more relevant, more readable and more relevant – both to practitioners and to researchers. The print version of the new CACM has been well received, and ACM is about to launch a new CACM web site this month (March 2009).

Several of us will be blogging for the new CACM web site, offering perspectives on science policy, research, computing technology and societal implications. Look for me at the CACM web site soon, under Blog@CACM. (And yes, I will continue to blog on Reed's Ruminations at www.hpcdan.org as well.)

The Power of Plum Jelly

The dilapidated two story house marked the corner of two single lane roads in the Arkansas hills, and it was old and weather-beaten long before I was born. The windows stared sullenly at the sky, covered only by cheap roller shades that had never seen better days. A rusted tin roof (iron actually, but we called it tin), covered the house, hammered by the summer rains.

The old man who sat on the house's little porch was as tired and gray as the ramshackle house. He was divorced, a small scandal in the churchgoing town, and like the tin roof, he had been hammered by life's insistent pains. No family visited and no children called; he had neither telephone nor car. He looked forward to nothing. He was a patient man, though, and he sat quietly and without complaint, waiting to die.

I knew all this from observation, as I rode my bicycle along the dirt roads around his house and mine; I'd also heard the furtive whispers of divorce when my parents and grandparents talked about him. Everyone called him "Ole Man" Smith. It was such a common moniker that only later did I realize that "Ole Man" was not his first name.

The Canning Frenzy

Summer was the time for gardening and canning, for my family, like those around us, depended on home-canned food to see us through the winter. Because we were poor, we canned green beans, poke greens, peaches and corn, and we either froze juice or made jelly from blackberries, strawberries and plums. It was a frenzy of picking, cleaning, processing and storing. It was my mother's summer duty, and it was my job to help when and where I could.

During the few weeks the plums ripened, we picked them from our trees and from the ground. They were small, no bigger than the end of my thumb, struggling to grow in the rocky clay. The first time I saw plums in a city grocery store, I was stunned; they were nearly the size of tennis balls! I shook my head in wonderment at how hard my mom had worked to make jelly from those small plums. But I digress …

After pulling the stems and cutting away the bad spots with a knife, the plums are washed and then squeezed with a colander to produce the juice. After adding some sugar and pectin, the mixture was ready to pour into the Mason or Ball jars and place in the pressure cooker.

It was hot and tiring summer work. As my grandfather would say, it was "warm, powerful warm." When it's 95F in the shade, it's 110F in the kitchen, with steam escaping the pressure cooker and hot jars cooling on the windowsill. I've seen those jars explode, flinging hot peaches and syrup across room. It's not a pretty sight.

In the middle of all this, my mother looked out the kitchen window at Ole Man Smith sitting on his porch in front of the old house across the road. Without ado, she announced, "We're making plum jelly for him." And so we did.

The Gift of Jelly

A week later, I marched up to Ole Man Smith's front porch. I was holding my box of cargo carefully in both hands. I wasn't very big, it was heavy, and I knew I'd best not drop it and break the jars. "My momma asked me to bring this to you," I said. "She made it for you," I added.

I watched a panoply of expressions play across his face. First, there was the fear that I was selling plum jelly door-to-door. He fumbled with this wallet, pulling a few dog-eared one dollar bills from inside. I assured him that my momma had told me two things, very clearly. First, that I was to deliver this box of jelly jars to him. Second, and even more importantly, under no circumstances was I to accept any money from him in return.

"It's a gift from her," I added unnecessarily.

Fear was replaced by surprise that my momma had thought of him. Gratitude and appreciation soon followed. There was enough jelly to last a man all winter, perhaps even two winters.

"I reckon this will go real good with some biscuits," he said.

As he picked up the box, he turned and said, "Tell your momma, I'm much obliged." Then he did something I'd never seen him do before – he smiled.

The Lesson Learned

I walked home feeling all warm inside, knowing that even as the delivery boy I'd done a good thing. That one box of plum jelly taught me more about the power of unexpected kindness than a hundred Sunday school lessons. It really was more blessed to give than to receive.

I realized much later that she sent me as the delivery boy to save her and the old man the embarrassment of a gift offered and a gift gratefully accepted. Though she never said so, I suspect it was also so that I might be a part of the gift.

As we face difficult economic times, with people losing jobs and houses, seeing hopes dashed and dreams deferred, it's important to remember the power of simple kindness. Support your neighbor, do a good deed, help a stranger. Even the small things matter, sometimes they matter most of all.

Together, we can make a difference, and we will each be better for it. The plum jelly taught me that.

 

The (Scientific) Good News

I was ten years old when I saw the light – the scientific light. For me, it was a Road to Damascus experience, catalyzed by a single event. My grade school teacher instructed each of the students to select a single, thin volume from the science encyclopedia and begin reading quietly at his or her desk. In retrospect, I realize it was probably the desperate act of an overwhelmed teacher who simply wanted a bit of quiet time. For me, though, it was a transformative revelation, a portal on a world of rationality, cause and effect and experiment-driven understanding.

For all those nagging questions, there was a systematic, repeatable mechanism to obtain and verify answers. The world could make sense, and the unknown was knowable. There were other people like me, and I could dream of being one of them – a scientist! It was thrilling and wondrous, and I knew without a shadow of a doubt that I had found the passion of my life.

The Universal Passion

Over the past 40+ years, that passion has led me to extraordinary and unexpected places. Yet across all that diversity, I have observed a universal behavioral constant, one that transcends national borders, cultures and languages. Scientists and scientific thinking are the same everywhere. They see the world through the same eyes and value the same things, a common approach to problem solving and reasoning. Above all, though, they share the passion and the curiosity, the unrelenting desire to know, to understand.

What drives us? It's not tenure; it's not publication; it's not research funding. Those are artifacts. It's not even fame, fortune or glory, though a few scientists seek those too. Rather, it's the desire to know, to understand, to add a small piece to the varied mosaic that is our limited but expanding human knowledge of this vast and varied universe. Depending on your assessment of the Fermi Paradox, perhaps it's to be the first sentient being in this brane to understand a small bit of its workings. If knowledge is your passion, that is reward enough.

Childlike Curiosity

Soon after I had completed my Ph.D., I read Peter Medawar's great book, Advice to a Young Scientist, and resonated with his insightful words:

I am often asked, "What made you become scientist?" But I can't stand far enough away from myself to give a really satisfactory answer, for I cannot distinctly remember a time when I did not think that a scientist was the most exciting possible thing to be.

I am no behavioral psychologist, but I suspect that all children are born with the insatiable curiosity that sustains scientific curiosity. All too often, though, I fear that our educational system punishes curiosity and rewards conformity. Only a small fraction remains sufficiently iconoclastic and self-confident to resist, asking those seemingly annoying questions that defy authority and drive discovery.

Why? It's a simple but profound question.

"Daddy, why is the sky blue?" It's Raleigh scattering, of course!

"Mommy, why does is it cold in winter?" It's axial tilt of the Earth! (Sadly, a stunning fraction of North American college graduates believe it's because the Earth is closer to the sun during the summer.)

"Daddy, why are insects not as big as elephants?" It's about surface area, volume and energy, as Haldane explained in his delightful essay, On Being the Right Size. (Ignore the politics at the end.)

The answers to simple questions often expose deep truths. Encourage and preserve the curiosity of children. Share the wonder; share the passion; share the good news. Scientists and children – they are more alike than different.