Remember John Lennon. 1940-1980.

Technology Review’s bloggers are working overtime. Now Simson Garfinkel has blogged on a site called “Ed-Heads” that features three virtual activities for all you guys and gals out there: Simple Machines, Weather, and Knee Surgery. Yes, knee surgery. There’s a virtual reception area, a virtual surgery, and a lovely set of full color photographs that are guaranteed to weaken your, um, knees. Luckily, the teacher’s guide warns that “some of the photographs and procedures in this knee surgery activity are rather graphic.” Ra-ther!

Just the thing for that restive third-grader.

Further learning occurs. On the Ed-Head home page, I see that humans “share 98.4% of their DNA with a chimp” (I knew that already), but we also share 70% of our DNA with a slug. Now I understand what Mondays are all about.

Can you imagine, all over the blogosphere, thousands of bloggers blogging on the fact that the online Merriam-Webster dictionary calls “blog” the most looked-up word for 2004?

That’s a meta-moment to savor. Or not.

Here’s the news story at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The Technology Review blog also covers the story, and points out that “online web site” in the M-W definition is redundant.

And now I know what “peloton” means, too. Not bad for a Monday morning.

There’s a fascinating article by Atul Gawande in a recent New Yorker about differences in how well doctors and hospitals treat their patients: complication rates, death rates, quality-of-life outcomes. Gawande writes:

In ordinary hernia operations, the chances of recurrence are one in ten for surgeons at the unhappy end of the spectrum, one in twenty for those in the middle majority, and under one in five hundred for a handful. A Scottish study of patients with treatable colon cancer found that the ten-year survival rate ranged from a high of sixty-three per cent to a low of twenty per cent, depending on the surgeon. For heartbypass patients, even at hospitals with a good volume of experience, risk-adjusted death rates in New York vary from five per cent to under one per cent—and only a very few hospitals are down near the one-per-cent mortality rate.

It is distressing for doctors to have to acknowledge the bell curve. It belies the promise that we make to patients who become seriously ill: that they can count on the medical system to give them their very best chance at life. It also contradicts the belief nearly all of us have that we are doing our job as well as it can be done. But evidence of the bell curve is starting to trickle out, to doctors and patients alike, and we are only beginning to find out what happens when it does.

Gawande goes on to discuss a cystic fibrosis specialist named Warren Warwick, who for forty years has directed the Minnesota Cystic Fibrosis Center at Fairview-University Children’s Hospital, in Minneapolis. This CF Center is considered the best in the U.S. What has taken it to the right edge of the bell curve? What accounts for its excellence? Science? Yes, but other centers also pay close attention to the latest research and methodologies. A focus on patient care? Certainly, but that’s not unique to the Minnesota CF Center, either. Other hospitals work very hard to provide top-quality care, both in and out of the hospital. No, it turns out that the distinguishing characteristic of the Minnesota CF Center is its director, Warren Warwick. And what makes Warwick so special? Gawande describes it as a “combination of focus, aggressiveness, and inventiveness”:

We are used to thinking that a doctor’s ability depends mainly on science and skill. The lesson from Minneapolis is that these may be the easiest parts of care. Even doctors with great knowledge and technical skill can have mediocre results; more nebulous factors like aggressiveness and consistency and ingenuity can matter enormously.

Let’s imagine for a moment that we’re discussing excellence in education, or in artistic performance, or in any human endeavor. Can the lessons Gawande learned in his analysis of health care outcomes be generalized to apply to other fields? I believe they can. In my own field of English literary studies, however, the sheer agency implied by words like “aggressiveness and consistency and ingenuity” is not very much in fashion these days. We study cultures, not persons, and the idea of a “great life” is sometimes greeted with disdain–if not outright derision.

Yet Gawande’s article teaches another lesson: that teams and collaboration are crucial, but true excellence requires personality. Without personhood, without decisive interventions by people with “focus, aggressiveness, and inventiveness,” excellence is unattainable. Worse yet, the idea of excellence may vanish, or be denied.

Near the end of his article, Gawande cites a Cincinnati CF center that has made considerable strides forward by adopting many of Warwick’s methods. “Yet you have to wonder,” Gawande says, “whether it is possible to replicate people like Warwick, with their intense drive and constant experimenting.” I don’t know about replication, but I do believe that education has as one of its primary goals the nurture and encouragement of those personal qualities. We teachers present information. We foster learning communities. We facilitate the learner’s progress through a course of study. Yet we should also coach our students in the focus, aggressiveness, and inventiveness that can lead to true greatness–a greatness that ultimately relies on personhood, and on personal agency.

Turns out many color laser printers lay down a pattern of colored dots that identifies the printer by serial number on every sheet it prints. The idea is to stop counterfeiters, a good idea on the face of it. The problem is that printer manufacturers are not required to tell consumers that their machines do this.

Apparently this practice has been going on for decades.

Undaunted by the truly overwhelming lack of demand for this information, I’m blogging the song list from the last Blue Window gig at the Colonial Tavern (Saturday, November 13 for all you Blue Window archivists). We played the tunes pretty much in this order, with a few rearrangings as (cough) circumstances warranted. No, we were not protected by chicken wire.

Moondance, Angel from Montgomery, Blue Bayou, Summertime, If I Fell, Dry River, Can’t You See, Cocaine, Strange Brew, Some Kind of Wonderful, Tore Down, Love Is Alive, Poor Poor Pitiful Me, Everybody Got Hammered, Everybody Gets the Blues, Ain’t Too Proud to Beg, Can’t Get Enough, China Grove, Walking on Sunshine, What I Like About You/R.O.C.K in the USA (medley), You’re No Good/Evil Ways (hesaid shesaid medley :-)), I Saw Her Standing There, Mustang Sally, Running Down a Dream, Taking Care of Business, All Shook Up, Badfinger Medley (No Matter What / Baby Blue), Key to the Highway, Black Magic Woman, I’m a Believer, Loving Touching Squeezing, Hanky Panky, Get Back, Bad Case of Loving You, Brown-Eyed Girl (nearly, almost, not quite, thanks for trying), Peaceful Waking.

Next gig is scheduled for February 5, back at the Colonial Tavern. Maybe I’ll be able to talk the band into working up a Big Star song by then. Hope springs eternal.

What if you were the guy who had the idea for optical storage of digital audio and video, and who made the idea a reality by recording a television show on an optical disc in the mid-1970s … and you couldn’t even take a sip from the gravy train that rolled through once the rest of the world caught up to your boldly imagined innovation?

Sometimes I’ll get on a bit of an information-wants-to-be-free kick. In fact, I’m having a great time experimenting with open-source php scripts at work right now. But just when I start to get big utopian thoughts, I read an article like this one, and I think that I must never, ever lose sight of basic issues of intellectual property and fair compensation.

Hollywood director James Cameron admits he made Titanic because he wanted an excuse–and funding–to take a submersible down to the wreck itself. He builds on this story to make the case for sending humans on a Mars mission. Why not just send machines? In his Wired article, Cameron writes:

Exploration is not a luxury. It defines us as a civilization. It directly or indirectly benefits every member of society. It yields an inspirational dividend whose impact on our self-image, confidence, and economic and geopolitical stature is immeasurable.

The idea of an “inspirational dividend” doesn’t have much traction with David Appell, though, who thinks Cameron is being merely “romantic” with no real argument beyond “exploration is worthy for its own sake.”

I’ll admit that Cameron doesn’t assemble a compelling logical argument, which for me would have something to do with the value of shared human experience. Nevertheless, so long as the argument is about data, not inspiration or meaning or all those other warm, fuzzy, crucial words, the case for human exploration will seem weak. Ah, but the heart has reasons of which reason knows not.

I’d sign up for the trip in a heartbeat.

I read Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead over the Thanksgiving holiday. I don’t often buy a contemporary novel solely on the strength of positive reviews, but Michael Dirda’s review (blogged on below) stuck in my mind for days and I found myself yearning to read the book for myself.

The holiday was an apt time for this book. My family and I were visiting Grandma and Grandpa in Harrisonburg, joined by my sister-in-law and her new husband and her stepdaughter, and amid much eating and hilarity and shopping and loving talk I found several hours in which to read the book. The surroundings and family warmth made the book even more resonant than it would have been anyway, so much so that at times I had to put the book down for fear I would return to the festivities with my face streaked with tears. They might have been tears of happiness or sadness–the book has plenty of both–or they might have been tears of wonder, which are the hardest tears to explain. In any event, I didn’t feel it proper to intrude my own reading ecstasies on everyone else at the table (or elsewhere), though I did read a couple of passages aloud as I went along, and there was a fine moment when I got to a passage on predestination in this household of staunch Presbyterians (sister-in-law and father-in-law are both Presby ministers, don’t you know). Mostly, though, I read the words and pondered them in my heart.

This really is a remarkable book. It reminds me of Sir Thomas Browne, of Flannery O’Connor, of George Bernanos (whose Diary of a Country Priest is mentioned in the book), even of George Herbert, a strong presence throughout whom Ames specifically discusses at one point.

But this is not a derivative book by any means. The voice of John Ames, the book’s protagonist, is unique, and compelling. There is equal power in his introspection and his narratives, a difficult trick that Robinson pulls off brilliantly. She also does something else brilliantly: she manages to convey the multiple levels of Ames’s self-reading while at the same time she suggests patterns apparently invisible to Ames that the reader may sense without feeling at all superior to the protagonist. Dramatic irony of this sort is rare, and is usually reserved for tragedy. This book, however, is not a tragedy.

I can only echo the praise others have given this book. The writing is limpid, wonderful. It’s a novel of ideas, a great character study, a great book about America. It’s something like a psalm, finally. One of the many things I’m grateful for this Thanksgiving is that I had the opportunity to read this book–and that Marilynne Robinson had the courage and skill with which to write it. Thank you.

Interesting article in today’s Technology Review on “big science” collaboration. The National Science Foundation is funding a “Science of Collaboratories” project. And what is a collaboratory? Gary Olson at the University of Michigan defines it this way:

an organizational entity that spans distance, supports rich and recurring human interaction oriented to a common research area, and provides access to data sources, artifacts and tools required to accomplish research tasks.

It’s easy to see that this definition can work for all sorts of collaboration in higher education and elsewhere, which is why the article’s seven principles for successful collaboration are useful for anyone trying to use online learning effectively. The eighth principle is also very important, though it isn’t given its own number and is mentioned only at the very end: “social glue” among participants is vital, and one of the best ways to get “glued together” is by face-to-face interaction.

There’s that blend again.