Douglas Fisher

I hiked the Mall today – got off the Metro at Foggy Bottom, walked through the southern edge of GW University, past the State Department, to the Lincoln Memorial, the Vietnam and Korean War Memorials, then the WW II Memorial, and on to the National Galleries. I thought about friends along the way. One of them, Van Carpenter, died during the Summer of 1972. He was 15. Van was not a close friend, but the first of many to precede me. He had gone along as a guest on the Kelly family vacation, as I recall, to Mexico. Van and John Kelly, also our age, had taken a car out – the Kelly’s were big off-roaders. John and Van struck an electrical power pole, they were barefoot, the power line had fallen onto the car, and when they stepped out on the driver and passenger sides, each holding the body of the car, they were electrocuted.

I bought my first sports coat, slacks, tie, etc with my mother at the family run department store on Glendora Ave – main street in our town, for Van’s funeral. I remember the salesman running suggestions by my mom and I.

I don’t remember the funeral itself – I just have vague impressions. In fact, I have only one rock solid memory of Van’s actual person. He and I were on the 9th grade track team of Sandburg Junior High School – the B team, and we ran the 1320 (feet) or ¾ mile – 3 ¼ mile laps. During the last home race with cross town rival Goddard, about half way through the last lap, with Van ahead of me and a Goddard guy in the lead, I heard Coach (Victor) Hurd (aka “Victor Mature” aka “Give-me-20-Fisher”) yell from across the field, at the finish line, “GOOOOooooo Fisherrrr!!!”. At the last turn, I kicked, and I passed Van, but he responded and he was in my peripheral vision the rest of the race, and we both passed the Goddard guy. I won by a hair that day, Van was second. It’s certainly a good feeling. But sometime after that race, and as I recall, after Van died, my mother talked with Van’s mother (in fact, I think that they were sitting in the stands together during the race), Van’s mother said that Van told her “If I couldn’t win, then I’m glad Doug did”. I remember taking this as an expression of personal liking rather than as a generic gladness that a teammate had won, and I recall being mildly surprised by it. Anyways, that felt good too.

Van’s mother also told my mom that Van had not gone to see Love Story, a 1970 movie of love and loss, with the family because he was afraid that he would cry (and presumably someone might see him?). He would have been 13, maybe 14. Boy, do I understand that. Still, I recall being surprised by his sensitivity and his honesty. Van might have been one of my first lessons on not knowing what was in someone’s heart, though I can’t say that I was conscious of it.

Several years ago I looked for some record of Van on the Web and couldn’t find him. I can’t find him today. I found the “Goddard guy”, later a high school classmate, just now, quite easily.

Van Carpenter of Glendora, California (CA)

I just got back from Copenhagen, where I participated in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) conference on Information and Communication Technology (ICT), Climate Change and the Environment. Last year I had been the only US government representative, and that had been a little scary, somewhat disappointing, and very cool – when they called on me for questions and comments they called on “United States” and before opening my mouth I reflected on what I was about to say This year there were representatives from the State and Commerce Departments, and my (big) boss and I from NSF. I’m not revealing any secrets here – last year’s and this year’s are on the Web (http://en.itst.dk/the-governments-it-and-telecommunications-policy/green-it/conference-on-icts-the-environment-and-climate-change) — more on this later and elsewhere.

I took the redeye from Dulles to Copenhagen late Monday afternoon, arriving Tuesday morning Copenhagen time. I was on Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) and I like it – every seat its own little screen with on demand video and music, a salmon dinner with not-quite-spaetzle pasta and lima beans (!?) to die for, power outlets for laptops, and stuff I’m forgetting.

I took the train from Copenhagen airport to downtown, stowed my big backpack in a locker, only keeping my government laptop around my shoulder for safekeeping. Last year I happened upon the National Gallery of Art just before having to return, and wanted to see it especially this trip, but in no rush, and in fact exhausted but with really no option but to stay awake for many more hours, so I walked.

Thus far in my experience there has been no singular global “Wow” image about Copenhagen – there has been nothing analogous to crowning a hill on a streetcar in San Francisco (Wow!), coming out of the tunnel overlooking Pittsburgh (Wow!), looking across Barcelona to Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia (Wow!) or vice versa from one of the Cathedral’s towers (http://www.greatbuildings.com/buildings/Sagrada_Familia.html), or gazing on the Chicago skyline from the Lake Michigan shore (Wow!). What I notice first about Copenhagen are bicycles – they are everywhere – Copenhagen is a commuter city, but very different from LA, which was my childhood territory. The parks, and I’ve only touched a few, are among the more local ‘wow’s that I’ve experienced — I walked through two on my way to the National Gallery, Orstedsparken and Botanisk Have, then King’s Gardens afterwards. At Orstedsparken I came across a statue that struck me personally, as I think it would have struck many of my friends right now – an angel watching over a man who is not conscious of it, but he is being watched over nonetheless. The angel’s face is almost impossible to see in the shadows, and I was tempted to use the flash, which generally I think is much overused, but like the statues of Gandhi and Saint Jerome on Embassy Row in Washington, I think that the artistic vision is that the faces be hidden in shadow and you only see the detail to the extent that you look closely, and even then, you can’t see enough.

Whereas the Washington National Gallery’s West and East Buildings separate classic and modern art, the Danish National Gallery seems to have no such segregation – modern and classic art are side by side, organized by other themes. I was able to get a couple of shots illustrating the juxtaposition. In addition, many of its walls are packed with paintings, an organization principle that elicits a ‘wow’ but at the expense of seeing many of the details, at least from casual inspection.

After a full morning, I took the train down to Helsingor, a beach town where the conference was held, did some brief walking around, talked to the tourist center, then a public bus to my hotel, a spartan place a couple of miles inland. I really wanted to sleep, but there was a conference reception that I thought I should attend for professional reasons, I wanted to stay up as long as I could for a better adjustment to the time zone, and frankly I felt isolated and knew connecting would help, and it did help.

The conference, in a nutshell, was focused on using information and communication technology (ICT) to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions due to humankind, and most notably what governments should do about promoting and supporting these efforts. There is great optimism that much can be done through virtualization (e.g., telework and conferencing with Web-based computer tools instead of the barbaric practice of flying cross country – yes, I recognize the irony , smart embedded systems (e.g., smart cars, smart buildings), which save energy through a large variety of computer-controlled mechanisms, and intelligent decision-making and planning systems that combine climate, economic and other social models. There is a lot of pushback though in implementing so much of this – for example, there are innumerable organizations that require that you keep your computer running 24/7 for reasons of “pushing” software and security upgrades, but my gosh, fixes to this should be 20 years old by now and the stupidity of designing such an energy-inefficient system is stunning — it offends the engineer in me. I could go on and on with other forms of pushback and lack of awareness, and frankly, among other reactions, our failure to solve even simple, gross technological inefficiencies like the 24/7 computer-on policy has given me a certain sympathy for the disfunction that seems apparent in those trying to solve the planet’s truly hard problems. I expect to be writing more on the topic of the conference. Generally, there is a lot that computer scientists and engineers can offer, both in terms of the products that they produce and in the ways that they think – my (big) boss Jeannette Wing has termed the latter “computational thinking”.

It would have been fun having Pat with me to share the simple excitements and anticipations of a plane ride, train ride, castles, gardens, museums, and I hope that for next year as we are a good travel team, but next year I might be participating over the Web! So many decisions coming up, and even the “easy” ones can give me angst.

Back in the day of my initial computer programming classes we used punch cards (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card). One card held one line of computer code, so that a 100-line program, which is a small program, required a deck 100 cards.

To prepare and run my program required I get in a line for the next available key punch machine — I typed my program out on a keyboard and coded holes were punched into cards. I might have to wait 30 minutes for a free machine on the night before an assignment was due, then taking another 15-30 minutes to punch my cards. When I was done, I went to another line, with a 5-10 min wait, and ran my deck through the mainframe-computer’s card reader — it flipped through the card deck like a card shark flips through playing cards, reading the holes in the cards as they sped by. After this, my program waited in the computer’s internal queue until its turn came, about 20 minutes, and the computer “ran” (aka executed) my program, printing out the results *IF* my program “worked” (but, sigh even then the results or OUTPUT was often wrong, a result of semantic or “runtime” errors), or the “line” printer (a massive thing that printed on large rolls of paper) would print out my program, flagging syntax errors that had prevented my program from running at all. If this all seems like a drag, it wasn’t really — the night before an assignment was due was a party — computer science was probably the most social major on campus. More recently than back-in-the-day, personal laptops have come to dominate and students often work in their dorm rooms (sigh), but I hope that computer science education is as social as it once was, albeit in different forms.

The simple physical operations that I had to perform to correct and run my program and get the results back was about (45min+5min+20min =) 70 minutes on a busy night!! Before I got back in that line for the key punch machine, I rolled out my printout and studied it for at least 30-60 minutes, maybe longer, maybe much longer — if I found the bugs that appeared to be the problem, I didn’t stop there, but studied the entire program looking for more, because there surely were more bugs and its usually the case that the “real bug” is NOT in the vicinity of its manifestation. No professor or textbook berated me to take a global view of the code, to go beyond the immediate symptoms and look for causes — it was the time bottleneck, the 70 minute response time, that encouraged, even demanded extensive thought on my part. In writing even a several-hundred line program, I actually ran the program only a handful of times.

Since back-in-the-day, programming development environments have gotten much better and computer response times have decreased drastically. A student can make a change to a program, hit “run”, and have the results of the run back before they’ve finished blinking, at least for the programs of complexity that novice-to-intermediate students will run (in contrast, while in grad school and not that long ago as a faculty member, I wrote and ran programs that might take a week).

But lesser response times (i.e., faster) and friendlier programming environments are not all good news — not for novice programmers trying to become expert anyways, though they might think otherwise. Unfortunately, it seems that the decrease in response time is accompanied by a decrease in thought time. The removal of a time bottleneck encourages a local change, hit run to see what happens, change, run, change, run, change, run … anyways, this is my experience as an instructor. A student might (try to) run the program a hundred times using this knee-jerk debugging strategy, and because the strategy focuses on local changes, not benefiting from reorganizations that stem from a global view, the code is far less elegant and more brittle.

Among the experienced programmer, fast response is a godsend, but its a bane to the novice programmer in training, whether the student knows it or not, and its a bane to society as well if these students become professional programmers.

I want to know whether this correlation between computer response time and programmer think time is really true, particularly among novices. And I’m very concerned with what analog correlations exist with other technologies and the influence of such correlations with respect to human sustainability.

When I have the time, so wonderful to think about (having time), I’ll be contemplating bottlenecks, how they promote the long view, the global view, particularly as they relate to computing and sustainability. I like the idea of bottlenecks that actively teach and reason with you, even as they slow you down — another note.

BTW — one of the greats in CS, Edsger Dijkstra, went so far as to suggest that the new CS programmer shouldn’t be able to access a computer for a year, so I recall. You ought to be able to write correct code for even complicated tasks without getting feedback from a computer at all — amazing, but I believe it.

WAY back in the day, when I was a college senior, I was a peer co-advisor for the computer science (CS) major at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). My partner’s name was also Doug – he was a great guy, a wise-ass gamer type, who complemented my lower-key inner-nerd well. Before subjecting our peers to our advice, UCI put us (and co-advisors of all majors) through mass orientation and training. There was one exercise where each pair of same-major co-advisors was put sitting down, back to back – one person in each pair was handed a strange geometric object, with many faces, different composite shapes on each face, and the other partner was given a sketch pad and pencil. The pair’s task was to transfer understanding of the object from one partner to the other, through verbal exchange, so that the partner with the pad could answer pre-specified questions, but these questions were unknown a priori to either co-advisor.

The CS team was the only team to complete the task successfully – all correct answers – I don’t think that others were even close!! Yes, I felt good about that and still do , but beyond pumping up my ego (and it did), it started me thinking about what was special about my chosen field of computer science – what kind of thinking and communication, even values, did CS promote that were somewhat unique?

As CEers, we (Doug and Doug) were trained to communicate with the world’s stupidest entity capable of response – we were trained to program computers, and that training gave us a sense of when assumptions were problematic, to spell things out, to reflect on what we said, to recognize where there was ambiguity and seek to disambiguate, and like lessons on communication. The peer-advisor training task described above was made for us, and as we were told afterward, this was a task to illustrate how easy miscommunication was. I had read ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’ a few years before as a freshman at UC Santa Cruz, and I naturally thought that there was a Zen of Computer Programming.

CS was and is a rich source of metaphor – I took its strange and beautiful theoretical abstractions, like the Pumping Lemma, which I’ve written about before, as bare-bone illustrations of life lessons. But the concrete activity of computer programming was rich in metaphor as well. One lesson I internalized from programming is that my thinking is almost always incomplete and/or wrong, if only in the small. When I program a computer I’ll only start writing code when I think that I have a sufficient understanding of the problem and the solution, but even so I’ll produce a sequence of programs that are incorrect in some way, until ideally, I reach the last one in the sequence, which I hope is (entirely) ‘correct’. Any experienced programmer knows though that this ideal of perfect code is never achieved for complex programs.  Despite the complexity of the computer programs I’ve written or participated as part of a team in writing, their complexity is trivial compared to the complexity of the world’s real challenges, where there is no doubt that my knowledge is always incomplete – my knee jerk reaction to a fix, in the real world or when programming, is pitifully myopic. I’ll save for another day my thoughts on this shortsightedness, and how it has worsened, even in the limited context of programming, and even in the face (because?) of more powerful technology.

A cousin to my-thinking-is-always-imperfect, again learned from programming, is to strive to see something for what it is, not (prematurely) what I would have it be. I can’t tell you how many times I have looked at computer code I’ve written and missed, over and over again, a bug, because I was projecting what I thought the code “should” be doing rather than what the code actually instructed that the computer do. I’ve had students look at their code for hours trying to debug a program, show the code to someone else, who then spots problems almost immediately – a fresh set of eyes is so important sometimes, and in principle they need not be someone else’s eyes, but often I’m just in a rut and can’t find my way out alone.

Clearly I have the goal of taking the code to an ideal state, but it can’t happen until I see the code for what it actually is. This lesson and generalization from code to other built entities is something I knew as an undergraduate, but it was many years and with much help from others, who sometimes bore sledgehammers , that I internalized this as a lesson about self – seeing who and what I really was as a prerequisite to productive change. Some of these helpers became dear friends.

I’m not sure whether this account seems manufactured — its not — I saw and see grand life lessons, stripped bare but recognizable, in computer programming and computer science generally — recognizing these lessons excited me back in the day and still does. 

Each spring embassies open their doors to local tourists (http://dc.about.com/od/specialevents/a/PassportDC.htm). Pat had gone two weeks ago to embassies from everywhere but Europe, and this past Saturday the EU opened up in a program that’s called ‘Shortcut to Europe’ (http://www.europe-in-dc.com/ ) . This time I pulled myself from work and remembrance; we took the Orange Line to Metro Center, caught the Red Line to DuPont Circle, and headed up Massachusetts Avenue, aka Embassy Row, with no particular plan.

It was about Noon, and warm, when we started walking. We came across a statue of Gandhi almost immediately. The statue portrays Gandhi looking at the ground, considering his next steps, on a steady walk forward. I liked its placement at the base of Embassy Row, I expect as a reminder to the residents that there could be nobility in their pursuits.

We got in quickly to the Bulgarian, then Cypress, embassies, both being off the main drag, and these gave an idea of the general format, with national foods to sample in many cases, literature on country concerns and EU policies and programs, some informational film or live regional music, perhaps with dance, and embassy staff there to answer questions. Pat had a written program and was getting embassy stamps like many of the other visitors. Pat sampled wine at the Bulgarian Embassy and we both loved the cheese, albeit salty, at the Cypress Embassy.

When we got in line for the Greek embassy I may have let out an audible moan, because Pat assured me that I could walk around and take pictures while she waited. I must have matured over the years because my angst was minimal in any case, perhaps only residue of an emotional habit now greatly diminished, or perhaps it was her habit of proactively assuaging her formally adolescent spouse, now at almost 52, “a man full grown” as my Granma Carr would say, usually as a disparaging reference to a male who was not as emotionally grown up as she would have liked (as in “Imagine that, a man full grown!?”) – She was quite a gal, like a piece of hard cinnamon drop candy. I smiled at remarks from somewhere behind us “Do we really have to wait in this?” Yes my brother, life is difficult at times.

I’m sure that one reason for long lines in some cases was that many tourists had roots in the country – I certainly would have waited a very long time to get into the Scottish and Iroquois embassies, for example! Another reason was almost certainly the embassy’s food offerings, as leaked out by earlier visitors. The Greek Embassy probably benefited from both, because word on the street was that there was some superfine olive oil and cheeses inside. Whether this was true or not, I don’t know, because once inside, after about a 30 minute wait, we found that the main food line was horrendous, and the children doing traditional Greek dances for the waiting throngs wasn’t going to cut it for us. Fortunately, Pat has a very dominant sweet tooth, and here is the first tip – you can just walk past the main line, into the next room, and the dessert line is almost nil. It pays to look around before getting in line – one of life’s great lessons in the microcosm of the Greek Embassy on Shortcut-to-Europe day!

The Irish Embassy is across the street, with an even longer line than the one we’d just endured. Pat’s Irish, but not me (only a smidgeon), so I headed down the block to the Embassy of Luxembourg, and I’m so happy I did, because a third reason, and my primary one to see the embassies is architecture, design, and décor – and in this regard little Luxembourg had the previous embassies beat – simple, tasteful, light and not rearranged to accommodate food lines or entertainment. But beyond this, the Ambassador and his wife were there talking to visitors – they were somewhat formal, a bit nervous and on guard I think, and I only listened in as they spoke with others, but I appreciated them showing up. I snapped pictures and got back in plenty of time to join Pat in line for the Irish Embassy – soda bread, crackers, and cheese – yes, the long line at the Irish Embassy was all about roots. But one wonderful surprise as Pat and I stood in line is that Mark Dalhouse rolled by with his Maymester Vanderbilt class on citizenship – I lit up, briefly chatting with people from Nashville, from home.

I took Pat back to Luxembourg and she confirmed their good taste, before we trekked up Massachusetts in search of Finland, stumbling upon other embassies as we went. I was across the street from the Croatian Embassy, and I was struck by a statue in its front yard – a seated man in apparent despair, I thought, probably representing the inner angst that must be often part of diplomacy. I crossed the street to look closer, and the man, Saint Jerome, was pouring over a book in search of answers – that’s the way I read it anyways – it wasn’t an undirected search for knowledge sake but the search had a better defined goal. In any case, the statue resonated with me, affecting me more than even the statue of Gandhi.

When I was done, Pat was waiting at corner, up the road, having spotted another embassy off the beaten path – the Dutch Embassy – another short line – and the most beautiful and intimate of the embassies we saw that day, with access to the second floor living space of the Ambassador – the library, living room with family pictures, and formal dining room for receptions. This was the only embassy that we visited that day which disallowed photography – perhaps for reasons of security, but even if not, I could understand why when I got in – there would be little forward progress if picture taking was allowed. Again, no food and no entertainment, security personnel with ear phones, mikes, sun glasses, form-fitted suits, in each room, along with Embassy staff, but note to self — see the Dutch Embassy again, and take your notepad.

It might seem that we had done a lot, but we had a fair amount of hiking in front of us to reach the Finnish Embassy, which we never did see, but we saw all variety of embassies along a straight, grand stretch of Massachusetts Avenue – from the huge Japanese complex with residence and chancery offices side by side, the small and somewhat disheveled offices of the Indian Embassy that spoke to me of unpretentious industry, the tiny brick Embassy of the Marshall Islands, the new, plush Embassy of the Ivory Coast (but by a French name that’s a tongue twister), and so many others. We ended the day at the Danish Embassy, sidetracked off Massachusetts, away from Finland, because I was going to Copenhagen in two weeks and because of the promise of a Climate Change exhibit – Ireland and Denmark had the only displays on Climate Change – imagine that, an island and a country largely below sea level.

After Denmark, Pat and I hobbled back along the path that we’d come — exhausted. But refreshed soon by friends. Nonetheless, I haven’t been as sore as I was on Sunday in a very long time.

I used to be a passive believer in equal opportunity in science and engineering, particularly with respect to my cubbyhole of Computer Science; anyone who wanted to enter and excel in computing should be able to do so, I thought, but this isn’t enough. My change from passive believer in equal opportunity to activist for equal participation wasn’t motivated initially by a heartfelt impulse for equal rights in this arena, because I lacked the necessary heartfelt experience. Rather the impulsion towards activism was motivated by my concern with climate change of all things, and other societal and environmental declines for which I most cared. Today’s transformative technologies just won’t forgive societal myopia stemming from the exclusion of women and girls from science, engineering, and policy.

Many women are lost to science and engineering early, as girls — it has nothing to do with their brains, but because bias and misinformation still exists in both overt and subtle forms, in men and women, boys and girls. In the undergraduate computing courses that I teach, 1 or 2 women in 20 students is typical. You can read well-intended reports and listen to well-intended talks that cite the many jobs in these disciplines, and that these fields are not for nerds (only), that they can be fun and rewarding, and the like — all true and intended to improve diversity, but it is most important to say out loud that the health of these sciences and the whole of society depends on greater participation of women and girls. Computing, to stay with my favorite example, is changing our place in the natural world and in relation to each other in ways that we don’t understand. Computing can’t be simply compartmentalized from its broader impacts, nor can such compartmentalization be the case with any science. We need all kinds of people, including the eggheads we know and love, who dig deep into their specialized scientific niches, rarely coming up for air, but we also need those who can reach and synthesize across vast areas of science and society. Women can and do fill both these roles and more. If I could follow only one strategy to better address most every societal concern that I have, then given my position and limited reach in this world, it would be broadening participation in science and engineering to many more women.

I became a fan of “Act Like a Grrrl!” (http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/pages/Act-Like-a-GRRRL/87733713487) when I read:

“GRRRLs are strong, independent, and creative young women (age 12-17) with something to say! GRRRLs express their thoughts and feelings on the page and then take it to the stage. They listen to what other GRRRLs have to say, dream big, and take action together to change their world for the better!”

The last sentence should be all CAPS because I wish that everyone was this way. It’s about saying your beliefs and feelings aloud, and I like that too. The next time a girl says “I like math”, or “chemistry”, or “computer science”, or “mechanical engineering”, I hope to hear myself and GRRRLs say

“Right on, sister — high five! It can be a patriotic pursuit. It can be a noble and humanitarian pursuit. How can I help?!”

I’m not alone. You can do a search of women, girls, science, and engineering, or start by looking below:

http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=109939 (Back to School: Five Myths about Girls and Science)

http://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=114494 (Computer Science–A Growing Field That Needs a Few (More) Good Women)

http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=114398 (Radio Series on Women in Science Wins Gracie Award)

http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=ConWebDoc.10791 (Computing’s too important to be left to men)