News, News, and Damn News

As the leading expert on the Automat I am called upon for a quote whenever something in that (admittedly slow-moving) world happens. I earned that exalted title and the calls that come with it by writing my dissertation on that subject, which writing took a good deal of researching, not a little of it in newspapers from way back when. One of the things I discovered in doing this research is that newspapers are inaccurate, which is the actual topic of this post, not the Automat, about which I have said all I ever need say.

When I say that newspapers are inaccurate I don't mean that they are biased (that statement hardly needs be belabored) nor, as Thomas Jefferson puts it, that they are guilty of "abandoned prostitution to falsehood," though surely some are. No, what I mean is simply that very many of the facts they report are wrong. The journalist, charged with telling us the Who, What, When, and How of the story very often cites the wrong people doing things that were never done at a time when they did not happen and in a manner that is untrue or even impossible. (I won't comment on how they do with the "Why.")  I think this happens because life is messy and journalists never, and I really do mean never, have enough time to do their work with a complete or even very high degree of care, not at least where the facts are concerned.

I don't mind that this happens (well I do mind, a little bit, because among the facts they almost always screw up is my name), but I wish more people were aware of this.  To quote Jefferson again, and this time more fully:

To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted, so as to be most useful, I should answer, 'by restraining it to true facts & sound principles only.' Yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers. It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more completely deprive the nation of its benefits, than is done by its abandoned prostitution to falsehood. Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. . . . I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false.  (Letter from Thomas Jefferson to John Norvell on Hume's Histories of England - Washington, June 14,1807.)

Read your paper, enjoy it, but please, do not trust it or quote it without doing your own fact checking.

Any guesses as to how I feel about television reporting?

Finally, some good news

Public art in Fairfax, anachronistically from January 2021

 Yes, let's save the Euro.

New Job, part 3: The Work

What do I do for work, and why tell you now?  To answer the second question first:  because now, a good many months later, I have an answer and, fortunately, the question is still relevant.  Who knows what tomorrow will bring, so let us speak today.

I am a big picture guy.  I say this not just because I think a big picture is often needed to understand context, to get a sense of the size of a problem, to see what it is we are all trying to do, but also because I actually draw big pictures, for example, the one shown here:

This diagram (technically a Sankey diagram, because I want to know how much data is going where) is useful to me because it holds on a single sheet of paper most of what I know about a topic, in this instance, how a certain type of data gets created in some of our core IT systems and what happens to that data once it has been created.  (This pictures is also useful to at least one other person, Felix of course, who is shown above playing a maze game of his own devising.)  I have spent much of my time since January researching and drawing this and a few other diagrams of comparable size in an attempt to understand the environment in which I find myself, and in particular to understand what kinds of data exist in that environment and what use is made of that data, and, too, what use could be made but isn't.

One of the interesting features of big pictures is that you cannot view them, at least not in their entirety, on a computer screen.  You have to print them, preferably on a really big printer.  And having printed them you have to find a wall somewhere on which to hang them.  And once a picture is on a wall, the days of private offices being long gone and the picture being, as I say, big, other people will inevitably see it too.  This suits me very well:  I want other people to look at these pictures (I make them not only large but colorful for this reason) and to draw from them their own conclusions.

It seems now that a number of people have drawn their own conclusions, not so much about what the pictures represent as about their author.  A corporate decision has manifested itself, about my role and, gratifyingly, about how useful it is to have someone drawing big pictures like these.  It is for this reason that I say I now know what my job is--namely to illustrate the overlapping system, operational, and data contexts within which the company is trying to address a number of the more substantive challenges it faces and thereby to supply these seemingly unbounded challenges with a frame of reference and some clues about how to address them--and it is also, I suppose, for this reason that I still have a job.

What I do not know even now is how to name this job, and that's a pity, not just for the sake of a more pithy blog post but also because I've been asked to provide my own title.  My first inclination, "enterprise data strategist," is a non-starter:  the word "strategist" is an albatross.  Another obvious choice is "architect," but there are lots of architects at Autodesk, and as best I can tell those with a technical element in their title (e.g., data architect) work within a scope too limited for the issues I am tasked with addressing.  I must have data in the title, it's what I most care about, but beyond that at the moment I know only what it cannot be.

Things are changing in my world at work.  Autodesk itself was born in the shift from mainframe to personal computers, it negotiated the move to GUI-based operating systems, and now it has to find its way to the cloud.  We are growing a consumer-facing business, a relative novelty to us, likewise the social web.  All of this and more requires a strategic response, and one element of that response must concern itself with data.  Whatever the uncertainty around my title, it's good to know, half a year in, what must be done.

The Ask

Gideon, from his crib:  "Dada."
Gideon:  "Dada."
Gideon:  "Dada."
Gideon:  "Dada."
Gideon:  "Dada."
Gideon:  "Dada."
Gideon:  "Dada."
Gideon:  "Dada."
Gideon:  "Dada!"
Gideon:  "Dada!"

Gideon:  "Dada!"

Gideon:  "Dada!"

Gideon:  "Dada!"

Gideon:  "Dada!"

Gideon:  "Dada!"

Gideon:  "Dada!"

Gideon:  "Dada!"

Gideon:  "Dada!"

Gideon:  "Dada!"

Dada:  "WHAT?!"

Gideon "I wa ice cream."

Pox

From Chickenpox

Why?  Because it probably produces more complete immunity than the vaccination and has negligible rates of complication.  Because our pediatrician, whom we have every reason to trust, thought it was a fine idea.  Because we recalled the week when Felix had it as only mildly discomfiting for him and quite pleasant for us.  So we kept an eye out for an infection in the neighborhood and joined in when we found it.

In the midst of it--say, 48 hours in, with Gideon fevered and miserable--we doubted ourselves.  More lost sleep, an unhappy baby, banned from daycare, oh the troubles we've seen.  But trouble after the fact doesn't invalidate the decision as made.

By the way, I'm all in favor of making this a mandatory vaccination:  1 in 80,000 chance of fatal complications is not something an individual parent need worry about in a world of fast cars, hot outlets, and spicy cleaning agents, but if society as a whole can save the sum total of deaths and hospitalizations that represents then it probably should.