Tag Archives: reading

Cognition is beautiful

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wp_20150725_031Today is the mid-point of the MOOC on Energy: Thermodynamics in Everyday Life that I am delivering both for our first-year undergraduate students at the University of Liverpool and anyone anywhere in the world who wants to sign up for free.  Not surprisingly, some MOOC learners have been struggling with some of the topics, which include statistical thermodynamics and require some elementary calculus.  A few learners have complained and implied that I should not be attempting to cover such challenging material, to which I have responded that my aim is to educate not to entertain.  Many more learners have made counter-comments that can be summarised by the words of writer and theologian, John Hull in his Notes on Blindness: ‘Cognition is beautiful.  It is beautiful to know.’

I think that these words hold true at many levels, from a child realizing how to match shaped pegs to shaped holes, a student acquiring knowledge and understanding in an engineering science course to a professor discovering new knowledge and understanding in a research programme.  For many of us, the beauty of cognition, often associated with a moment of dawning realisation, is the reward for the effort required to truly understand.

Source: I read about John Hull’s audio diary in ‘Rain: four walks in English weather‘ by Melissa Harrison published by Faber and Faber, London, 2016.

Digital detox with a deep vacation

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beachIt’s official – half of us are addicted to our internet-connected devices and a third of us have attempted to kick the addiction.  A recent study by the UK’s communication regulator, OFCOM found that 59% of internet users considered themselves ‘hooked’ and spending the equivalent of more than a day a week on-line.   They also reported that one in three internet users have attempted a ‘digital detox’ with a third saying they felt more productive afterwards, while slightly more that a quarter found it liberating and another quarter said they enjoyed life more.  So, switch off all of your devices, take a deep vacation,  do some off-line reading (see my post entitled ‘Reading offline‘ on March 19th, 2014), slow down and breathe your own air (see my post entitled ‘Slow down, breathe your own air‘ on December 23rd, 2015).  Now, you won’t find many blogs advising you to stop reading them!

Health warning: OFCOM also found that 16% of ‘digital detoxers’ experienced FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out’ (‘FOMO’), 15% felt lost and 14% ‘cut-off’.

Escape from eternal punishment

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145-4502_IMGIn her introduction to the ‘World’s Wife’ by Carol Ann Duffy, Jeanette Winterson says the ‘punishment of the Gods turns out to be a 24/7 always-on meaningless managerial job, where no matter how many emails you answer, your inbox will be full again the next day’. As a professor, I am fortunate not to have the meaningless job part of this punishment but I do sometimes feel that my inbox fills up no matter how many emails I answer.  Actually, I suspect that the filling rate is related to my answering rate but it appears to be a complex feedback relationship.

Many of us compound the punishment by shackling ourselves to the inbox via our smartphones. You may not see it as a punishment to be constantly in touch with everyone but it is probably a handicap. We have a limited bandwidth to handle information and people tend to over-communicate and lack understanding. We need to reduce the level of communication and increase the level of understanding.

I am breaking the relentless cycle of communication by taking a holiday for a couple of weeks.  There will be some horizon therapy [see my post entitled ‘Horizon Therapy‘ on May 4th, 2016] and mind-wandering [see post entitled ‘Mind wandering‘ on September 3rd, 2014]  as well as doing pretty much nothing.

Source:

Carol Ann Duffy, The World’s Wife with an introduction by Jeanette Winterson, London: Picador Classic, 2015.

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Models as fables

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moel arthurIn his book, ‘Economic Rules – Why economics works, when it fails and how to tell the difference‘, Dani Rodrik describes models as fables – short stories that revolve around a few principal characters who live in an unnamed generic place and whose behaviour and interaction produce an outcome that serves as a lesson of sorts.  This seems to me to be a healthy perspective compared to the almost slavish belief in computational models that is common today in many quarters.  However, in engineering and increasingly in precision medicine, we use computational models as reliable and detailed predictors of the performance of specific systems.  Quantifying this reliability in a way that is useful to non-expert decision-makers is a current area of my research.  This work originated in aerospace engineering where it is possible, though expensive, to acquire comprehensive and information-rich data from experiments and then to validate models by comparing their predictions to measurements.  We have progressed to nuclear power engineering in which the extreme conditions and time-scales lead to sparse or incomplete data that make it more challenging to assess the reliability of computational models.  Now, we are just starting to consider models in computational biology where the inherent variability of biological data and our inability to control the real world present even bigger challenges to establishing model reliability.

Sources:

Dani Rodrik, Economic Rules: Why economics works, when it fails and how to tell the difference, Oxford University Press, 2015

Patterson, E.A., Taylor, R.J. & Bankhead, M., A framework for an integrated nuclear digital environment, Progress in Nuclear Energy, 87:97-103, 2016

Hack, E., Lampeas, G. & Patterson, E.A., An evaluation of a protocol for the validation of computational solid mechanics models, J. Strain Analysis, 51(1):5-13, 2016.

Patterson, E.A., Challenges in experimental strain analysis: interfaces and temperature extremes, J. Strain Analysis, 50(5): 282-3, 2015

Patterson, E.A., On the credibility of engineering models and meta-models, J. Strain Analysis, 50(4):218-220, 2015