Ausable Chasm and Personal Action

After dropping my youngest daughter off in the dorm at NYU, my wife and I drove north for some simple no-one-on-the-back-seat together time. We headed up to a place I dimly remembered from my childhood, the Ausable Chasm. We stayed overnight in the tiny motel at the chasm’s rim, built in 1953. In the morning, we hiked into the Chasm, followed by a rafting trip to the Chasm’s end. The short trip was delightful, and set me to meditating on mindfulness and environment, and on information gathering and choice.

The Ausable Chasm is at the Northeast corner of New York, between the Adirondacks and Lake Champlain. A still active earthquake fault spit the sandstone mountain an eon ago, just where the run-off from the highest peak in the Adirondacks formed the Au Sable River. As the River was confined in the resulting gorge, it sped up and cut deeper. Steep cliffs rise as high as 170 feet above the water. The river runs swift and furious, at one point a reported 70 feet deep while less than 30 feet wide. Millions of years of sandstone lamina are on prominent display.

I vividly remember visiting the Chasm when I was 10. Severe floods have ripped out the man-made structures I climbed on then, and their replacements, in the intervening years, but the vivid memories triggered by the sights were amazing. In the late summer, now as then, the woods above are filled brambles, and berries, and edible lichens; the views into the Chasm are stunning. I had always remembered and mispronounced the word Ausable as a cognate of “awesome”, a feeling that still applies to the gorge.

As you hike into the Chasm, the sounds of the river block out all noise from beyond the rim. Reverberating off the damp sandstone, the sounds from up and down river occasionally meet and cancel each other out, creating the silence of a cathedral, a more profound silence than the mere absence of noise. The silence intensifies the wonder of the physical geology on display. The cracks caused by the collision of North America with Africa stand in stark contrast to the wrenchings of the walls by earthquakes.

The Chasm is the perfect scale to introduce children to the natural world. It has a diverse ecosystem. You can see the bounty of nature in the numerous wildflowers and the abundance of raspberries and other brambleberries crowding the path. The torn metal frames of earlier paths ripped by floods speak eloquently of nature’s power and disregard for our works. Hundreds of millions of years of sediments and fossils stand clearly revealed on the walls.

I know families who introduce their children to nature at extreme locations. They learn the botany of foul smelling jungle plants they may never see in school. They leave the cocoon of school and soccer only for eco-tourism to the rain forest in Costa Rica. They travel directly to the Grand Canyon. I think they learn the wrong things. The first nature they see is so big, that there is hardly any point in seeing more. They learn that the natural world is far away. I believe it is harder for them to take responsibility for what is going on here and now.

Issues such as power and carbon will not be solved by proxy. They will by fixed by people taking an interest in and responsibility for local solutions. They will not be fixed through by carbon indulgences to plant a tree in a faraway land. They will be fixed, if they are fixed, here and now.

And it starts with appreciating how wonderful, how complex, and how beautiful things are here, in our own back yard.

Ambient Information and Behavior Changes

Yesterday I wrote of using control instead of management. Today I am thinking along the same lines and wondering if the all the displays on a Prius are really useful/ All the gauges, all the dials, present to the driver what is essentially the engineer’s control-oriented view of the car and its processes. They provide constant feedback on what each part of the engine and power train is doing, and how it is affecting fuel use.

A couple months ago in Wired, the described a program by Southern California Edison that did away with all the detailed messages. For years, they had emailed, and texted, and phoned key customers to alert them to changes in the state of the grid. The provided information about pricing, and load, and stability. The problem was, that this had all too little effect on the behavior of the customer’s company. Energy load was not being managed.

One day, Mark Martinez of Southern California Edison had an inspiration. (Can we say a light bulb went off on an energy and facilities blog?). He was looking at an ambient orb (http://www.ambientdevices.com/cat/orb/orborder.html ), a high tech pet rock that could be programmed to change colors in response to changes in the Dow Jones Average, or in freeway traffic. For an extra monthly fee, one could request data feeds shaped to one’s personal portfolio. Mark developed an energy-related channel for the Orb, one that would cause it to glow green when the Grid was underutilized, and red when the grid was saturated. He then bought 120 Orbs and mailed them out to key customers.

These ambient orbs elicited a better response from his customers than had all his previous detailed efforts. Automated phone calls, text messages, emails all looked busy, but together they never produced the effects produced by the glowing Orb.

The human brain excels at finding the smallest of patterns, and developing hidden correlations. In a well known university psychology experiment, students in an introductory class were asked to compliment any woman seen on campus wearing any red, be it so little as a small red hand-bag. They were cautioned against mentioning any details, or mentioning the color, just a simple “You look great today!” Within a few weeks, the campus was awash in Red, with nearly every women wearing red.

Along with this pattern finding comes a great capacity to ignore outliers. Single occurrences of information do almost nothing to change behavior. This behavior has only been increased by today’s modern messaging-based society. We are bombarded with information, much of it unwanted. Our attention span has shortened as we constantly move to the next email message. The man who deletes 150 spam messages from his mailbox each morning has little trouble yet another message from the Grid.

Ambient displays do not interrupt, and they do not require an instant response. They sit their quietly, persistently conveying their message until finally it generates a conscious response. Perhaps the value of the Prius interface is that it has now grown too complex, beyond what the driver understands. If so then it is now like to rain forest, surrounding the non-technical driver with an ambient sense of a thousand forces beyond his ken. The subconscious then processes the information, using abilities evolved to avoid being eaten, and arrives at optimum fuel mileage by a back route.

Managing the Impulse for Control

Monday’s Wall Street Journal included an article on how technology has reduced the impulse control of top executives. Empowered by cell phones and Blackberries, they can no long control the impulse to reach out and touch their staff. The electronic tether means these executives are always on, unable to go on vacation, to really take time off. This poses two classes of risk. The executive experiences a loss of recovery time and narrowing of interests that hurts his long-effective. The more insidious problem is that his staff and top managers are unable to take responsibility for their jobs. Constant micromanagement enervates most staff and alienates the best. The interference and implied lack of trust was cited as a significant cause of turnover among the hardest to replace staff.

The same issue included an editorial by Dick Armey on the FAA and Air Traffic Control. He recommends closing down large portions of the current system and moving to one based upon a pervasive GPS. He described this process as moving from Flight Control to Air Traffic Management. A significant barrier to progress is the desire of Congress to preserve control and patronage in each and every district. The delays caused by the inability of the current Air Traffic Control to handle the current volume of flights are a significant cause of the frustrations of flying this summer.

In oBIX, if we do our work right, we will significantly reduce the span of control in today’s over-integrated systems. Individual systems and their control systems will be isolated with their own interfaces. To the extent the interfaces become service oriented, they will eliminate central system micromanagement of control, to be replaced with coordination of services. As in business, this will allow the systems with better service agents to flourish. A significant difference is that in building systems, the best agents can be replicated, extending the benefits of their superior performance.

As the GridWise Architectural Council defines the Service Oriented Grid, demand/response and site generation will be additional services proffered to the market by building-based agents. These autonomous agents will negotiate with the site-based system services, in response to the goals of the local enterprises, and with the awareness of live electricity pricing to offer load management services to the grid. These agents will manage the economical production of heightened amenities to the building occupants. This will be far more effective, and far better accepted than is central control of water heaters and building chillers by the grid.

It’s hard to give up control. Giving up control means giving up cherished perquisites of authority and the comfort well-worm processes. Giving up control means establishing objectives and letting others perform. But giving up control means the best and the brightest will work with you. Giving up control means that that your organization will be as intelligent as the sum of your staff, and not just as limited as you are. Giving up controls lets individual agents compete on the most economical provision of the best benefits. Giving up control increases the intelligence of any service, human or machine, as the creativity and skills of all our allowed to compete.

If we could only manage the impulse for control…

Changes in State

It is a wistful Sunday morning. It is a cool 60 degrees on the porch, down from the punishing 90-100 degree days of late. Rusty the semi-Beagle has quieted down from the morning walk to get the paper. The roosters down the hill are performing their morning call and response. An orange glow, hinting that fall will come suffuses the yard.

This week will be a flurry of last minute activities, all unplanned. On Friday, we will leave early to drive north. On Sunday morning Katy, my youngest, will move into her dorm at NYU. The years of nurturing and cajoling, or hectoring and applauding are just about over – now I will sit back and watch what I have done.

This year a second transition begins. Josh is all seriousness and purpose. He tells me he can just squeeze an economics minor into his last semester at Case Western. He is wrestling with a few years as a practicing engineer in industry or continuing right on to another degree. We have already completed the personal transition, his graduation will be a mere formality, one that will consume me and that he will barely notice.

Margot, always in a rush, may graduate before him. She has always been a second child, always wanting to show up her older brother, always unhappy with the inequity of not being recognized as first. She has always worked the hardest, at everything from school to track to work. She has always accepted the least; our relationship has always been prickly. She seemed to have found peace during the week she was home this summer. In two weeks she is off to Vienna for a semester abroad from Chicago. She has always stood on her own, and I know she will do fine.

By Christmas, depending on how their appeals of various academic injustices go, I may be down to one kid still on the dole, and by the end of the week, none at home. And so opens the third act.

I plan to drive slowly from New York City to Cleveland next week, hiking, and visiting wine country, and simply talking with my Maggie. For the first time in decades, there will be no kids to roust, no fights to referee, but just two people resuming a journey together after some distraction. We will visit Josh in Cleveland for his birthday and then drive back to Carolina to resume something like normal life. It is a celebration of an inflexion point.

Where does the arc of my life go from here? In September, I will take some days off for a retreat at my brother’s ranch on Colorado’s western slope; there I will ponder what other changes to make, what opportunities lie ahead. What does the next act look like? What shall I do with more time, and fewer constraints?

I have some ideas I want to put into play. I love thinking about them, love writing about them. I think they are important, and can have a big effect on our future, and the future of how our civilization sits on the planet. I enjoy working with the people who share the vision as we develop paths to implementation.

But today it is a quiet, cool morning on the porch. I am enjoying the sweet melancholy of putting one phase to rest, even as I look forward what comes next. I recognize that I don’t know how I will engage the challenges ahead. But for now, I am enjoying the shade of the old oak and the orange glow of morning sun on the magnolia, as the roosters settle down and the crickets hum.