Achievements, happiness and the passage of time

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A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about time as ‘a giant wheel rotating through cycles of creation and destruction leading, over aeons, to the birth and death of entire worlds’ [see ‘Aeonian cycles of creation and destruction’ on October 18th, 2023].  I had written previously about Aristotle’s view of time as the measurement of change and how Newton believed that time passes even when nothing changes [see ‘We inhabit time as fish live in water’ on July 24th, 2019].  I recently read ‘The Wall’, a beautiful and thought-provoking, post-apocalyptic novel by Marlen Haushofer, in which the narrator states ‘Time only seemed to be passing quickly.  I think time stands quite still and I move around in it, sometimes slowly and sometimes at a furious rate.’  This aligns with the fish-in-water concept of time rather than the giant revolving wheel.  I recently had a conversation with a colleague about our perception of time as we looked back on our lives which made us feel that time has sped past whereas at the time it appeared to be passing slowly.  Perhaps our familiarity with the past, a landscape through which we have travelled, foreshortens it or is that I might have less than a thousand weeks left [see ‘One just raced past and I have only about 1000 left’ on September 8th, 2021] .  Haushofer’s narrator also says, ‘I had achieved little that I had wanted, and everything I had achieved I had ceased to want’.  In my working life, I have some empathy with this statement, particularly the second part.  I have moved through time at a furious rate, striving towards accomplishments; but now that I have most of them, they seem relatively unimportant.  They are certainly not the key to happiness which can be found anywhere through supporting and valuing others [see ‘A view from the middle’ on March 22nd, 2023] as well as in concentration so intense, for instance though reading or writing, that you lose your sense of time leading to a deep sense of happiness and well-being [see ‘You can only go there in your head’ on May 11th, 2022].  I wrote this post on a Sunday afternoon after spending a couple of hours sitting in the warm October sunshine on the campus of the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign reading ‘Mr President’ by Miguel Angel Asturias – both the reading and writing have left me in a happy state of mind.

Source:

Marlen Haushofer, The Wall, Vintage Classics/Penguin Random House, 2022.

Do you think that you have a miserable job?

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Many years ago I attended the Center for Creative Leadership in Greensboro, North Carolina. There I was introduced to a series of books by Patrick Lencioni.  I use one of them, ‘The Five Dysfunctions of a Team‘, regularly as part of module that I teach on Science Leadership and Ethics which is in turn part of a Continuous Professional Development (CPD) programme [see ‘On being a leader‘ on October 13th, 2021].  I pulled the book off my shelf a few weeks ago in preparation for delivering the class and next to it was first one I read and enjoyed, called ‘The Three Signs of a Miserable Job: A Fable for Managers‘.  If you are only reading this post to find out if your job qualifies as miserable, then the three signs are anonymity (you see yourself as being invisible), irrelevance (your work does not matter to anyone, not even the boss) and immeasurement (you have no tangible means of assessing success or failure in your job).  The message of the book is that a manager has a responsibility to ensure none of their team suffers any of these basic signs of a miserable job.

Personale mappa mundi

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I wrote a few weeks ago about appreciating a good infographic [see ‘Inconvenient data about electricity generation‘ on October 11th, 2023].  I realised recently that I had enjoyed another one vacation without appreciating it as an infographic.  During our vacation, we stopped for a few days in Hereford and visited the cathedral where they have a map of the world made around 1300, known as the Hereford Mappa Mundi.  The map is roughly circular with a diameter of about 1.5 m and is drawn on vellum made from calf skin.  It shows the history, geography and destiny of humanity from the perspective of Christian Europe seven hundred years ago with 500 drawings depicting towns, plants, animals and Biblical events – so more of an infographic than a map though of course the word ‘infographic’ had not been invented when it was produced more than 700 years ago.   The perspective is unusual to the modern eye and was described to us by a curator as the view that a fly would have of the surface of an apple as it crawled around on it.  It is arranged using an O and T motif, in which the T is inside the O creating three sectors.  Jerusalem is at the centre with Asia above it, and Africa and Europe to the bottom right and left respectively.  The idea of a fly crawling around on an apple set me thinking about what my map of the world would like from the perspective of the regions I have explored at ground level.  Most of the oceans would be very small because I have crossed them at about 500 mph in an aircraft, except for the seas around Europe which I visited by ship in the Royal Navy.  Liverpool would replace Jerusalem at the centre and North America would replace Africa in the bottom right because I have never been to Africa but I spent several years in North America. Asia at the top would feature images of universities and conference venues in China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan squashed together because I have visited all of them several times but always by plane.  Europe would be shown in some detail with pictures of research laboratories though somewhat distorted due an emphasis on a few places that I have visited frequently when participating in research collaborations, such as Milan, Toulouse, Ulm and Zurich.  When we lived in the US, we made a number of road trips to both the east and west coasts as well as northwards into Canada, so North America would be shown in more detail than either Europe or Asia and would include family photographs.

Image: Philip Capper, Mappa Mundi (c.1290) Hereford Cathedral. CC BY 2.0.  https://www.flickr.com/photos/flissphil/1385520222

Opportunities lost in knowledge management using digital technology

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Decorative imageRegular readers of this blog will know that I occasionally feature publications from my research group.  The most recent was ‘Predicting release rates of hydrogen from stainless steel’ on September 13th, 2023 and before that ‘Label-free real-tracking of individual bacterium’ on January 25th 2023 and ‘A thermal emissions-based real-time monitoring system for in situ detection of cracks’ in ‘Seeing small changes is a big achievement’ on October 26th 2023.  The subject of these publications might seem a long way apart but they are linked by my interest in trying to measure events in the real-world and use the data to develop and validate high-fidelity digital models.  Recently, I have stretched my research interests still further through supervising a clutch of PhD students with a relatively new collaborator working in the social sciences.  Two of the students have had their first papers published by the ASME (American Society of Mechanical Engineers) and the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers).  Their papers are not directly connected but they both explore the use of published information to gain new insights on a topic.  In the first one [1], we have explored the similarities and differences between safety cases for three nuclear reactors: a pair of research reactors – one fission and one fusion reactor; and a commercial fission reactor.  We have developed a graphical representation of the safety features in the reactors and their relationships to the fundamental safety principles set out by the nuclear regulators. This has allowed us to gain a better understanding of the hazard profiles of fission and fusion reactors that could be used to create the safety case for a commercial fusion reactor.  Fundamentally, this paper is about exploiting existing knowledge and looking at it in a new way to gain fresh insights, which we did manually rather than automating the process using digital technology.  In the second paper [2], we have explored the extent to which digital technologies are being used to create, collate and curate knowledge during and beyond the life-cycle of an engineering product.  We found that these processes were happening but generally not in a holistic manner.  Consequently, opportunities were being lost through not deploying digital technology in knowledge management to undertake multiple roles simultaneously, e.g., acting as repositories, transactive memory systems (group-level knowledge sharing), communication spaces, boundary objects (contact points between multiple disciplines, systems or worlds) and non-human actors.  There are significant challenges, as well as competitive advantages and organisational value to be gained, in deploying digital technology in holistic approaches to knowledge management.  However, despite the rapid advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence [see ‘Update on position of AI on hype curve: it cannot dream’ on July 26th 2023] that will certainly accelerate and enhance knowledge management in a digital environment, a human is still required to realise the value of the knowledge and use it creatively.

References

  1. Nguyen, T., Patterson, E.A., Taylor, R.J., Tseng, Y.S. and Waldon, C., 2023. Comparative maps of safety features for fission and fusion reactors. Journal of Nuclear Engineering and Radiation Science, pp.1-24
  2. Yao, Y., Patterson, E.A. and Taylor, R.J., 2023. The Influence of Digital Technologies on Knowledge Management in Engineering: A Systematic Literature Review. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering.