Category: Personal Reflections

Lessons learned about life; pearls of wisdom I’ve gleaned through pain, failure and honest reflection

Musical Zeitgeist

Carl Setzer

Listen for music’s zeitgeist. Harmonics: voices intersecting, creating sounds not uttered, rather vibrations overlapping, the whole greater than the sum of the parts.

Music offers us so very much, should we choose to listen. We may learn the value of each voice, whether frantically busy or quietly adding structure, all critical to the audio portrait of a piece. Each pitch and tone crucial to the landscape. Silencing one changes the whole.

We must learn to value voices equally. This summarizes the commandment to love.

Namaste!

Instagram

Carl Setzer

Funny discussion recently: using non-phone photos on Instagram…cheating or no? Fascinating thoughts about purpose, medium, and veracity. To me, all art embraces a zen quality. Cheating doesn’t exist. Well, not in this context. Plagiarism, another beast, another story.

So, the question remains, and no answer comes from me. You?

Lonliness

Carl Setzer

Lonliness, originally uploaded by carl.setzer.

A playground full of gear and children…with the swings ignored.

Healing Development Mistakes and the Language of Global Affairs

Carl Setzer

Recently I’ve heard Chinese officials (and before that, Vietnamese, Indian, Mexican and others) complain about the US “preaching”, particularly about labor and environmental practices. A key piece of that, “why are you denying us the same benefit you had”. This one saddens me deeply. We saw the destructive nature of our actions and seek to purge that from our psyche. No, this isn’t an attempt to rob you of advantage, it’s an attempt to help you avoid our costly mistakes. The US is still healing from the environmental degradations of our history. Still coming to terms the destruction from the dishonest and ill-treatment of our indigenous people, or slavery. 

The goal, for me, at least, isn’t to maximize our grain. Really, it should be about avoiding the same costly mistakes we made in our development. The available mistakes to make are manifold, probably unknowable. Learn from us. If we’re wise, we’ll learn how to learn from the rest of the world. But that’s a blog post for a different day.

A Technologist Reflects on the Rory Staunton Case In New York

Carl Setzer

Re: “An Infection, Unnoticed, Turns Unstoppable“

Brief summation: boy gets infection via a superficial seeming injury. Multiple medical professionals fail to catch it as it escalates, eventually killing the boy. 

Reading this piece in the NYTimes is painful. As a parent, these stories rattle your paranoia. Parenthood seems to be that thing which shakes us from a “it can’t happen to me” attitude. Yet my parental paranoia wasn’t the only issue raised. I left wondering what could’ve been done differently, or, more specifically, how could technology help to prevent such tragedy.

Some key data were missed in the process, in particular several key elevated levels (“His bands were 53% (normal high is 15%); absolute neutrophils were 13.5 (normal high is 8.5); absolute bands were 7.8 (normal high, 4.2). On the other hand, a blood value associated with viral infection was low. His lymphocytes were 3% (normal low, 28%).”) were, for whatever reason, not acted upon  by the hospital staff. There are several possible reasons, but all seem to stem from human error. What I envisioned is the doctor, while being distracted by the myriad distractions in an ER setting, simply missed this information.

One thing technology can do well is remove the “human” part on these sorts of errors. It’s easy to conceive of a medical data system that would compare the results with “acceptable limits”, or some sort of gradient. Then a simple script would flash/harangue, staff until acted upon.

Would such a thing have saved this boy? Hard to say. I don’t know if such a system existed and was operational at the time. But I like to think of solutions when faced with crisises. And like to think that there are technological solutions for a great many global ills. Perhaps that’s naiveté, or hubris. Yet, it’s there. If it’s a survival mechanism meant to mitigate the sadness or fear, it’s not very effective. It is something, no?

Overwhelmed -or- My Inbox Is A Blizzard Of Data

Carl Setzer

My inbox is out of control. I know others feel this, too. This blizzard of information, inboxes, tweets, Facebook, texts, calls, news-sites…on and in it goes. We’ve gone far past data saturation.

I’s wondered lately where we go from here. How do we cope with this? Tools are being developed, but most seem to focus on new ways to deliver. Perhaps different packaging, clever design; but the problem isn’t readability, it’s volume. How do we filter?

Our culture has never faced this before. Never has information been so commoditized. Never have we had all the world’s assembled knowledge sitting in our pockets.

Most of us filter by ignoring, where it’s views we don’t like, voices we find annoying, or just deleting this one email “this one time”. Yet, for me at least, that’s unsatisfying. I value discussion. Value getting new voices heard, new ideas expressed.

Yet, without finding away to increase our absorption rate, it seems we’re faced with blocking information flow. Unless (and here’s my hope) we build a tool to help. Some new and clever way to relate to information.

For this I wait.

Brian & Melissa: Social Media Rows

Carl Setzer

Perhaps you’ve heard this trending story about Brian Presley (an actor) & Melissa (a model). (if not, here’s a brief summation here) via Huffington Post

Just read David Amerland’s piece, When Melissa Met Brian: A Lesson in Social Media Ethics over at Social Media Today.

So, my take. Melissa started with the assumption that Brian was attempting to cheat on his wife with her and ran with that. In analysis, this seems an act of arrogance on her part. (The man in the seat next to you is talking to you. The only reason is he wants sleep with you?)

Be that as it may, she unleashed the mindless reactivity of the internet. It’s amazing how quickly that can get launched and how nearly impossible it is to put that “genie back in the bottle”.

Sure, it’s important for us social media users to think before we post, but we should also consider thinking before acting on something we read. Always remember there are two sides to a story.

(Mea cupla: I saw this as it was trending hot on Twitter and thought Brian a cad. As this has shaken out, I’m realizing he’s not as culpable as first appeared. In particular, at no point does he proposition her, or even ask for a phone number).