I first learned of his work with non-verbal communication in the early seventies, but returned to it in a visceral way in the early nineties. I read The Dance of Life: The Other Dimension of Time and it worked its way into my dreams. I dreamt that I was interacting with the people around me without words. I was actively interacting with them in the distance we stood apart and the way we move forward and away from each other. We interacted in the sounds that we made. I had one particularly powerful dream where I imagined myself observing the rhythms of people’s walk and motion and playing music that incorporated the rhythm of each person that walked into the room into the rhythm of everyone else already in the room.

Edward Hall’s work was the intellectual bridge that enabled me to walk out of my brain and into my body.

So I’m halfway there!

via Giles.

Sample fact: The time American’s spend watching television commercials every weekend is approximately equal to the entire time spent in creating Wikipedia to date.

Rule of thumb: “Doing anything is better than doing nothing.” “It’s better to do something than to do nothing.”

Via Jason Sutter who lives in New Zealand but shows up in my feed of blogs local to my zip code.

Update – 28 April 2008 Here (via Gruber) is a link to the text of the talk. Also, the quoted rule of thumb is corrected.

I had two different concrete experiences of problem solving in the past couple of days. I think these examples are interesting because they are so contained, not because they are hard problems. They illustrate how I tackle a problem and provide some generalizable strategies for problem solving. I’ll cover the other problem in a future post and try to extract the strategies.

This post is about the little man’s homework this week. He’s still struggling with this:

Shelley wanted to buy some clothes that were on sale.

Blouses	Pants	Socks	Shoes
$10	$10	$5	$20
$15	$20	$10	$30
$25	$35	$15	$40

Her mother said she could spend $85. List all the different ways that Shelley can buy 1 blouse, 1 pair of pants, 1 pair of socks, and 1 pair of shoes that total exactly $85. One way has been done for you.

Blouses	Pants	Socks	Shoes
$10	$20	$15	$40
___	___	___	___
___	___	___	___
___	___	___	___
___	___	___	___
___	___	___	___
___	___	___	___
___	___	___	___
___	___	___	___

So how do you solve this?

The exhaustive solution is to run through each of the possible combinations of each item and total the associated cost. There are 3 possibilities for each of the 4 different items, so there are 3^4, or 81 possibilities. That would be a moderately tedious number of sums for an adult faced with a real life problem. The little man is 8 and doesn’t care about clothes, so he has zero patience for that approach. He wants to look at the problem and figure out the solution and if he doesn’t get it immediately then he wants to write, “I tried my best, but couldn’t figure out the answer” on his paper. Apparently this is some sort of magic incantation that he thinks his teacher will accept.

His parents aren’t happy with that solution. He has only investigated approximately 2 of the 81 possibilities, the top row and the given solution. I don’t know how to motivate him to check out all 81. I still don’t. That’s not what this post is about, but if you have any ideas, let me know.

I got bored myself after running through the first 9 possibilities — there are no solutions with the $10 blouse and the $10 pants — and started looking to solve an easier, less compute intensive, problem.

I took a couple of approaches.

First thing that I noticed was that there had to be either 1 or 3 items whose price ended in 5, or you couldn’t get $85. As I was staring at the possibilities, I felt like this eliminated many options. Many is a subjective word, though and after I figured out the there were still 39 remaining, it didn’t seem so many. Computing 39 sums of 4 two-digit numbers is tedious, even if all the terms are multiples of 5.

Human calculation speed is greatly increased by dividing every items price by 5, and trying to get them to total 17 (=85/5). You can still limit this to possible solutions that have either 1 or 3 odd terms.

None of the shortcut solutions are ultimately satisfying however, because of a flaw in the display of the problem. Even running through all 81 permutations won’t satisfy, because there are spaces for 9 solutions, but there are only 8!

I wrote a little program that iterated through all the possible solutions and found these solutions:

Blouses	Pants	Socks	Shoes
$10	$20	$15	$40
$10	$35	$10	$30
$15	$20	$10	$40
$15	$35	$5	$30
$15	$35	$15	$20
$25	$10	$10	$40
$25	$20	$10	$30
$25	$35	$5	$20

Ultimately, this becomes a problem of combinatorial optimization, which seems like too much for 3rd grade.

Anyway, I haven’t shared my results with him. I don’t know if I will. He might be fascinated, or repelled, by them. Most likely, he would want me to give them to him so he could copy me and just get it done.

For those who don’t know, MarsEdit is a Macintosh program to write blog posts.

There are a couple of small features in the way the Mars Edit works that could have been deal breakers for me, so I was going back to the MarsEdit forums to figure out if there were a work around for them. I couldn’t remember the url of the site, so I Google MarsEdit.

The problem is the results. The first result returned by Google is to a page on the Ranchero Software site mentioning that Ranchero Software sold MarsEdit to Red Sweater Software more than 7 months ago. The second Google result points to the Red Sweater Software page that describes MarsEdit.

Curiously, the PageRank for the Red Sweater page is 7 while the Ranchero page PageRank is 0, and the PageRank for the Ranchero Software home page is 7, while the Red Sweater home page is 6.

What this means is that there are so many more links out there on the web that point to MarsEdit at the Ranchero site than at the Red Sweater site, and the rating of those sites is so much higher, that a deficiency in page rank of 0 to 7 is overcome.

Even more confusingly, the absolute number of links isn’t that different. As of this moment 282 links point to the Red Sweater page and only about 592 links point to the Ranchero Software site.

I wouldn’t have thought it possible. This is a PageRank result that really confounds all my expectations.

If you do try to poke around on the Internet looking for prints, you might just come across this reproduction of the Great Wave (local cache). This is a fine lovely print, you can zoom in to see the detail, read a brief description and note the bequest by the Havemeyer family. (Zoom in on Mt. Fuji and the boats to appreciate the phenomenal detail.)

Art lesson over, the thing that jarred me about this web page was clicking on the “Next” button. That goes to this page (cached) containing a pair of Royal Earrings from 1st century Andhra Pradesh, India.

Could anything be more miscellaneous? Different styles, different techniques, different media; two works of art separated by two thousand years and four thousand miles. They have nothing in common beyond being art produced by human beings. To be fair to the Met, I jumped into a spot in their collection stream where it transitioned from Japanese to South-Asian, so I accentuated the effect. It was as if I were present in the gallery and I turned the corner from the East Asian Hall into the South Asian Hall. On the web, I didn’t have any visual clue that I was nearing a transition. The collection streams are organized chronologically by region, further heightening the transition.

This is the look of an expert in action.

These to be important questions. For reasons I’ll go into below, I think that achieving expert knowledge in at least one field is critical for every thinking person.

As the final paragraph of this Scientific American article has it,

The preponderance of psychological evidence indicates that experts are made, not born. What is more, the demonstrated ability to turn a child quickly into an expert–in chess, music and a host of other subjects–sets a clear challenge before the schools. Can educators find ways to encourage students to engage in the kind of effortful study that will improve their reading and math skills?

The article, from which I take my title, summarizes some of the work over the past 100 years on the mental processes of chess grandmasters, “the Drosophila of cognitive science.” The advantages of studying grandmasters is that their area of expertise is narrow, the differences between individual masters are well measured and there is some evidence that the results from the studies of grandmasters can be generalized to expertise in other fields and even to the acquisition of basic skills.

What the grandmasters have done is transformed themselves into pattern matching machines of the highest order. “[The chess master] does not have to remember every detail at all times, because he can reconstruct any particular detail whenever he wishes by tapping a well-organized system of connections.” The master recognizes the pattern, having seen, and deeply experienced that pattern before. This is supported by results from the 50s that showed that although masters had much better recall of the positions of the pieces on the board from an actual chess match than lesser players or novices, they did little [define little, ed.] better than others when the pieces were arranged randomly.

This pattern recognition is built by “effortful study,” “continually tackling challenges that lie just beyond one’s competence,” which build the pattern matching or “chunking” structures in the brain.

Even the novice engages in effortful study at first, which is why beginners so often improve rapidly in playing golf, say, or in driving a car. But having reached an acceptable performance–for instance, keeping up with one’s golf buddies or passing a driver’s exam–most people relax. Their performance then becomes automatic and therefore impervious to further improvement. In contrast, experts-in-training keep the lid of their mind’s box open all the time, so that they can inspect, criticize and augment its contents and thereby approach the standard set by leaders in their fields.

These are small differences that are magnified over time; small differences that accumulate and become a difference in kind. Apply yourself continually over 10 or more years to the study of anything and your performance in that field can no longer be compared to that of the person who has just bided their time. If expertise were wealth, and it is of a sort, this it is the difference between living paycheck to paycheck and investing ten percent of every paycheck in an profitable outside business. The compound interest theory of expertise.

But you’re not a genius, you don’t have talent. Wrong. Genius and talent are red herrings. What you need is motivation.

[M]otivation appears to be a more important factor than innate ability in the development of expertise.

How do you create/sustain/nourish the conditions for motivation for yourself, or for others? Years ago, I said of myself, when I had little motivation, “Enthusiasm is a state of grace.” I’ve been reflecting on my own experiences and those of other since that time, trying to find and to remain in that state of grace.

One obvious factor is success. If you are being successful at some activity that you love, there can be motivation aplenty. Your history in that activity is one step after another toward ever greater achievement and your rise appears, even to yourself, to be inevitable. In reality you are just getting much more practice, and that practice is productive “effortful” practice.

As one striving to become an expert, you need to maintain your motivation. As a leader, teacher, educator, or mentor of others, the goal is to create the conditions under which motivation stays high. This is the focus for leadership and it ought to be the focus for self-leadership as well. How are you going to run your group/business/self so that the motivation stays high.

I come back to motivation and leadership in a later post, but for now there are a couple of points I want to make about expertise.

1) Almost everyone can become an expert. The article discusses the development of tracking expertise. Peak skill levels in the tracking of animals are not reached until the hunter is in his thirties, after essentially 30 years of “effortful study.” The development of expertise has been critical in human evolution – we are designed for this – and we don’t really know what the limits are.

2) Almost everyone has become an expert. Those of us who have learned to walk, to speak, or to read have acquired an extra-ordinary level of expertise. How? We had a high degree of motivation to do all of these things. Acquiring these skills was pleasurable and opened up new possibilities to us. What else can we do with the next 10 years of our life and that degree of motivation? What will the possibilities be then?

3) Being an expert in one field doesn’t transfer to any other field. Quoting Scientific American, “American psychologist Edward Thorndike first noted this lack of transference over a century ago, when he showed that the study of Latin, for instance, did not improve command of English and that geometric proofs do not teach the use of logic in daily life.”

If expertise is not transferrable, why do I think that it is critical that every thinking person have the experience of expertise?

Firstly, because it is useful to have first hand knowledge of what expertise is. There is no shortage of people who have become “experts” by virtue of six months study, or by virtue of having a certain degree, or a certain credential. Sometimes these people’s degrees or credentials are quite similar to those of actual experts. It is useful to be able to tell the difference between these people. Sometime they might want to be operating on you, or telling you how to live, or how to raise your children.

Secondly, because acquiring expertise is the first step in acquiring expertise about expertise. Having engaged in the effortful study, you are in a position to engage in the effortful study of your own effortful study and that of those around you. You have “a” pattern and you can begin to assimilate more patterns and to recognize and differentiate between them. You are a better teacher, a better parent and a better communicator. You know what you know and what you don’t know.

Finally, I think that you can ease your path to expertise by understanding this process. There are some things that I thought could be taught to me, that weren’t really teachable. If you ask an expert, they don’t know how they know. They look into their experiences and pull out the answer the way you pull on your shoes. You don’t think about the details of each step you just do it. The same with the expert.

If you want to become an expert, you are going to have to have the experiences to draw on.

Reasoning, when we do it, is mostly to find justification for what we already believe.

Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia, in here.