Finding meaning in stable/routine operation

 The course I mentioned last post talked a lot about communicating meaning in terms of concrete objectives, with very clear examples like NASA "we are going to put a man on the moon and bring him back again safely." Now as an engineer I've been more often involved in the design, build, and commissioning side of things, or a distinct process improvement for an existing facility. There's a concrete goal with a definite endpoint.

But what about ongoing operations? There is no endpoint, no time when you can say "congratulations everyone, we have achieved our goal!" or even track steps towards an end goal.

I've seen operational goals set such as producing or treating a certain number of units of whatever the facility does, but I don't find that inspiring... especially when the numbers are or seem arbitrary, and doubly so when the reward for meeting them is a more difficult target next time around.

So maybe considering the value in what the facility does and the value of having that constantly available would be more meaningful. Since I'm completely biased in favour of doing things which protect the environment and public health, I'll start with that category.

Take a sewage treatment plant as an example. Most people don't like thinking about them and like to smell them even less, but they're absolutely crucial to both public and environmental health. People's lives literally depend on them; without, every town above a certain size turns into a festering miasma of waste-transmitted disease. Cholera, for example, was a lot more deadly than people these days realize. This seems like, with accurate communication, some pretty meaningful work, even if it is stinky. I wish the general public would be more aware of just how important sewage treatment actually is, but that's a whole other post.

But how about a facility that produces things in the general category of "non essential stuff" - which really could be anything that exists to make the company owners money, and which they have to advertise to convince people they totally need it, really.

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And this is about where I got hung up on this post, because I don't have a solution and I'm an engineer, I want to have at least a suggestion before I talk about something. So it sat for about a year as a draft, I've long since finished that course, and I don't have an answer to how to make work meaningful when I don't already think it is. Such is life, I guess; lots of people have been thinking about this topic and coming up with lots of blather. I think I'll stop before I add blather, and instead add only: I don't know.

Meaningful blather

I'm currently going through an online course in the business leadership vein, of which there are multitudes, but this one specifically is on a subject that produces immense quantities of corporate blather: communicating the meaningfulness of the work, from the corner office to the peons doing the actual labour.

Oh wait, is my bias showing there?

The thing is, I do recognize that a person who finds meaning in their work is going to do a better job and be more engaged than someone who doesn't, all else being equal.

Where the corporate blather comes in is when the company tries to hand wave meaning into tasks or ill defined aspirations. The positively unreadable vision and mission statements of so many companies are great examples of this. "Our vision is to be the best in our field" or something so generic seems to me pretty useless at engaging employees.

What if you're making some non-essential item that the company has spent loads of marketing dollars to convince people that they totally need? Where's the meaning there? Do the people making, shipping, and selling those things find them meaningful? Do the company owners find their chosen product(s) meaningful, or are they trying to wave around a concept of meaning to get more labour out of their employees?

But then, how much of what I classify as "corporate blather" is them being bad at communicating meaning, how much is them handwaving to hide a lack of meaning, and how much is me simply not being the target audience? (I heard once that if you find an advert annoying then you're not the target audience. Seems I'm not the target audience for the vast majority of ads I've seen...)

The course did a good job at describing factors that contribute to a sense of meaninglessness of work. Alas, many of the factors that undermine meaning in work are ones I and my friends have encountered many times. Not seeing results, lack of autonomy... being berated for taking initiative to improve or suggest an improvement to a process really takes the cake though. The course mentions Marx and his concept of "alienation of labour" (note to self, read a bit of Marx) which would be related. Meaninglessness, disconnection, alienation—all describe a situation in which workers do only what they must for the pay they need in order to live.

(I promise the next one won't be so cynical. Had to get the easy snark out of my system first...)

Not dead!

...just reading more about business type stuff than interesting technical type stuff.

 I think I may start posting about the stuff I'm reading there too. The whole thing with explaining something you're learning to help yourself make sense of it applies just as much to fuzzy things like how to human or how to business as they do for more repeatable things like how to chemistry.

 I'm definitely starting from a place of "ugh, business-speak" though. I guess that's the engineer in me.

Edible education

One subject I've had in my list to write about (once I spent the time to find some good sources) was why some leaves are edible while others aren't—completely aside from the question of toxicity, there are lots of plants that we simply can't digest. I hadn't yet got around to digging into the subject when I ran across the answer recently, along with loads of other interesting information about food chemistry.

A few weeks ago I discovered a free, online course offered by McGill University via edX, on the subject of food and nutrition. Despite being offered by the chemistry department there, it doesn't require more than high school chemistry and the ability to use a 4-function calculator as prerequisites, and I'm not even sure if it needs high school chemistry. You should probably know the difference between an atom and a molecule, and at least recognize the Periodic Table of the Elements.

I was too late to sign up for the credit version, where the assignment deadlines are enforced, but there is a non-credit, audit version (which I'm doing) where you still have access to all the video lectures, discussions, and mini-quizzes.

So back to edible vs. non-edible leaves.

In the lesson on carbohydrates, (week 4, lesson 1) they showed the chemical structure of starch vs. cellulose (video 8). Both are long strings of glucose connected by oxygen atoms, but the way they're strung together is different—and that's it. That's the difference between plants we can digest and plants we can't. (Plants we can digest still have cellulose in them and we pass that through our system no problem—but we don't get any nutrition out of it.)

(Screenshot from Food for Thought, week 4/lesson 1/video 8. Requires free course registration to view.)

They look very similar at first glance, but if you look closely, they have an important difference: every second glucose segment is upside down in the cellulose chain.

We have the enzymes necessary to digest starch. We don't, but cows and other ruminants do, have the enzymes necessary to digest cellulose.

Enzymes are complicated things which have a very specific shape, and can fit around molecules of a very specific shape. So, an enzyme that fits the shape of starch in order to cut it down to its component glucose molecules will simply not fit the different shape of cellulose, even though the components are all the same.

So that was short and sweet. Also, check out the course, it's fascinating. (Keep in mind you can adjust the playback speed of the videos. I found my attention wandering because the instructors speak kind of slowly; running them at 1.5x speed makes it easier for me to keep from wandering. You can also back up and repeat sections if you don't catch it the first time through, or pause to look at the diagrams, because it's a video.)

Timely prizes

Here's something fun that I feel like I should have heard about before now, what with following science news and all that.

The Center for Communicating Science has an annual challenge to (surprise!) communicate a scientific subject—in a way that an 11-year-old will understand. Which means no university level math. Obviously, my posts here are not even close to what they're looking for, since I assume at least high school chemistry, most of the time, and I like including math.

One of the two winners is a canadian PhD student in chemistry and, from the look of his videos, an all-around goof. I certainly got a few laughs out of his video, and I thought his explanation was the clearest I've ever heard.

Opening my eyes

I was on a work trip and sitting in the lunchroom at a client site, chatting with the operators there. It was a friendly group, and we got to know each other reasonably well in our lunchtime conversations. I and one of the locals were talking about running and race training, being both runners. Another of the operators mentioned that he occasionally ran a mile at the track, and was asking about training for a 5k race, three times farther than he had run before.

Because he and I both find running more than a mile or so on the track unutterably boring (I think he hadn't run more than a mile on the track partly because he was bored, not because he was too tired to continue) I suggested that he run on the street, through the neighbourhood where he lived, so at least the scenery was a bit different. I frequently use google maps' walking directions tool to plot out a route of the distance I want to run when I'm not in the mood for an out-and-back straight line run, especially in an unfamiliar city.

He laughed and said he couldn't do that. Because he predicted a response to him being out running along the sidewalk: "Honey, call the cops! There's a black man running!" And the rest of the group laughed, because they knew it was true.

It had never in my life occurred to me to even think that somebody might call the police on me while I was out minding my own business on a training run.

White privilege: yeah, I have it.

Continuing education

You know how last week I said I'd post something short and easy? Well this is it.

Two places to get general continuing education, which I have been enjoying for some time now:

The Khan Academy, free bite-size videos, usually in the 10-minute range, and exercises to practice what you learn, all free. It's heavily weighted toward math as that's how the whole thing started, but with quite a few other subjects as well. The site also has badges you can win if you like that sort of thing, and you can track your progress through the videos and exercises. You don't have to start at the beginning; I jumped into calculus and linear algebra because I wanted to refresh both of those. (The majority of the math I do at work doesn't use either of those, so I was way out of practice.)

The Teaching Company, multi-lecture courses on a wide variety of subjects. The courses look very expensive, but if you find one you want, just wait for it to go on sale. Everything goes on massive discounted sale at some point during the year, and a lot of the stuff I've looked at goes on sale in the under $40 range for audio-only download. (They also do video download, and CD/DVD shipping for audio/video respectively, as an option for the majority of courses. Those tend to be more expensive.) For 12 hours of audio lectures given by a noted expert in the field, I think it's a pretty good price. (But if you want math, go to Khan Academy. You can't beat both free and fantastically clear explanations.)

I hope some of you find those resources useful.

Lazy citations

One thing I've complained about many times in the past with respect to internet searches is the way blogs will link to the blog where they found a link to something interesting, not to the something interesting itself.

I understand the desire to acknowledge the source of your information, and kudos to them for doing so. But from the point of view of somebody searching for information, what this means is that a google search will find a lot of blogs talking about this cool thing, all linking to each other in a long chain of clicks which is sometimes broken in the middle by a blog being long abandoned and taken down. This happens often enough that it has its own term (linkrot) and it makes it very hard to follow the clicks to the "something interesting" you're looking for. (This has been improving in the last few years, fortunately; either people are getting better at linking to both the original and their source, or google is getting better at filtering out the link chains in their search results.)

But, like everything on the internet, this is just a computerized, digitized version of something that is not new at all, as I have been discovering since starting this blog a bit over a year ago. I saw a perfect example of it while doing the reading for an earlier post, in fact, though fortunately (this time) not the linkrot aspect of it.

One paper I read made a claim, and had a citation for it. I searched Google Scholar for the paper cited, found it, and looked for the information to back up the claim. Instead, I found the exact same claim, using almost the exact same phrasing, with a citation listed. So, after shaking my head in mild disbelief and wondering if the author was just copying without verifying, I searched for this other citation. Fortunately I did eventually find the original paper, and it did say more or less what the cite-upon-cite said.

A Tale of Two Studies

While looking up information on how ammonia takes the sting out of stings, I ran across two studies, both double-blinded, placebo-controlled trials of a sting relief formulation. The one that mentioned ammonia was the one I read first, because that's what I was looking for. The other one named a product brand name I'd never heard of before; I read it by accident, clicking on the wrong link in the search results. These two trials came up as the top two results when I searched google scholar for ammonia mosquito bite relief.

The two studies are: Effectiveness of Ammonium Solution in Relieving Type I Mosquito Bite Symptoms: A Double-blind, Placebo-controlled Study and The efficacy of Prrrikweg® gel in the treatment of insect bites: a double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trial.

Go ahead and read only the abstract; those are all I'm going to talk about, not the rest of the papers. The abstracts say it all.

What did I learn?

Some random stuff I've learned from my field work: some of this is really blindingly obvious in retrospect, but which I didn't learn in university and thus didn't think of until I ran into it, sometimes embarrassingly face first and sometimes by trying to use an existing bad design.

> Operations and maintenance don't like crawling on their hands and knees on gravel to get at equipment that needs maintenance.

I told you some of these would be blindingly obvious. I have seen limited access to not only equipment for maintenance, but also to valves that need to be used on a regular basis. I have also personally needed to work a valve several times per day where I had to thread my hand between several tubes just to reach it. Fortunately I have skinny hands, and none of the tubes were hot.

What did you learn?

While I was at the National Academies Press website downloading stuff for a previous post, I ran across a title in their catalogue that caught my eye:

Surrounded by Science

Since it was free, and it was about everyday science everywhere and teaching people about science, I downloaded it. Because, you know, Science!

I was nodding right from the first two paragraphs of the preface. Do you remember going to some museum, or aquarium, or other educational and fun location, get interested, have a fun time, then at the end of it get asked by your teachers or parents, "what did you learn?"

And then drawing a blank.

The funny thing is, the first thing I thought of when I read that was actually back in university, when halfway through any given class the professor would announce the date of the midterm: my first thought was usually to wonder what he could possibly test us on, we hadn't hardly learned anything.

I don't know if the book answers the question of how to help kids answer the question "what did you learn?" (I haven't finished reading it yet) but it certainly tries to answer the question of how to help people learn and absorb and integrate science more effectively.

Personally I think instead of asking what they learned, you should ask your kid what were some of the cool things they saw. They'll probably surprise you with the amount of stuff they learned. (I saw a deer with fangs at a museum once. That was seriously weird.)