Thoughts on a Course on Presenting Data and Information

I spent my day today at a course on Presenting Data and Information, given by Edward Tufte. Tufte is one of those people who is selectively famous- just about everyone in my little professional world has heard of him, whereas just about no one else I know recognizes his name. I was delighted to get the chance to see his course, and as a bonus, I am now the owner of four of his books (they came with the class registration): The Visual Display of Quantitative Information,  Envisioning Information, Visual Explanations, and Beautiful Evidence. I look forward to reading them all, but I think the class added a dimension I would not have gotten from just reading his books.

I won't attempt to summarize the entire course here- if you're curious check out Tufte's website or one of his books. Besides, I am still assimilating what I learned. The older I get, the more I find that really interesting ideas take awhile to digest and incorporate into my thinking. So right now, I just have a pastiche of ideas, and not a unified narrative. But I want to share a few thoughts from the day:

1. A lot of the discussion in Tufte's books and in the class is about how to create a truly great graphical display of data. (He points to Minard's graph showing Napolean's march into and retreat out of Russia as a particularly effective graphic.) One of his fundamental points is that "the purpose of an information display is to assist thinking about the content." I found myself thinking back to the book Soundings, about Marie Tharp, the amazing maps she produced, and how the intellectual contribution of figuring out how to organize and present data so that its meaning can be understood is often under-appreciated.

2. I have just finished reading Distrust That Particular Flavor, a collection of essays by William Gibson. One theme Gibson returns to in several essays is the idea that the internet is a sort of collective external memory for humankind. That idea popped into my head a couple of times during today's class, but I haven't really sorted out what, exactly, I think the link is. Maybe just that if the internet is our collective memory, it would be good if we had better ways to organize and present the data in it. But maybe something more... I think this is an example of how it takes time for me to assimilate new ideas into my thinking.

3. Tufte did discuss the internet, and specifically Tim Berners-Lee's original proposal for an information "mesh" at CERN, which led eventually to the internet. Watching that part of the class, I was struck by how many times we have had to rediscover the fundamental unsuitability of hierarchical data models for representing most real world data. The first "discovery" of this of which I am aware was in Codd's work on relational databases. And then Berners-Lee founded the internet because he was dissatisfied with the limitations of the hierarchical information stores available to him at CERN. But then XML came around, and we all had the argument again. And now NoSQL databases have come around, and we're discussing it yet again. I don't know if this is sad, funny, or telling us something profound about how we humans like to think about data. (And for the record, I've made extensive use of XML, and think NoSQL databases are interesting and have advanced our capabilities in important ways- but there are fundamental limitations in representing data as a hierarchy, and some subset of the IT world seems to periodically forget that.)

I will certainly continue thinking about the course- after all, I have always liked to organize information. It is a unifying theme for a lot of my interests. I may or may not write more about Tufte's ideas in the future, but if you are at all interested in the topic of how to present data and you get a chance to attend his course, definitely take it.

No Escaping Biology

"We are biology. We are reminded of this at the beginning and the end, at birth and at death. In between we do what we can to forget."

- Mary Roach, in Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

I am also reminded of this when I am sick. And yes, I'm sick again, and so is Petunia. January has been a tough month at Chez Cloud. I'm hoping for an easier (or at least healthier) February!

Weekend Reading: The Hooray for Learning Edition

This week's links are all about how learning things is good:

First, Bad Mom Good Mom has an awesome post about using thermodynamics to heat your home, which I loved. We've also been known to let the kids' bathwater hang out in the tub all evening, to help keep the house warm.

I also really enjoyed Laura Vanderkam's article about self help books. I am not a huge consumer of self help books, but I don't completely avoid the genre, either. I don't think I would ever adopt the "program" advocated by a self help book completely and uncritically, but they do sometimes have helpful ideas, which I can incorporate into my life.

Changing gears completely, Dan McKinley has a post about the dangers of thinking that correlation implies causation and overinterpreting A/B tests.

Despite the risk over overinterpretation, it is still good to gather and analyze data... as this article about Google HR makes clear. I think this is the only article that has ever made me think a job in HR would be cool.

Finally, I could try to invent some link with my theme this week, but it would be a lie. I just think that this building is really cool.

Management is Always Having to Care about Other People's Issues

Mr. Snarky and I went out to lunch yesterday. We both had to work, but we work literally 5 minutes from each other, so I just picked him up and we went out for a nice lunch. We don't do this very often- we both have other preferred lunchtime routines. We really should try to do it more, though, because it gives us a chance to talk about our days in ways we can't over dinner, when the kids are also eager to share their days (Petunia, in particular, likes to tell us her day was "great!" and Pumpkin usually wants to tell some long and complicated story that I only have a 50% chance of following) or after the kids are in bed, when other priorities crowd in.

Anyway, on Monday, we found ourselves talking about our respective work issues, and since we are both managers, most of our issues involve fixing other people's problems, or fixing problems caused by other people's quirks. We do still occasionally discuss technical issues we are solving, but really, the technical issues are the easy ones. Dealing effectively with other people- that's the hardest part of my job, and I would suspect most managers' jobs.

This is not news, at least not to anyone who has spent any amount of time as a manager, but still, I sometimes manage to forget it. Remembering it yesterday- and getting ample opportunity to really live it today- clarified another reason for my recent career funk: I'm tired of dealing with other people's issues. And I don't just mean the "I have a problem, can you help me solve it?" sort of issues. Those are actually the easy ones. I mean the issues where I know that person A has a quirk that makes topic X a sore topic for him, but oops! Person B just sent an email about topic X and cc'ed not just person A but person A's boss. And oh, I need to get Person A to help me solve a problem related to topic X in order to finish one of my projects. Or the issues where Person C really wants to do something on one of my other projects, but doesn't really know how to do it yet, so either I have to say no and make Person C mad at me or figure out how to train/mentor without impacting any timelines. Or the issues where Persons D and E are having a long running and rather pointless technical argument, and I just need to get a decision made already, but neither really wants to budge because it has become a technical holy war of sorts, so I have to find some credible third party to break the stalemate and settle the issue.*

I could go on and  on, but you get the idea. People come with quirks and baggage and pet topics and the like. That is one of the things that makes people interesting, but it is also one of the things that makes management hard. Sadly for me, dealing with other people's issues is a large part not just of my current job, but of just about any job I can envision on anything looking like my current career path.

This was a bit depressing, and I said so to Mr. Snarky. But then he said something that made us remember the time we went to one of those Texas Roadhouse type chains and were surprised to discover that when a particular song comes on the jukebox, the waitstaff all have to stop what they are doing and do some stupid dance. And I decided that maybe my job isn't so bad, after all.**

*These are not actual examples from this week. They are all fictional examples, culled from years of being a manager.

**Although... maybe next time I've got two developers locked in a technical standoff I'll tell them that they can do a dance off to settle the issue. That should go over really well.

Monkey Wrenches in My Career Plans

Fair warning: this is one of those posts I write to sort things out in my own head, and is therefore very navel-gazey. If that's going to both you, click away now.

One of the things making me feel less than 100% at home in my own skin lately has been some ongoing uncertainty about what I should be doing with my career. I've been feeling a bit bogged down, but it is hard to know if that is a sign of a problem, a side effect of the subtle sexism that still exists in my field, a symptom of my scanner nature not getting what it wants, or just a sign that I'm mid-career and the novelty has worn off.

Also, last yer was a difficult one at work, with lots of projects and not enough help managing them, so not much time to do anything but manage (I'm happiest when I get to do some hands on techie or science work, too). We've hired me some help this year, which should make things much better. Once I get the work load rebalanced, I suspect I'll go back to being pretty happy in my current job, which really is a good one. Petunia is sleeping through the night fairly regularly now, and we are starting to teach her to go to sleep without company. The kids play on their own more, too. All of these things together have given me more time for my hobbies and non-work projects, which will probably keep the scanner part of me happy.

So why I am angsty? Well, I still doubt that I'll be able to retire from a job similar to the one I am doing now- the biotech industry seems to moving toward more small, barely scraping by sort of companies, which means fewer companies that have the money to invest in the things I do. I think that is sad, and that good IT can make companies of all sizes more productive, but if the money isn't there, it isn't there. I have been kicking around ideas for ways to solve that problem (and also keep me employed), but nothing compelling has coalesced yet.

Given that uncertainty and the ever present possibility that my non-work projects won't keep my inner scanner happy and I'll need to move on to something different, I want to have a contingency plan. This became clear early last year, and I spent a fair amount of time thinking about things, until I came up with a plan. I was going to steer my non-work projects towards things that might either make me money or build skills for a second career. I even had a list of projects sketched out, with a plan for how I would progress through them. The fact that I don't actually know what I'd want to do for a second career made this challenging, but I think I managed to come up with some good ideas. I figured that would keep me happy for at least 5 more years at my current job (assuming the job lasts that long!) thereby giving us time to pay off our second mortgage and get both kids out of day care and into public school. Those two things would free up a lot of our income, and we would no longer need my salary quite so much- giving me the freedom to take more career risks, perhaps even do something as risky as start my own company.

Guess I just keep going

And then my company threw a big monkey wrench into all of my plans. They announced that we are moving to a new building that is in a far less convenient location for me. It will be OK once Petunia is in Kindergarten- taking my commute from an average of 20-30 minutes to approximately 30-40 minutes. Unfortunately, Petunia doesn't start Kindergarten for another 2.5 years, and while she is still in day care, the commute is much, much worse.

And then my husband's company announced they were moving, too, and one of their three possible sites was even more horrible for us than my company's new site.

My 5 year plan crumbled. Suddenly it seemed like I might need to make a decision about my current career path as early as this year. Mr. Snarky announced he'd probably change jobs rather than tolerate the commute if his company moved to the distant site. If he changed jobs, would I want to do something risky with my career before we saw how his new job went?

We talked about moving Petunia to a different day care, and while that was an option we would have considered if Mr. Snarky's company moved to our least favored site, we hated it. We love our day care, and so does Petunia.

Luckily, Mr. Snarky's company decided to move to one of our preferred sites, choosing a location that is right around the corner from where they are now. This means that Petunia can stay at her day care- instead of splitting the child shuttling duties into drop off and pick up, we'll split by child. I'll do all the Pumpkin shuttling, and Mr. Snarky will do all the Petunia shuttling. I'm still not thrilled about my company's new location, but I think we can make it work.

However, to make it work, we may need to get some more help and/or cut some new corners. I've been gathering ideas in the background, hoping to convince myself that my 5 year plan can continue. I'm nervous that the commute will be longer than I expect, and that even if it isn't, the extra time in the car will leech away so much time that I won't be able to make even the excruciatingly slow progress on my non-work projects that I make now. I won't know for certain until we're in the new building and I see how the commute really goes, but I'm not very good at "wait and see." So here is my list of ideas so far:

1. I can get some books on CD or podcasts to make me feel like the longer commute is not completely wasted time. Or I could find some better "learn Spanish in your car" CDs. The ones I have are so dull that I stopped listening to them. (One plus of the new arrangement will be that my commutes will be child-free.)
2. We could rejigger our evening routines and eat dinner at 6:30 instead of 6, taking some of the time pressure off my commute. (Pumpkin would still need to be picked up no later than 6, though. The "cost" of this change would be the loss of after dinner playtime and a slightly more harried feel to our evenings.)
3. We could hire a household assistant, to do some of our errands- and also possibly to get our dinners started and/or pick up Pumpkin.
4. We could upgrade our kitchen and get a fancy stove that we could program to start boiling water before I got home (not sure if I could convince myself to do that, though- what if I got delayed and the pan boiled dry?)
5. We could eat even less inspired weeknight dinners than we do now. Currently, I try to make something sort of interesting twice a week. We eat leftovers once, pasta with sauce from a jar once, and frozen pizza once. We could go up to two leftovers and add in something like quesadillas (currently a weekend lunch item).

What would you do? Anyone have any other ideas to throw into the mix?