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Feedback Part Two

Feedback is the return of a portion of the output of a process or system to the input, especially when used to maintain performance or to control a system or process.

My friend Pam got an electronic activity tracker for Christmas, and like I’ve done with other good ideas Pam has, I decided to copy her and get one too. My husband got a different brand and we’ve been testing and comparing our models. Both offer feedback on how many steps we take each day, the number of stairs we climb, the number of miles we walk, and the number of hours we sleep. Mine even calculates how long it takes me to get to sleep. Using the numbers that are calculated, our trackers estimate the number of calories we’ve likely expended, based on our age, weight, and height, information you put into the system when you set it up. I’m sure motivations to use these systems vary but here are some of mine.

  • Monitoring the progress of one of my most important goals, to move more. I’ve read about the health risk of inactivity as we age and no longer do work that requires physical activity and effort. As a writer, spending long hours everyday at my computer, I don’t want my obituary to read, poor dear, she died from sitting too often and for too long.
  • A reality check – I wanted an objective measure of what I actually do, because my own perception is not always reliable. Some days a mile walk in my neighborhood feels easy, but on other days it can feel like a hike up a steep hill.
  • Rewards – The five year old inside me still likes some version of the gold stars and “good job” my teachers wrote on my school papers. Knowing that my tracker is noting the steps I climb encourages me to climb more of them. It feels like I’m getting credit for my efforts.
  • Learning something I didn’t know – When I saw the estimation of calories I used during my eight hours of sleep, (420 or so), I thought the instrument must be broken. But checking on line, turns out we do use calories while we sleep. And maybe I use more than some other people because I get up often to go to the bathroom, and I turn from side to side fairly often during the night.
  • Accuracy – Sometimes my instrument doesn’t recalibrate correctly, when it switches over from daytime to nighttime analysis. Waking in the morning with the report that I have walked 400 steps in the night (which has happened) gets me to wondering if I walked in my sleep. I know how many steps it is from my bed to the bathroom and back, so that information is not likely to be accurate. Starting off the day with 400 steps gives me a head start on the number I hope to do each day. But I don’t need help in cheating; I can do that all on my own, without any help from a technological accomplice.

 

 

Published on Monday February 11, 2013 in Health, Personal Stories and Technology. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

The Day of the Mother Has Arrived

Everywhere I look I seem to see a pregnant lady. This is more likely to happen in the summer time, when women aren’t wearing layers of clothing to keep warm. And I must admit, this particular noticing could be related to the fact my son and his partner are expecting their first child, my granddaughter, this September. Women dance PregnantI could just have babies on my mind.  There’s the very pregnant gal in my Zumba class that I first noticed the other day, due to her cute workout attire. When I complimented her outfit she commented she didn’t have much choice in what she could fit into these days. Her baby’s due early September.

Coming home and looking through the paper, I saw that Yahoo has just appointed their first women CEO. Of course, being a woman of a certain age, I rejoiced at this development. In reading the details, however I learned the more dramatic news – that 37 year old Marissa Mayer is pregnant and due to deliver her first child in October.

Wow! The times they have a-changed! In the old days, women kept the news of their being in a family way, a secret as long as possible. Marissa MayerThis was particularly necessary if they were interviewing for jobs or hoping to be promoted in their workplaces.  Having a pregnant lady at the helm of the ship is a big deal because of what it does to the traditional barriers of the good ol’boy network, the glass ceiling, the baby track, and people’s ignorance.

I’ve always felt this baby-carrying factor the heart of the matter, the one difference between the sexes that makes all the others seem moot. If this works out for all involved it doesn’t mean that it always will, but it is a demonstration, in an industry whose signature force is innovation and creativity, that to stay competitive, its best to not exclude the gifts of one half the population. I’m wishing Ms. Mayer and Yahoo the very best. I may just get that pregnant lady in my Zumba class to help me celebrate.

Published on Saturday July 21, 2012 in Technology and Women, Girls & the Feminine. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Higgs Boson and Me

As a senior person committed to life long learning, I’ve always been fascinated by physics. And though I usually feel my images of the subject are fuzzy figures a bit farther than my vision can decipher, the struggle seems worth it. Who doesn’t want to better understand the nature of our universe?

In trawling through the vast amounts of data in my own body/mind/spirit, I remember that adult’s learn something new by connecting it to something we already know. And through the years I’ve noted that new insights often emerge when someone from one academic discipline crosses fields to become a neophyte in another. So allow this dancing social worker to venture forth.

Higgs Boson Graphic

A Little God In each Part of Us

On July 4th, the physics world launched their own particular fireworks. The ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider announced that after a long search for the Higgs Boson particle, it has been found.  The particle only exists for a septillionth of a second, which gives new meaning to the expresson, “in the blink of an eye.” No wonder they had to trawl through enormous amounts of data to find it. (15 million gigabytes per year x many years)

Since the Higgs Boson process starts as a movement, it seems to me to be a kind of dance. A dance in which energy is only transferred, never created or destroyed. When the movement begins interacting with the Higgs field, the kinetic energy slows down and is converted to mass. (Remember Einstein’s E=MC2)                                                          Sonification Of Higgs BosonHiggs_Boson_Atlas

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I loved hearing that researchers in GEANT, a European Academic Communications Network turned the data points of Higgs Boson into a melody. And staying true to the intervals in the data, they created a piece of music.  The results of this “sonafication” process resemble a Habanera, like the well-known aria from Carmen. Makes me want to shout Ole!

http://www.zdnet.com/the-song-of-the-higgs-boson-how-the-lhc-data-sounds-as-music-7000000701/

Published on Friday July 13, 2012 in Songs and Technology. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Circles of Concern

I overheard several of my women friends admitting to one another that they don’t read the newspaper or watch television. Nearly a week after a gunman went into a local mental hospital, shot one man dead and wounded seven others before a campus policeman killed him, they hadn’t heard about the incident. I found this deeply disturbing.

I know these women to be sensitive, compassionate, spiritually oriented people, and I’m sure part of their refusal to not pay attention to the news is that much of what is broadcast as news, isn’t. And much of what is reported locally, nationally, and internationally, tells of horrific events in such graphic detail, viewers are at risk for developing vicarious trauma by just by reading or viewing the images.

Once the women heard about the shooting incident, they were appalled, and deeply concerned for the victims of such a senseless tragedy. For the family members, like the fiancée of the man that was killed, and his parents who had already lost their only other child, a daughter, when she was killed by her boy-friend a couple of years ago. Once they knew of them and what they are dealing with, they weep and wondered how such terrible tragedies can be visited on simple, good people.

One women expressed concern for the campus policeman who was put in the situation to have to take someone’s life. Used to dealing with tipsy teenagers and college pranksters, his heroic actions saved lives, but needing to shoot to kill would have been farthest thing from his mind when he reported to work that day.

Another women expressed concern for the patients in the hospital and the staff who were put on lock down for several hours. And what about the ripple effect involving others in the community? Until the city police could give the all clear to the schools and offices surrounding the incident, an entire neighborhood had to be locked down, leaving  hundreds of family members worrying and praying for their loved ones’ safe return.

There is danger for compassionate empathic people, in learning the details of even a single incident like this one. But with traditional media outlets cranking out news 24/7, and blogs, emails and facebook, we are all at risk for becoming overwhelmed. How many people can we afford to let in to our circle of concern because once we know about them, they are in our thoughts and prayers, our nightmares and dreams?

Published on Wednesday March 14, 2012 in Technology, the Big Body and Women, Girls & the Feminine. 3 Comments Tags: , .

Show

One of the games we play in my writer’s group is to challenge one another to write a response to a single word using only 100 words. It’s a discipline much needed in these days of sound bites, blogs, and tweets. Here’s my 100 word response to this week’s word, “Show.”

A picture’s worth a thousand words they say, and new technologies are busy demonstrating that truth. Skyping with my son, his facial expressions and gestures show me how he really feels. My high school granddaughter constructs power points to show teachers and fellow students what she’s learned. My techie friends’ Facebook posts include images and a ytube address.

Elementary school children still do “Show and tell” as we did in the olden days, and writing students continue to be admonished to show not tell. But it still takes dancers to show with their whole bodies, that which words cannot reveal. 

Published on Wednesday February 22, 2012 in Art & Life, Personal Stories, Technology and Writing. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Activist Art Shows The Way

After reading Mary Thomas’s excellent article about the Pittsburgh Biennial activist art segment at CMU, I was disappointed it wouldn’t be staying around longer.  After seeing the exhibit on the last day, I felt more disappointed it wasn’t staying around so I could bring my out of town holiday guests.  The exhibit left me with a pervasive sense of sorrow that I couldn’t share, even with my companions as we walked across campus. We discussed the three-story sculpture of people walking single file up a silver pole, into the sky.  Someone pointed out, the pole used to be graceful and slender, but after many bouts of being bent in the wind, it was remade for safety’s sake.  The present version has the people walking on a thick cylinder, along the same trajectory, but the present platform seems to overpower the human figures. 

Our tour began with a section of billboards, powerful shoot-outs on themes of economic equity and immigration. One of my favorites, an artful rendition of barbed wire attempting to cover the message,  “A millionaire stole your job, not migrant labor.” An instillation of small tea tables, “Feminist Matter(s): Propositions and Undoings,” by the subRosa collective contained artifacts of women artists and scientists and stories of their struggles for recognition.

This one hit home personally. Having been a faculty member at various universities, and having been told that what I considered worth investigating and teaching, (career paths of professional women leaders, movement and non-verbal communication in therapy) were subjects not worth pursuing.

In meditation in my women’s group the following Monday I got a deeper understanding of the show and my sorrowful response. I saw an image of a wrecking ball taking down a building and a large shovel scooping the rubble into a landfill. In contrast, came images from the instillation, Transformazium’ – women deconstructing a condemned building, patiently disassembling it in order to reuse the materials.  

 The patriarchal system never worked for women, but it never worked for most men, and minorities, and children either. Now as that system is in advanced disrepair, we must carefully disassemble its parts, so we can reuse what still has value. And as with the campus sculpture, special attention needs to be paid to the balance between people and technology.

Published on Thursday December 15, 2011 in Art & Life, Environment and Technology. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

New Birthday Rituals

My birthday last week turned out to be a communal event. I‘m taking back all those critical comments I’ve made about 21st century technology, especially about social media. After all the good wishes I got from “friends,” I’m thankful Facebook and other systems like it are revolutionizing the way people celebrate their birthdays.

In addition to the Facebook greetings (which are prompted by Facebook reminders that a friend’s birthday has arrived), I received e-cards, which offer, in addition to good wishes; moving visuals, cartoons, music, and songs. I also appreciated the old-fashioned snail mail cards sent by people who don’t do email, or whose computers are not functioning properly. And finally, there are the voice mail messages, akin in my family to a singing telegram as my brother and sisters sing the “Happy Birthday” song into the recording on my phone to be recovered later at my convenience. This practice has spread to my friends and work colleagues who got together this year and left a version of a Happy Birthday song, which stumped me for a few minutes as I struggled to identify the voices of their four-part chorus.

All in all, for someone who’s had enough birthdays to not take having another one for granted, I appreciate hearing from folks around the country in all these myriad ways, both new and old, that folks can say, “we’re glad you’re still here.”

Published on Saturday July 23, 2011 in Rituals and Technology. 0 Comments

Mbali and Me

Mbali came into my life three years ago and we have meet for a half hour once a week, most weeks since then.  She lives in South Africa, which, according to Google is 8,272 miles, (as the crow flies), from my home in Pittsburgh. We refer to each other as “Net Buddies.” since we meet online, and were matched to talk with each other under the auspices of an organization called, Infinite Family. http://infinitefamily.org/

The organization was begun by two women who had gone to Africa to adopt babies. When they saw the extent of the need on a continent where one tenth of the people are infected with HIV and where, a whole generation is missing in many communities, they realized they could never adopt enough children to make a difference. Their vision became to use technology to bring together teens in Africa affected by HIV/AIDS with adults like me, willing to become a mentor and friend.

The adults and the teens filled out an application which included our interests. Being a grandmother of three sports-minded grandchildren, I hoped for a match with a girl who liked to dance, since, unlike sports, that is something I know quite a bit about. In the training program for adults we were told to temper our expectations since computers were new to the children and English was not their first language. But I never had trouble understanding Mbali’s English, and she far surpassed me in her abilities with the computer.

One day early on in our technological relationship, I became so distraught trying to get the sound on my computer to work I nearly give up on the whole project. But Mbali encouraged me. “It’s ok. We can just type.” And so we did. And we still do whenever my computer doesn’t recognize my headphones, or her headphones are missing, misplaced by the teenager that used them ahead of her.

When I first saw Mbali’s beautiful shimmering face, I fell in love with her. I felt immediately her respect and appreciation for the gift of my attention and interest in her. I loved having someone to share my love of dance with. And I knew what she did not, that in my country, most teens are not interested in having a relationship with an adult. It seems a rare teenager in the U.S. who even shows much respect to elders. So her relationship to me was at least as precious as mine was to her.

We came to speak of what her gifts might be, and how she might discover them, ways to avoid test anxiety and the best subjects to give a speech about for speech class. I shared my writing with her, my experiences doing InterPlay, and I taught her some InterPlay story forms. She’s met my grandkids, my husband, and our dog Clancy.

Sometimes we talk about politics; that they have a National Women’s Day holiday and we do not, why people criticize Obama so much, our mutual admiration for Nelson Mandela, and my appreciation for South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which I see as a peace-building model for the entire world.

Perhaps this video mentoring program is a model for the entire world. It seems to me to have changed both our lives. Mbali and I were interviewed about our relationship and it was featured on the BBC’s OUTLOOK radio program. Take a few minutes to listen and hear Mbali’s side of the story. When you click on the link, go to the top of the page and click on Listen Now. From there scroll ahead to 18:40 minutes to Infinite Family’s part of the program. Here is the link:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00fvmx1#synopsis


Published on Friday April 22, 2011 in Technology and Women, Girls & the Feminine. 1 Comment Tags: , .