Walking Trees

Species moving is nothing new and I was glad to read about serious efforts to think ahead and planting trees in new environments to adapt to global warming.   The tree you plant today will be around for a long time and if the climate changes it will still be there.  Of course, humans moving tree species is really nothing new.   Foresters have pushed the loblolly pine north and North American trees dominate the plantation forests in South America, Australia and South Africa.   Sometimes trees grow better someplace other than their native range.    A most famous case is the Monterey pine, which grows poorly in its narrow native range in California, but thrives magnificently (some think invasively) in the Southern Hemisphere.  

As environments shift, global warming will redefine what we mean by “natural” or “native.”   Environments won’t merely shift north or uphill.  They will be different from what we have today.   We will soon be seeing environments that have not been around for millennia or maybe even millions of years.   There have not been temperate forests north of the Arctic Circle for millions of years, for example.   The relationships among species will be new.     It will be an interesting time to be alive and we have to be involved in the dynamic of changing environments. 

Anyway, read the article.

I wrote a post covering some of these issues, BTW.

That’s a Fact

The printing press created facts by mass producing books and papers that were relatively difficult to alter w/o detection and could be traced more or less to a printer.  Lots of what appeared in print was wrong, but it came with some authority and some authorities became the authorities that most people agreed to accept.    We had the Encyclopedia Britannica for the almost erudite and the Guinness Book of Records to settle barroom disputes about the facts.

You could never be sure of a fact in the pre-print age.  Most information passed by word of mouth.  It was oral history, susceptible to unreliable memories, wishful thinking and ordinary mendacity.   The written word was literally written.  Each copy was different.   Specialists can date manuscripts by the errors that have entered them.   Think of it.   You say something; I hear something else.  We dispute what you said and neither of us remembers correctly.   This is the pre-print world where everything is a matter of opinion and subject to interpretation.

Welcome back to this old world, brought about by new media.   The Internet lets everybody “print” anything.   Finding the facts on Internet may require a kind of triangulation.   You have to compare different sources and then decide which version you believe.    You can also alter what appears on the web.   Well, technically there is a record somewhere, but you can “update” and perhaps overwhelm that.   Truth often means what appears on the first screen of a Google search.

The general level of information has greatly improved.   I am amazed at the extent of what you can find on Wikipedia and the accuracy is very good in many cases.    Wikipedia is essentially an information market.    It works very well when there are lots of participants w/o very much controversy.   Where it falls down is where the market is thin (i.e. few participants to check and correct) or where there is enough controversy to attract lots of people with their own deceptive agendas.   It never stands still.

I have a set of Encyclopedia Britannica.   I used to love those books.  I would just pull one out and read what I found, a kind of a random walk.   I used to like to have the true facts.    I am looking at my Britannica from my chair.  They are nice books to look at, but they are no longer accurate.  Populations have changed since this edition was printed nearly thirty years ago.   Some whole countries have been created or disappeared.   New things have been invented.    My Britannica’s certainly are not worthless, but it would be very foolish to trust them on science, politics or current affairs.   Actually, the only thing they are really good for is history.   I am sure that they have not changed since I got them, so I can trust that those were the “facts” of around 1980.   But overall I am better off with Wikipedia.

This makes me sad.  I liked the idea that I had all the accumulated knowledge on my bookshelves, which now contain facts of antiquarian interest and opinion.   On the other hand, I have the information of the world a few key strokes away.   Decent trade, IMO.

But it is still cool to have the real book, printed at the real time and touched by real people.  Below is from my Britannica Atlas, which is older than I am.  When this map was printed, during WWII, the editors did not know what the map of Europe would look like before the ink was dry, so they went back to the pre-war map, which was only valid for a few months.  This map points to another print v Internet difference.  This obsolete map is in my book unaltered.  I can find the same map on the Internet, but I have to look for it.  The Internet piles new information on old, like a sediment w/o outcropping.  In a book, you might just find something intriguing like a map that doesn’t make sense and bids you learn more.  In the Internet age, if you don’t dig, you don’t find.

National Arboretum

The weather in Washington this year has been superb, cooler than usual w/o too much humidity. I took advantage of a warm pleasant afternoon to go over to the National Arboretum. It is not very far from where I work, but I had never been there.   It is actually astonishing when I think about it. I go many miles to see trees in other states and even countries, but never bothered to make the short trip. I will have to wander back and spend more time.

It is located in the middle of one of DC’s less nice neighborhoods.  That is one explanation.  But it has been improving.  Washington has gotten better in general.  In 1988, when I was here for language training, the place was going to hell.  Things have gotten a lot better since Washington elected reasonably competent and non-crooked mayors.  It was depressing back in the 1980s when Marion Barry kept getting reelected, but that is another story.

The Arboretum is very pleasant.   It reminds me of Whitnall Park in Milwaukee. I had the place almost to myself.  I thought the trees would be thicker, but there is a lot of open space.    They also had some plant exhibits about how farm plants could produce energy. You can see the pictures.   

The top picture is a big catalpa.  We used to call them Indian cigar trees, because of the long pods that hang down.  Catalpas are native only to the area around Indiana, Missouri and Illinois, but they have been planted all over the U.S.  My Aunt Loraine had one in her front yard on Whitnall (again with the Whitnall) Ave.  It was still there last time I passed.  The next picture is switch grass.   The last picture shows cottonwoods.  They are tough trees.  Their leaves quake in the wind producing a nice gentle sound.  They grow very fast, but don’t live very long (for a tree).

Hanging Around

As long I am wallowing in doubt and indecision, I have a few more thoughts about work, making a contribution and retirement. 

I could retire today… in theory.  FS is like the military in that respect.  We can get our full pensions after 20 years if we are at least fifty years old.  I have achieved both.  We have an up-or –out system.   Had I not been promoted in 2007, and presuming no promotions in 2008 or 2009, they would be kicking me out come this October.  As it is now, I can stay until February 2016.  My last promotion bought me six years and they gave me an extra year as compensation for my year in Iraq.

We are only allowed to stay in each pay-grade-class a certain number of years and we only get 27 years to jump into the Senior Foreign Service.  The grim reaper is always taking the hindmost.    The system, IMO, has a major flaw in that it puts faster risers at greater risk, since they come sooner up against their time in class.   We also have an interesting concept of “opening your window.”  You cannot be promoted into senior FS unless you open your window.  When you do that, it starts a clock ticking.  You get six evaluations and if you don’t make it to SFS by the time the clock runs out, your window shuts and you are involuntarily retired.    Your life can be extended if you go to a place like Iraq or have a year of training (as I did at Fletcher School, which is why I would have gotten the boot in 2009 instead of 2008).  A cautious person would wait until he had been in the FS for 21 years.  That would mean that he would lose nothing if he did not get promoted, since he would get kicked out of the FS in general in 27 years.   Of course, anybody who does that is probably not very ambitious. 

I opened my window as soon as I was eligible.   I didn’t want to hang around like a fart in a phone booth.   I could have survived as an FS01 until 2012, so that would have been only a four year difference (w/o the long term training year).  On the other hand, they could promote me and I would have more options.  I honestly didn’t think I would make it.  The odds are against you.  I knew that I should not hang around too long, but I also knew I would not have the courage to just set out w/o the boot.  So it was a kind of play or trade option. Get up or get out.

There is a kind of FS life-cycle and I fell into it for awhile.  When we are around forty-five, we complain about the lack of recognition and start bragging that we will be out the door the minute we become eligible for retirement, presumably earning the big bucks in the private sector. When we turn forty-nine, we go silent.  We stop talking about retirement in general and start to count the years until our time in the FS runs out.  A couple years later, we start complaining again, but this time it is decry the injustice that a “good worker like me” may be forced out while “I still have so much to contribute.” 

My question is about how much I still have to contribute.   As I wrote a few days ago, I am concerned that some of the new media is passing me by.  A lot of my skills have become obsolete.    Of course, I can learn new ones, but is it really a good deal to taxpayers for somebody like me to retrain to learn something that a lower-paid newer employee can just do out of habits learned as a child growing up with computers?  

It is always a dilemma to weigh experience and judgment against raw talent and brain-power.    Experience improves judgment, but only within a range of similar situations.  In times of rapid or discontinuous change, experience with former systems may be as much as an impediment as an advantage.   Old generals know how to fight the old wars.  They always are in danger of being overtaken by a revolution in military affairs.  The tank means changed tactics. The same goes for all walks of life, if somewhat less dramatically. That is why you have to clear out experience sometimes and let younger people in.  The experience of the past hangs on their necks less heavily or not at all.   Our up-or-out system is supposed to guard against this sort of complacency, but eventually you get to the end of the trail and maybe you get to the end of your own trail before they vote you off the island.

This is not a problem limited to the FS. In fact, we are relatively better off than many others precisely because of our up-or-out system.  The economic downturn has changed the equations.   All over the country people are delaying retirement. This is good in that it saves money on pensions and keeps people productive.   But it also clogs the arteries of an organization.   You need people leaving at the top in order to give people on other rungs of the ladder the opportunity to climb.

IMO, older people should keep working as long as they want to and as long as they can.  In fact, given the upcoming Social Security and entitlement crisis many will have to do just that, like it or not,  but maybe not in the same jobs or even the same professions.  You get stale after a while, as the pathways your good ideas and sound practices have blazed become ruts and craters that limit options for yourself and others. 

My baby boom generation is the biggest, healthiest and best educated cohort of soon-to-be senior citizens in the history of the world.  We see old people running marathons, discovering new things and opening new businesses.   We still have a lot to contribute and a duty not to sponge off the smaller generations that follow us.  I think we will see an amazing flowering of entrepreneurship among older people.    The Internet will greatly facilitate this trend.  

But maybe we need to be bumped out of our ruts. Our experience is valuable to the extent that it does something valuable.   It is a tool and like any tool, it must be used. It does not entitle us to anything, any more than the ownership of a hammer entitles you to pound.

I don’t know where I am going with this.   It is the time again for me to look for a new assignment and so the thoughts like this are clogging my brain. I have options where I can use my experience in new ways.  But I am not sure what to do.   Should I go down a path where I can use the skills I have developed, where I am reasonably sure of success, or try to cut a new one? 

Punctuated Equilibrium & Phase Transitions

It is a type of evolutionary theory.   I won’t vouch for my grasp of  the biological details, but I think it well applies metaphorically to societies and lots of things in life.   Events seem to go along more or less the same for a long time and then they jump to something else.  In fact, little changes are building up over time, but they are not apparent and counterbalanced until the system just cannot hold.   This is what happened in the old Soviet Empire and it may be what is happening in Iran today.    It is hard to understand how people of the time could have not anticipated the change because it is so easy to see … looking back. Prediction is a lot harder.

The concept that goes with this is “phase transition.”  The standard example of this is water.  It is a solid ice until it reaches 32 degrees.   Then it turns to liquid. This doesn’t happen gradually.  20 below zero looks like 31 degrees above, but get above 32 and it is completely different.  After that it stays the same from 32 until 212 degrees, when it suddenly turns into steam. 

No matter what you call it, I feel like I have just experienced it with the new media.  All those webchats, twitter, Facebook, Flickr, webpages etc have been kicking around IIP for a long time.  Some people were working on them.   But today I noticed that we have made a kind of phase transition.   We are a new media organization.  President Obama is speaking in Ghana today.   We at IIP are supporting with SMS, Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr.  We even have a place on Second Life, where avatars will discuss President Obama’s words … and it all seems natural, business as usual, NBD to everybody but me. 

And I am feeling like I just missed a train. I liked blogs. I felt reasonably comfortable with Facebook.  But I really don’t have much use for SMS or Twitter and I positively don’t like Second Life.   I used to be kind of a leader in new tech methods of public diplomacy.  I was a pioneer, a mapper of strange new waters – at least that is what it seemed to me.   Now colleagues are swimming effortlessly in the new media ocean, while I am looking out after them like a beached whale.    The wonder is that this all happened in the course of about a month.  The world I have known for some years have shifted, hence my thoughts of punctuated equilibrium and phased transitions.

I am not sure I can go along on this phased transition. Maybe I walked along this trail as far as it can take me and I need to leave further progress to others. Maybe it is just that it is almost 3am and I can’t sleep. Maybe things will look clearer in the light of day. President Obama will speak on a from a far away continent in just a few hours and our new media will shrink the distance to something inconsequential. What a wonder.

Anyway, I suppose there are other things I can do. 

New Media For the President

My colleagues at IIP did a superb job of supporting President Obama’s address in Ghana on all new media platforms.   

The center of the program was sending SMS highlights of the President’s speech as he delivered them.   Three of our colleagues watched the live coverage and released the highlights at the appropriate time.    Computer penetration in Africa is not as extensive as it is in most of the rest of the world, but Africans have innovatively connected themselves to the world with cell phones, so SMS is a way to go there.  I thought President Obama gave an excellent speech.    It helps to have good and interesting content. 

BTW – I feel no compunction in bragging about this shamelessly because I had almost nothing to do with the success except that I was standing nearby. That was the beauty of this operation. It was largely self organizing, with everybody not only doing their jobs but being proactive in taking leadership roles where appropriate and following the lead when it made sense.  In my time in government, I have rarely seen such a large operation run with so little tension and so much good humor. Life doesn’t have to be tough.  You can usually get better results with happy and engaged people.

Chrissy asked me why I thought it worked so well.   It might be too soon to tell, but I think there are several things that have been working and growing, as I mentioned the previous post, that are now flowering.   IIP has been building new media skills for years now.   It takes years to grow people, acquire skills as an organization and build trust.  We have grown people with skills and more importantly the innovative attitude that overcomes obstacles and finds opportunity.     Into this mix, we have added some really great young people, who have grown up using the new technologies.   They feel as comfortable with the various new media as I do watching television.   By a combination of foresight, planning and luck, we just have the right kind of people for what we are trying to do right now.

On the cynical side, IIP currently has no political appointees, which is rare enough, but even more remarkable is that our big boss is a career FSO who has been in charge at IIP for about three years, so we have had stable, non-political leadership across two administrations.  This meant that our programs could continue to develop w/o the transition hiccups.   Don’t get me wrong.  We all love the energy, enthusiasm and skills brought by political appointees, but sometimes the reach of their enthusiasm exceeds their grasp of the realities of the situation.

What was so remarkable? Lots of things just worked.  When everything works as it should, you really have achieved excellence. And some things were outstanding.

I am not a big fan of Second Life, but I have to admit that it worked well in this case.   Our colleague Bill May had some friends who organized a virtual discussion group that featured viewing of the speech and discussion by/with experts.  IIP let them use our “island” in Second Life (for those unfamiliar with it, Second Life is a virtual world, where you can set up virtual events and build your own online communities on your own virtual islands.) but interested individuals carried the load.   The new media requires that you relinquish some control in order to achieve better results, and our leadership was wise enough to let it be.

Beyond that, IIP’s bloggers blogged and twitted the program.  CO.NX did their usual interactive good work.   We distributed translations in English, Portuguese, French & Swahili important for Africa, and of course the usual Persian, Arabic, Spanish, Chinese & Russian.   And everything got out and posted almost immediately. 

Of course, our overseas posts, especially those in Africa, localized our products and did their own programs. I understand that our post in South Africa got 250,000 participants in their own SMS outreach in the first 24 hours.   

It was just excellent all around. It worked. I am proud to have been standing nearby.

Webchat

I will participate in a live webchat on August 12 (see below).  Please sign up so that I am not embarassed by lack of interests and send in your comments and questions.  Thanks. 

Click on this link to go to the Facebook page.  

Sustainable Forestry and Climate Change
Join forest owner, carbon credit producer and sustainable forestry advocate John Matel for a live chat on August 12

Host:Co.Nx: See the World
Network:Global
Date:Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Time:9:00am – 10:00am
Location:Online
City/Town:Washington, DC
Email:conx@state.gov
 

Description

Date: August 12, 2009
Time: 9:00am EDT (1300GMT)

Experts estimate that 20% of greenhouse gas emissions come from deforestation. Yet forests are the ultimate in renewable resource. A well-managed forest can produce wood, help clean the water and air, as well as provide a home for wildlife and a place for recreation now and essentially forever. In addition, rapidly growing forests remove and sequester large amounts of carbon dioxide. (Growing one pound of wood in a vigorous young forest removes 1.47 pounds of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and replaces it with 1.07 pounds of oxygen.) In short, while good forestry practices are not the only solution to the problems of climate change and environmental degradation, there is no workable solution without them.

John Matel is a forest owner who is working to put sustainable forestry into practice on his land in the U.S. State of Virginia. In addition, as Communications Director for the Virginia Forestry Association Tree Farm Program, he helps foster good forestry stewardship on private lands around the Commonwealth of Virginia and beyond. Pine forests in the southern U.S. supply around 58% of the U.S. demand for timber and account for more the 15% of the world’s timber production. This is done sustainably and each year landowners in the southern U.S. plant more than a billion trees.

Drawing on his experience with things like the sale of carbon credits, the environmental value chain, prescribed burning and sustainable forestry, John Matel will be available to answer your questions on a live webchat.

Please read more at his webpage at http://johnsonmatel.com/blog1/forestryecology.

A Cool & Green Season

The weather has been great this year.  This evening it is actually chilly.   It will get down to 60 degrees tonight.   I don’t remember it ever being so cool in Washington in July.   I read that last month was the coolest June since 1958 and one of the coolest since they started to keep records.   It has also been usually rainy, so everything is very green and robust.

Below are a few pictures from around SW Washington.  

This is our shredder truck.  We are moving to our new building nearer the Main State.  Some stuff needs to be shredded.   This truck brings us the industrial strength shredding power.

Broadcast Monitoring System – The Rise of the Machines

Years of science fiction make big real-world advances look puny. All of us have seen the fantastically multimedia computers on Star Trek or the James Bond and have come to expect instantaneous processing time, perfect video delivery and trouble-free operation.   Of course we know that the real world data systems don’t work like this, but even when we know the real world, it is the illusions we recall. 

I thought about that at a briefing today.  I saw a broadcast monitoring system that lets you to search broadcasts using key words, as well as set up permanent watch lists, much the same way you can do now for text.   It monitors major satellite broadcasts and produces machine generated transcripts in original languages. 

And I thought, “So what?  No big deal.” But it is, actually, a big deal even if it looks a lot like what we imagined we had before. Consider the analogy of search engines.  Think of how much better you can search with Google than you could with Lycos, Magellan, the aptly named “dogpile” or so many of the others whose names we forget. But all Google does is the same thing as the most primitive search engines; it just does it better. That is how progress is made, by making incremental improvements until at some point you have something new, but nobody notices. 

Untethered imagination is much overrated. It is funny to hear people say that Leonardo da Vinci invented helicopters, tanks or submarines just because he imagined the concept and drew some unworkable sketches or that Jules Verne pioneered space travel because he wrote a book about going to the moon. Yet when a helicopter flies overhead, you could say, “NBD, da Vinci invented the thing nearly 500 years ago, it just didn’t fly; this is just a minor improvement.” And I hate that childish notion that this or that modern machine was “really” invented by ancient Africans, Arabs, Chinese, Greeks, Incas, Persians, Russians … Who cares?

It matters less who imagined something first than who make it work first and then who keeps improving it.    It also matters who tells others about.  If you make a great discovery, but nobody else knows about it, you really didn’t make a great discovery. You just indulged your idiosyncratic curiosity.

Returning to the subject at hand, the broadcast monitoring system takes the place of those bored guys that used to watch TV and take notes (Presumably, sales of coffee and cigarettes will decline.)  The advantage is that the machine never sleeps or has to take a bathroom break.  The disadvantage is that the machine doesn’t think or make free association.  It only produces exactly what it is asked to give, although more sophisticated programs are allowing them to branch out with a kind of artificial intelligence.

The original language transcripts are good, the translations, not so good.  They have some of the comical aspects we associate with mistranslation.  However, retrieval is more important than perfection.   Skilled human translators can make whatever changes necessary after the machine does the initial sorting.

The systems I saw can do Arabic, Spanish, Chinese, Persian and English. Bahasa, Hindi and Urdu are planned.  It takes at least six months to “train” the program.  They need enough of a sample.   For example, if you let it go for only a short time, for example last week, you might have nothing but Michael Jackson stories.  Your machine would have a strong vocabulary on plastic surgery, gloves, music videos and bizarre behavior by aging man-boys, but maybe not enough on more important topics. 

The system is around 80% accurate, but it depends on who is talking and about what.   It can pick up around 95% of what an anchorman says when he is speaking directly to the camera, but starts to decline when there are multiple participants in a conversation and/or when people start slipping into dialects or even idiolects.  

It works a lot like Google for video and you could probably start using it in less than ten minutes.  The hard part is to know what you want to get from the system and how to use it.   Translation is more an art than a science. Of course, decision making requires even a greater use of judgment. 

I think this is very promising for understanding big trends. As we get more data points to smooth out outliers and the quirks of special situation, we can start seeing the simpler patterns in the ostensible complexity. But despite the coolness of this technology, it provides essentially the same sort of service for video that a reasonably skilled user of Google can achieve with texts. Of course, while Google is very useful in finding information, we still have not really figured out how to use it as an analytical tool for audience research or evaluation.

Still not as cool as I saw on Star Trek many years ago. I suppose Leonardo da Vinci invented the concept.

Crap TV

When I was in Norway, one of the local television stations constantly played reruns of Ricky Lake and Jerry Springer.  I used to wonder what kind of image of our country these clowns created. They were bad enough, but now we have a whole slew of reality shows.    They show unattractive people being venal and selfish.  We live here and we have a wide variety of other impressions.   But I was imagining if I was to see something like “Bridezillas” w/o other context I might not want anything to do with the culture that produces such monstrosities. 

Americans are no more venal than people in other countries and our television shows are really no worse than other.   For example, the Dutch invented many of the reality shows, like “Big Brother.”   But most of these offerings don’t get distributed around the world.   The Brits seems to have developed the perfect television PR.    I have been to the UK and seen some of what they watch back home.   It is not very uplifting.  Yet in the U.S. and around the world, we get “Masterpiece Theatre.” 

I am not the only one to worry about the coarsening of America.  I don’t know how much television is reflecting changes in America and how much it is driving them.    I also am not sure of how people are looking the programs.   When I see people being selfish and demanding to be covered in bling, I look down on them.   Everybody needs somebody to look down on and the low-lives on reality TV provide an outlet.

There is an old saying that the bad man is a lesson for the good.  You can see what not to do.

But are negative role models enough?  Are they really seen as negative?  A lot of the bad people get what they want by being aggressive.   Maybe some people see that as good thing.

We should not underestimate the power of television.    Advertisers understand that a fifteen or thirty minute commercial can sell a product.   Maybe a thirty minute or an hour program can sell a lifestyle.  I watched a lot of television when I was a kid and I know that I consciously modeled some of the behavior and habits of some of the television characters.     It sometimes surprises me today when I watch an old show and see one of my traits in embryonic form.    Maybe I was just more impressionable than most kids, but I don’t think so.   I hear too many stories, jokes and tag lines from movies. 

Television characters help define the boundaries of what is acceptable.   For example, when did it become acceptable to call women “bitches,” much less use the word on TV?  But both things are now common.   How is it that the “poor” people on reality TV can afford and think they deserve fancy cars and jewelry?

I grew up on science fiction and westerns.   Both were common when I was a kid. They were actually very similar.   “Star Trek”, for example, was a lot like “Wagon Train.”   They travel through unexplored territories meeting strange people, with whom they alternatively cooperate and conflict.    And they all were morality plays, very simple and clear.   They seem very naive today, but they are certainly no more simplistic than “Bridezillas” and they have a better purpose.

I have to stipulate, however, that television has generally improved. The production values as well as the complexity of programs are much better than they used to be.  In addition, we have many fine productions on history, science and human affairs.   But this is a result of a general widening of offerings.  There is much more choice now.    You can choose to watch well produced dramas (like Law & Order), good news programs (Newshour on PBS), technology (Modern Marvels) or any of the great variety of history programs.   Or you can watch crap all day and night.

Choice is enhanced (exacerbated) by the ability to time shift and save programs.  At one time television united the country.  We watched the same things at the same times and that made us more similar.  Most Americans watched the evening news with Walter Cronkite.  Half the country tuned into the final episode of “The Fugitive.”   Now we all watch different things at different times.  I suppose that will make us all more different.  Unequal inputs produce unequal results.