Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Songs of Thrushes


O thrush, your song is passing sweet
   But never a song that you have sung,
Is half so sweet as thrushes sang
   When my dear Love and I were young.

William Morris (1834–1896)

  I've drawn twice in this blog from a memoir I wrote about Helen and me after she died [1,2].  The memoir was meant for our children, its contents mostly family lore and photographs, not designed to be of much interest to anyone else.  Yet those two excerpts spurred enough response to show me that what I wrote has more general appeal.  I shouldn't have been surprised—much of the purpose of writing is to share thoughts and feelings with possible strangers, especially when the writing crosses between generations.  It re-assures the younger among us that they are not the first to feel as they do, that there truly is nothing new under the sun.

  So I'll dip once again into the memoir, this time into the chapter about Helen's and my courtship, which was prefaced by the verse above.  For those who know me now as an octogenarian, to read that I once was in the throes of love may challenge the imagination too far.  I had an advantage in reading William Morris' poem: it froze him in time for me as a young swain, not the aged writer he became.  Perhaps strangers who read this essay will likewise be able to see me in my thirties.

  I first saw Helen in 1963 while I was ringing a doorbell: not exactly her, but her partial, backlit image, mottled and ambered by an antique glass door pane.  It was like an Impressionist painting, soft-brushed and romantic.  The image is still with me, fifty years later; I can even now feel my heart skipping a beat.  She smiled as she opened the door.  Beautiful blue eyes, I thought.  Flashing smile.  We exchanged a few insignificant words, and I watched as she went down the stairs, on her way out from visiting my cousin, with whom I was to dine.  I’d rarely felt as engaged as this on a chance encounter.  I remember asking myself,  "Could this be the One?"   I was 33, no youngster, so I was amazed by my gushiness.

  I wheedled Helen's telephone number from my cousin, and soon dated her, anxious to know if my first impression was accurate.  It was.  She was lovely, vibrant, a little wacky.  She wore her hair rolled up behind her head in a French bun, severely accentuating the beautiful bone structure of her face.  Her nose had a funny twist in it, the result of a skiing accident, I later found out.  She smiled with her whole face, wide-mouthed, her eyes laughing too.

  As we exchanged information about each other, I thought It’s like we’re from different planets. Maybe opposites really do attract: magnetic north and south poles, electrons and protons.  I was from the megalopolis of New York City, she from a small town in Utah.  I was Jewish, she Mormon.  I was scheduled, organized to the point of rigidity, always—except perhaps after a few drinks—reserved and uncomfortable with small talk.  She was impetuous, unscheduled, people-oriented.  I was an engineer, mathematically analytic; she a psychologist, immersed in the understanding of emotions.  Mars and Venus.

  Many dates later, those differences spawned an inevitable first argument.  Never much bound by the clock, she kept me waiting for the better part of an hour as she prepared to go to dinner with me.  I, a devoté of Chronos, ran by the clock.  My annoyance showed— even if it hadn't, the psychologist in Helen would have sensed it.  The date was a disaster.  Helen, incensed by my unspoken animus, blew up at the end of it, throwing back at me the earrings I had given her some weeks before.  I was stunned by her vehemence.

  Weeks went by without a word between us.  When we did talk to explore our rift, Helen asked if I was afraid of anger.  In fact I was, as I was afraid of most emotions.  I had learned well from my family that spoken words take on a life of their own, never to be recalled, always hanging in the air as a ghostly reminder of the sometimes regretted emotion that launched them.  Helen's family, when they were angry, had at each other, then made up, the venomous words disappearing as if never spoken. 

  “Don’t you know that expressing anger, getting it out of you, is good?” Helen said.  “What’s worse: bottling anger up—leaving it to the other person to figure out if and why you’re angry—or expressing it so as to leave no doubt, and then working it out?  Who benefits from keeping feelings to yourself?”  My response was, “Who benefits from speaking hurtful words without first thinking about them and perhaps suppressing them?”  That interchange, I more and more understood as our relationship developed, characterized our different psyches.

  Given the polar extremes of our personalities, I agonized about whether to propose to Helen, trying—true to form—to be scientifically precise about my feelings.  On one side of the scales I placed the many ways in which she and I differed; on the other side I put my growing love for her.   In the balance, was a life-long commitment tenable? 

  In the end, rational analysis didn't matter at all.  One evening, after a romantic dinner, I looked into Helen's eyes and could see in them the question, "When are you going to ask me to marry you?"  Thrushes sang in my ears, and I blurted out my proposal over their song.

  I imagine that bookies would have given long odds against our marriage being successful, and certainly there were naysayers among our friends and families [2].  But sometimes, when strong magnetic north and south poles meet, they clamp together so tightly that they can't be pried apart.  And so it was as we melded during our 34-year marriage.  Again, always looking to literature for the right words, I can do no better than the Bard:

So we grew together,
Like to a double cherry, seeming parted,
But yet an union in partition.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream
  Act 3, Scene 2
          

Wednesday, April 17, 2013

To Lie or Not to Lie

  The text for this essay might well be a paraphrase of an old saw: "To lie is human."  None of us is lie-free; in fact we all frequently lie, for various reasons.  I  am not referring here to inadvertently stating errors of fact, or to the "lying" that bluffing poker players or magicians indulge in, but to purposeful misrepresentations to people who expect the truth.  Most often, these are "white lies," told to avoid embarrassing others or ourselves.  Yet the spectrum of lies is vast, a few points on which I have marked in this graphic:

The Lying Spectrum.

  Immanuel Kant posited that lying of any sort is always morally prohibited—one of his categorical imperatives—thus occupying the extreme left end of this spectrum.  For him, lying is never justified, even to save an innocent life.  I believe none of us joins Kant in that extreme.  Similarly, none of us always lies; that would at any rate be self-defeating, since if one were known as an inveterate liar, the truth would simply be the converse of whatever one said.

  (That reminds me of an old children's puzzle:  If you came to a fork in a road, one branch leading to a village of only liars and the other to a village of only truth-tellers, and there is a person at the fork who comes from an unknown one of these villages, what question would you ask to assure that you are told the way to the truth-tellers' village?  The answer appears at the end of this posting.)

  In between the extremes of the spectrum is a gradated set of deceptive behaviors.  Most blameless are the white lies, and this is where the dispute begins.  Sam Harris, in his Kindle single Lying, propounds the view that even "innocent" white lies are "the social equivalent of toxic waste," polluting  society to the detriment of all. 

  I previously tangled with another of Harris' immoderate positions in my posting The Self.  There I challenged his claim that free will does not exist, that at core we are automata controlled only by the gestalt of nature and nurture which has programmed us.  Of course, in the present context that would mean our decisions are beyond our autonomous command, so we really don't "choose" whether to lie or not.

  Harris devotes a good portion of his Lying tractate to the perplexing question of whether to tell a white lie.  How do you answer a woman who asks, "Do I look fat in this dress?" when in fact you think she does look fat in it, in fact think that she is fat?  Do you cancel attendance at a dinner party by falsely saying you have a migraine headache rather than by giving the real reason—that you simply couldn't stand another night out?  Do you encourage a friend to continue an activity that you are sure he is bad at? 

  Harris says that, in each of these cases, by telling a lie "… we incur all the problems of being less than straightforward in our dealings with other people.  Sincerity, authenticity, integrity, mutual understanding—these and other sources of moral wealth are destroyed the moment we deliberately misrepresent our beliefs, whether or not our lies are ever discovered. … By lying, we deny our friends access to reality—and their resulting ignorance often harms them in ways we did not anticipate.  Our friends may act on our falsehoods, or fail to solve problems that could only have been solved on the basis of good information."

  According to Harris, telling the woman that she might want to put on another dress, or actually lose weight, might be valuable information to be acted upon.  Simply asking if you can beg off the dinner party will at the very least allow the host to trust your excuses in other, more weighty circumstances.  Suggesting to your friend that he change activities might help him open up new worlds of opportunity that he had been blind to.  Moreover, tiny erosions of trust accumulated by even innocuous white lies add up to eventual underlying mistrust.  And there is the practical problem of what Harris calls "mental accounting": we have to keep track of what lies we have told to whom.  Telling the truth incurs no such penalty.

  So, while Harris steers clear of Kant's categorical imperative—he himself would lie to save an innocent person—he draws the line infinitesimally to the right of that place on the spectrum.  I have to disagree, even at the risk of losing the trust of those who read this posting.  We all, in our normal interactions with others, expect some dissemblings and prevarications, and these don't rise to the level of breeding distrust.  They are part of the minuet of sometimes-opaque social behavior we constantly dance, like the courtesy of holding a door open for someone we despise, or the frivolous exaggerations with which we embellish a good story.  We take these social artifices in our stride, discounting them in the course of our rational evaluation of people and situations.

  Each of us has an fuzzy line in the lying spectrum that we rarely cross—usually somewhere in the realm of white lies of various moment.  We venture beyond it only at the risk of pangs of conscience, disapprobation by friends and family, and sometimes severe societal penalties.

  Where do you draw your boundary?   Be careful!  I might not believe you.
________________________________________________________________________     
Answer to puzzle:  You can't ask "Which way to the village of truth-tellers?" for—not knowing whether your respondent will tell the truth or not—you will not know if the answer is correct.  Instead, ask "Which road will you take to go home?"  Either type of respondent will point the way to the truth-tellers' village.  This question has the element of self-reference that often leads to or resolves paradoxes of logic.  See my posting Gödel and God.

Wednesday, April 10, 2013

An Industrial Leave

  I wrote last week about the results of the three sabbatical leaves I took during my academic days.  An industrial leave had an even more profound impact.

  In 1968, a stranger came into my office at UC Berkeley.  He said that he and a partner were starting a company which had the possibility of a contract from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.  He had been referred to me by one of my academic colleagues as someone with technical knowledge that might help in the contract.  That was true, and I began consulting for the new organization, which was called Teknekron.

  HUD wanted to explore technologies with which the locations of vehicles in large fleets—buses, police cars and fire engines, taxis, delivery trucks—could be monitored in order to improve the efficiency of dispatching them.  (This was well before the Global Positioning System of satellites was conceived.)  One method could be radio multilateration, i.e., measuring location by comparing the times of arrival at dispersed listening posts of a radio signal from the vehicle.  Radio-signal propagation in urban areas was encompassed in theoretical research I had been doing for more than a decade.

  I proposed that, instead of actually constructing several particular multilateration systems and evaluating their relative performances, Teknekron should focus on measuring and modeling the characteristics of urban radio propagation itself.  Once we had a good model, it could be simulated on a computer, and various multilateration systems could be compared in simulo to determine which might be most successful.  I contended that computer simulation would be much less expensive and more comprehensive than physical trials of a number of "in the metal" systems.

  That approach was adopted, and I began designing an experiment that would lead to the urban-radio model.  It soon became clear that I was needed full-time to lead the experiment, so I took an industrial leave from Cal in 1969-70.  The experiment consisted of circulating through typical types of urban and suburban areas in an instrumented truck, and measuring, at a prescribed set of locations, the distortion of radio pulses transmitted from an elevated position.  Here's a much-younger me in the truck recording some of the data:

Taking data.

And here's a sample of what appeared on the oscilloscope in front of me:

The responses of the urban radio medium to
 narrow pulses at three frequencies (logarithmic scale).
   
  (Amusing aside:  The project went under a rubric that encapsulated its purpose, "Public Urban Locator Service" or PULSE, which was emblazoned on the side of the truck.  In the Berkeley of the late 1960s, we should have known better.  The constant appearance in the streets of a truck so-labeled, bristling with antennas, stoked an inevitable Berkeley paranoia: were we part of some nefarious project that was tracking innocent people?  We attracted much attention and some protest.)

  The waveforms from thousands of oscillograms like that above were laboriously manually digitized, yielding some 100,000 punched cards of data—the standard storage technology of the day.  The data were then analyzed and transformed into a statistical model of the urban radio medium.  When experiments using the model were run in simulo and the results compared to those of equivalent physical experiments reported in the literature, we were ecstatic at the superb agreement.  We had indeed successfully captured the urban radio medium in a computer!  I breathed a deep sigh of relief.

  Thus having eliminated the need to build actual multilateration systems for physical trials, we moved to the main task of the project: running simulated trials of such systems and calculating the location accuracies that could be expected with each.  The results gave us insight beyond all our expectations.  All told, it was perhaps the hardest year of work I had ever experienced, but well justified by the outcome.

  Teknekron went on to try to commercialize the most promising of the systems we had simulated, but was decades ahead of itself in terms of viable and inexpensive electronics.  Commercially practical multilateration of the type we simulated in 1970 had to await the late 1990s.  It is now a commonplace, employed by the cellphone industry to locate cellphones with excellent accuracy.  And the totally different GPS technology is of course also available; its users anywhere in the world can locate themselves with it.

  I went back to Cal much enriched professionally by my industrial leave.  The 100,000 punched cards were a trove of still-unexamined data, which led to several PhD theses under my supervision and a further-enhanced model of the urban radio medium.  That model was used in the design of the GSM cellular telephone system, now one of two worldwide standards. 

  On comparing the sabbatical leaves I described last week with my industrial leave, there is no contest.  While the sabbatical leaves might have been more relaxing, even more creative in terms of theoretical work, the practical work of the year at Teknekron was a new and immensely valuable departure for me, one that I couldn't have done at the university.  For engineers and scientists, I think that a revolving door between the university and industry—between academic research and its commercial application—is a vital cycle.  It should be used more, even during sabbatical years.

 I continued my involvement with Teknekron for another quarter century.  The ability to simultaneously live both inside and outside the University's walls was a great boon in my professional life.  But I leave that tale for another time.

Wednesday, April 3, 2013

The Sabbatical

  The academic sabbatical has hoary antecedents, steeped as it is in the antiquity of the Old Testament and even further back to practices in ancient Babylonia.  In Genesis, God rested on the seventh day, after six days of creation.  The Fourth Commandment says, "Six days shalt thou labor, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the sabbath … In it thou shalt not do any work."  Israelite slaves were to be released in the seventh year after six years of bondage.  Land was to lie fallow in the seventh year, without tilling, planting or harvesting.  After seven seven-year cycles—the Jubilee year—land was to be returned to its original owner.

  Yet the idea that a paid seventh year of sabbatical leave should be made available to academics is relatively modern, dating only to the mid-19th century with the rise of the research university.  It arose from the realization that, in order to do research in the libraries of the world or to conduct field expeditions and experiments, and to maintain a scholarly intercourse with peers internationally, such an accommodation had to be made—else the academic would need independent means to properly pursue his studies.  The paid year off was therefore meant to give professors without such means undisrupted time to keep abreast of their fields, usually by traveling, so as to bring new vitality to their research and the university's curriculum.  This was indeed a rest from normal activity, but not a rest from work itself.

  The 19th-century rationale still has relevance, although I suspect it is no longer altogether compelling in the Internet age, when most of the knowledge of the world is but a click away, as is video teleconferencing with colleagues.  Even for my pre-Internet self, although I did what I felt was very good research while on the three sabbaticals I took, I am not sure that I could not have achieved like results without them.  They did, however, satisfy a signal purpose: new perspective, changed from the insularity I sometimes felt within the walls of my own university, which could be numbing.  At any rate, I did not complain about the perk.

  My first sabbatical, in 1966-67, was enabled by a Guggenheim Fellowship, which supplemented my sabbatical salary just enough to survive in all-too-expensive Paris.  I was associated there with the Faculté des Sciences at the University of Paris, located in the Jussieu neighborhood on the Left Bank, where I interacted fruitfully with its famed faculty of probability and statistics.  I gained a deeper and more rigorous understanding of their fields, preparatory to writing a book on the mathematical theory of communication, which was based in part on what I learned.  Engineering had traditionally taken many liberties with mathematical formalisms, and the 1960s was a time when many engineering professors, including myself, tried to correct that. 

  My wife, our one-year-old son David and I lived in the western suburb of Saint Cloud, just across the Seine from the Bois de Boulogne.  One of my favorite activities, even during the frigid Parisian winter, was taking a train from the beautiful old center of Saint Cloud to the Gare du Nord in Paris, then walking across the city to Jussieu, stopping half way for a pastry and a steaming expresso.

  My French was, I thought, moderately passable; but it was deficient enough so that when I bravely tried to give, in Franglais, the first of a series of lectures on some of my research results, a student gracefully interrupted to let me know that they all understood English.  It was one of many gentle putdowns I suffered as I stuttered my way through the French language that year.  Perhaps that sobering experience made me decide on Anglophone locations for my next two sabbaticals. 

  In 1974, I spent a one-semester sabbatical in Hawaii, where I went to immerse myself in the theory and protocols of the ALOHAnet digital-data radio network, at the time being implemented within and among the Islands with the help of the Electrical Engineering Department at the University of Hawaii.  Its groundbreaking technology inspired the now-dominant Ethernet, which was invented a bit later.  No freezing walks to work here!  After my first foray onto the campus in Honolulu to give a lecture, wearing a lightweight suit, I reverted to the Hawaiian style of sandals, shorts and multicolor shirts.

  The enervating climate of Hawaii was something of its own problem, though.  We had rented a lovely apartment directly on Kahala Beach, just to the east of Diamond Head.  I went to the university just one or two mornings a week.  On the other mornings, I tried to concentrate in the apartment on my research, while Helen (with David, almost nine, and our daughter Abby, almost three) went to the beach.  It was very hard to keep at it in that languorous weather, and I soon found myself joining them earlier and earlier in the day.  I never understood how anyone got any work done in Hawaii.

  My final sabbatical was in London in 1983.  David, in his last year of high school, was an exchange student just outside of London, and Abby was in sixth grade in a lovely private school a stone's throw from our apartment in Lowndes Square, near the intersection of Knightsbridge and Sloane Street.  I was associated with the Imperial College of the University of London, although I spent much of my working time in our apartment—I was hot on the trail of applying my recent theoretical research to the emerging cellphone technology.

  I have written before of my love for the Brits and things British, and this was no exception, even in small ways.  When I went to the university as part of my fellowship with the British Science and Engineering Research Council, I walked a favored path that ran through the lovely old mews that only London can boast of; and I was captivated by the still-ongoing tradition of a faculty-student tea every afternoon.  Not exactly a high tea, but a daily opportunity to exchange ideas in an informal setting.

  Despite my latter-day ambivalence about the necessity of sabbaticals in achieving the substance of academic objectives, I have none about their ability to revitalize the mind.  The sabbaticals I took indeed sent me back to Berkeley invigorated, full of fresh ideas, and bearing with me the results of my new research.  God set a good example when he rested from his chores after six days; I'm sure that He too felt refreshed for doing so, and perhaps gained new ideas on how to oversee his new creation.