Abandoned

This week's Piled Higher and Deeper pretty much sums up how I feel right now.

A more innocent stem cell line

Japanese Researchers at Kyoto University recently announced progress in creating stem cells from adult somatic cells. Stem cells are the earliest types of cells in our bodies and they are valuable to researchers because they have the ability to become different kinds of cells. A liver cell when it reproduces will always produce another liver cell, but a stem cell can produce a liver cell, or a skin cell, or a neuron. Because stem cells are precursors to other kinds of cells, they disappear in the body in very early stages of gestation, so to get new stem cells, they must be harvested from fetuses. That's where the ethics of stem cell research comes in.

But if the researchers are able to convert mature cells back into stem cells, this harvesting will not be necessary and the restrictions that limit harvesting will no longer continue to have an effect on how researchers can obtain and work with stem cells.

Why am I interested in this? Well, in part because a shift in the issues around stem cell research will likely occur if there is no longer an ethical debate about the source of stem cells.

But stem cell researchers who are enthusiastic about the whole field propose that stem cells will have wide application within medicine, including radical rearrangements of our original cellular composition by reprogramming cells to improve them. That would then shift the debate about stem cell research squarely into the question of how much modification a human body can undergo without losing its claim to that identity. And that's one of the questions posed by the technologies that I'm writing about.

It will be interesting to see if this development turns out to be as good as it sounds, or if it's like cold fusion and other 'developments' that have turned out to be disappointing after the hype. But if it does turn out to be replicable, then I'll be interested to see if it shifts the debate surrounding stem cell research the way I think it will.

Boy, is it hot here....

How hot is it?

It's sooooo hot....


Only in Canada, eh?

Redux

Part of those zillion and one things to do lately has been house hunting related stuff. Yep, we're hoping to buy a house. I say hoping because I'm starting to lose hope.

Being out of town made the whole want-to-make-an-offer thing really difficult, but we managed to put together an offer and submitted it earlier this week. We gave them 24 hours to consider it. In the 21st hour, our agent called to say that the sellers had pulled the house from the market. Apparently the job transfer had fallen through so they won't be moving.

I know the advice is not to get your heart set on a house before you've closed, but I admit, I was starting to really get to like this house.

Now it's gone, as are our #2 and #3 picks.

So we're back to square one. And right now, the pickings look pretty slim. It's disappointing for sure.

Wow!

Exhausted. Many things going on. Many different things.

For the first time in a very long time, I'm having difficulty ranking my to-do list because it's all on the "A" list of urgent AND important. Strange feeling. Especially because it's just the last 48 hours and will probably only last another 24. But still a very strange experience for me to not know how to prioritize these three days...

Travellin'

Returning to Boston has felt strange every time (this is the third) and I can't quite figure out why. The first time it felt very strange, and I chalked it up to being the first time. But even this time it feels weird.

Normally I'd guess that it was because I lived here and now am visiting, and the dissonance between 'living here' mode and 'visiting here' mode is too large. But then I realized that I never felt that kind of dissonance when we would return to Calgary to visit while we were living here. Returning to Calgary was always very comfortable, like slipping on a favorite shirt that you haven't worn for a long time. Returning to Boston is more like slipping on a pair of 4 inch heels. Not as comfortable, and you're acutely aware of them at every moment.

There is the possibility that right now I'm just feeling sour over a meeting that didn't go as I had hoped, and that's why I feel weird...

But I've gotten a couple of things done, seen some friends, and I'm looking forward to visiting Cape Cod tomorrow, since I've never been there before. I still have a couple of friends I'm trying to connect with, and I hope it works out. But if it doesn't, I'll just have to catch them the next time.

But it's still a very strange feeling being here - not quite vacation, not quite home.

The lighter side of working the tourism industry in Alberta

It will be a busy day getting ready for a trip to Boston today, and during the trip posting might be light, so I thought I'd leave you with this amusing post, courtesy of a good friend and longtime reader.

All Time Dumbest Questions Asked By Banff Park Tourists

Yes, they're ALL TRUE as heard at the information kiosks
manned by Parks Canada staff!

1. How do the elk know they're supposed to cross at the "Elk Crossing" signs?
2. At what elevation does an elk become a moose?
3. Tourist: "How do you pronounce 'Elk'?"
Park Information Staff: "'Elk.'"
Tourist: "Oh."
4. Are the bears with collars tame?
5. Is there anywhere I can see the bears pose?
6. Is it okay to keep an open bag of bacon on the picnic table, or should I store it in my tent?
7. Where can I find Alpine Flamingos?
8. I saw an animal on the way to Banff today -- could you tell me what it was?
9. Are there birds in Canada?
10. Did I miss the turn off for Canada?
11. Where does Alberta end and Canada begin?
12. Do you have a map of the State of Jasper?
13. Is this the part of Canada that speaks French, or is that Saskatchewan?
14. If I go to British Columbia, do I have to go through Ontario?
15. Which is the way to the Columbia Rice fields?
16. How far is Banff from Canada?
17. What's the best way to see Canada in a day?
18. Do they search you at the B.C. border?
19. When we enter British Columbia, do we have to convert our money to British pounds?
20. Where can I buy a raccoon hat? ALL Canadians own one, don't they?
21. Are there phones in Banff?
22. So it's eight kilometers away... is that in miles?
23. We're on the decibel system, you know.
24. Where can I get my husband really, REALLY, lost??
25. Is that two kilometers by foot or by car?
26. Don't you Canadians know anything?
27. Where do you put the animals at night?
28. Tourist: "How do you get your lakes so blue?"
Park staff: "We take the water out in the winter and paint
the bottom."
Tourist: "Oh!"

It's stampede time!

So we went to the Stampede today. First time I'd gone in probably six years and I would guess only the fourth time I've ever gone. Stampeding is an expensive proposition, and when the kids were young, there wasn't much for them to do. But the day also saw a couple of firsts. I attended my first stampede breakfast held on the grounds itself (Native Calgarians find it pretty hard to avoid some kind of invitation to a stampede breakfast of any sort - there's so many - but most of them take place in other parts of the city). It was also the first time I saw a rodeo, which was kinda neat, but ranks up there with the time I watched a bullfight. Interesting, but not the kind of thing I'm going to pay for a second time. And I bought myself my first ever cowgirl hat. I've owned boots for years - very comfy things - but never had a hat. Guess now I'm fully outfitted!

If you've been to the Calgary stampede before, there's not much to say. If you haven't, well, it's hard to describe in just a few words. It's part midway, part rodeo, part agricultural show, part place where old people spend the day looking at all the vehicles, RVs, and houses that you can buy lottery tickets for. It's certainly much more diverse than the agricultural show that was held in the city I grew up in, but after Universal Studios and Six Flags, the kids found the midway much more disappointing than they remembered it.

So that's how I spent my day. Eating free food, paying way too much for a few midway rides, and trying to avoid the exhaustion, sunburn, and heat stroke that so often accompany a trip to the Stampede. I'm happy to say I managed to avoid all of them.

Running into the wind

I was running into the wind for part of my run today and it reminded me of a metaphor I came across while reading Privilege: A Reader. I don't have the exact quote in front of me, but I'll paraphrse:

For people coming from unprivileged positions, running always feels like running into the wind. You're well aware of the wind, and you have to work hard at making progress. It often feels like you expend a lot of energy without actually moving forward. For people in privileged positions, running always feels like the wind is at your back. The running feels easy and you don't even notice the wind helping you along. It feels like it's all you and it feels good.

That got me thinking about my own position vis a vis privilege. Sometimes I am in privileged categories. Sometimes I am not.

I'm sure that I don't notice how easy it is as a white person to go places, to be heard, to be accepted, or even recognized. Certainly walking into a business, an office, a classroom, an English department, the post office, a public park, or any other myriad places don't cause me to pause for a moment. I never wonder if I will be accepted, if I will be able to conduct business, or if I will meet with a racist who will ignore me, not take me seriously, or even insult me.

I know I take these things for granted. I know how blind I am to how my experience is different than for others because friends have told me they don't experience the world the same way I do. When I have a rude waitress, I assume she's just rude to everyone. It doesn't occur to me that she might just be being rude to me because of the way I look.

But I have friends who wonder about it all the time. Because they don't look like me. And they have had rude waitresses who were only rude to them. It really makes you think when you're confronted with someone else's experience like that. But it's also very easy to forget those things when the wind is at your back and you feel like everything's fine.

The one thing that does remind me that the wind isn't always at my back is my gender. Although as a white woman, my colour doesn't affect the way people interact with me (for the most part anyway), my gender sometimes has, and that's when I really have gotten a taste of running into the wind.

There are two times that really stand out in my mind when I think about having problems getting things done, getting my voice heard, as a woman. One happened just a few months ago. I was introduced through work to a subject matter expert who was going to provide us with some content for a course. During our initial meeting, I had a great deal of difficulty making and holding eye contact with him. At first I thought it was a cultural effect, or perhaps because I was the new person in the room. But then the second time we met, I had to reintroduce myself because he had forgotten my name.

Now I've got a bad memory for names - not faces so much - but certainly names, so I can understand lapses. Problem is, he didn't have any problem remembering all the men's names at that meeting. I still didn't think much of it until the third time we met. I had exchanged emails with this man several times, met him twice, and now we were scheduled to meet at an office to do some work. We both approached the (locked) office at the appointed time. He turned to me, without an ounce of recognition in his face and said, "Do you know when this office opens? I'm supposed to meet some people here". I responded that I too was supposed to be here and introduced myself for the third time. He didn't seem the least embarassed that he hadn't recognized me.

I felt absolutely invisible at that point. In fact, I wished I was invisible and didn't have to go through with the rest of the meeting. But then I got angry after we went inside and started working, only to find that he hadn't read the document I'd sent him ahead of time so that he could be prepared. He hadn't bothered to learn my name, and he hadn't bothered to read the document I'd created that he needed for the meeting. We spent two hours together that day. I wonder if he'll remember me when we meet next time?

The other really distinctive time was a double whammy - two men ignoring me for the price of one!

I was serving as chairperson of a residents council and we had decided we wanted to erect a new playground for the kids in the area. This was going to be a big undertaking; we had to raise money, and we had to get all kinds of permissions from various interested parties. It was a bigger project than we'd ever undertaken before, so it required a lot of planning.

One of the first steps was to get some permissions. I contacted the appropriate gentleman and left a voice mail message. And then a while later I left another. And another. And another. I even popped in unannounced at his workplace to try to catch him. No luck. Reporting my failure to gain permission back to the council, I was told this wasn't surprising because this man didn't like talking to women.

The council secretary called him, got a coffee date within a week and permission during that initial meeting. The secretary was a man.

I was angry. But we had our permission.

Next step was to generate funding. We had already received two generous donations, but we still needed to do some fundraising and throw our own money into the pot as well. During one meeting, we discussed our current financial situation as well as fundraising options. We knew we'd been running a surplus for the last few years, so we made a motion requiring the treasurer to provide a report on how much surplus we had.

During the meeting the next month, we anticipated a report from the treasurer. He refused to give it. I was shocked. I asked if he had misunderstood the motion of the previous month. He replied that he had not. But he did not feel that he should reveal how much surplus we had. He did not think we would be satisfied with spending just the surplus but that we would dip into the contingency fund as well. The council as a whole reassured him we knew the importance of the contingency fund and would not dip into it, and re-stated the request, asking for the report the next month.

Well, next month came and we awaited the report. I really had thought that the previous month had simply been a misunderstanding, and with the entire council reaffirming their desire for a report, it would be produced. It was not. The treasurer again refused. This time it got personal. He said he would not produce a report if I was the chairperson, suggesting that if the secretary or one of the other male members of the council were chair, he would produce it.

---

It's a very frustrating feeling to know that you're smart, capable, and doing a fairly good job in this volunteer position but that someone else thinks you cannot possibly understand accounting principles simply because of your gender. It's as if the person who discounts you because of your gender is lying, saying things about you that aren't true, and in a sense, when someone says you can't do something because of your gender, even though you know yourself capable of it, it is like a lie.

But it's mostly frustrating because you know there is nothing you can do about it. You cannot reason with a person who is prejudiced, particularly if they are prejudiced against you, because they won't listen to you. You have nothing important to say. In this case, it also disrespected everyone else on the council and in the community who voted and said, "yes, she's capable of doing this job".

It's hard to describe how horrible it feels. In this case, I knew he was wrong. And there was some consolation in that. But it still rocks your core sense of who you are, this realization that some people can't see past the surface.

I've probably been lucky in having very few experiences like that. But if you ran into the same prejudice time and time again, when it seems that everyone is telling you the same thing... that you're not capable, or not trustworthy, or invisible... well, wouldn't you just start believing it after a while? If you think so highly of yourself but everyone else around you seems to disagree, wouldn't you start to doubt yourself? Might you not start to believe that what all those people are saying must be true?

That's the danger of continuing to let people struggle and run into the wind. Because running into the wind is hard. And if it never let up, if you never get the chance to feel yourself running under your own steam, never get to see how good you can do without being encumbered by the wind, you'd just give up after a while. Why spend so much time and energy for so little gain? Collectively, we lose a little everytime someone drops out of the race.

That's why every time I hear someone complain about reverse discrimination, I don't worry too much. Sure, any kind of discrimination is bad. We should not encourage it. But when someone who's been running with the wind at their back suddenly turns the corner into the wind, they get a small taste of what it's like for other people. And maybe that's not a bad thing.

I'm not saying I run into the wind all of the time, or even most of the time. Mostly the wind is at my back and life seems good. But those times when the wind shifts and blasts me in the face, making it hard to make any progress are good for me. They remind me that the wind is always there, even if I don't feel it very often. We all need to run into the wind once in a while, to remind us what it feels like to do so.

The world needs more teachers

Well, maybe it doesn't need more teachers... but it certainly does need more people who recognize that not everyone was born knowing what they know. And sometimes the knowledge that other people need in order to understand your area of expertise is not the same as the knowledge you need to succeed as an expert.

This instructional design job has been pushing me to the limits of my intuition and practical sense. I've actually been grateful for my age, and my life experiences (even the less pleasant ones) in working this job because I really don't know that someone fresh out of university in their early twenties could actually do this job the way it is structured. That's because I am so frequently required to draw upon my own experiences in interpreting the material provided by experts in order to present it so that the user can understand it.

I've worked on two projects from start to finish and have started about a dozen more that are in various stages of stagnation, searches for funding, or slow and steady progress. And in pretty much every case, the information that I'm given in the beginning of the project is very sparse.

Most of the time when I create an outline for a course, I'm relying upon my own sense of what kind of information might need to be transmitted to a user. In some ways, there's an advantage in not knowing anything. As the designer, I'm in the same position at the beginning of a project as the user - usually knowing nothing of the topic - which means I've got a good idea what the user will feel like going through the course. But that doesn't make it any easier to create the course.

Sometimes however, the group or person supplying (or not supplying) me with information about the course, goes so off target that it takes me a while to realize that what they're telling me about their area of expertise is something that the user will not need. It might be a set of skills or knowledges that the expert uses everyday, and so he/she thinks the user should know about it too. But it really just muddies up the picture.

I just spent several hours figuring this out for one of our projects. The outline the client gave me for the video component of the course is poorly organized because it's not in chronological order. For someone who works there, this would not be confusing, but for me, it took a long time to figure out that the last dozen scenes they had mapped out actually belong earlier in the sequence.

You can also tell there are several "hot button" issues for employees in this organization, because they continually return to these issues in the outline, but there's no recognition that
a) the user has no interest in issues that do not affect him/her, and
b) revealing these issues and inside jokes (yes, there's some kind of joke about a sheep that I just don't get) will just tarnish their reputation with the user, which would counteract what they're trying to do in the project.

I realize it's my job to organize the content of the course for the best delivery and in the most useful manner for the user, but it really is rather astonishing how narrow some people are when contemplating what their work might look like to outsiders.

I'm willing to bet that the person who wrote the document had some senority in the organization, but frankly, I would've had a much better idea of what users need to know if they'd had the guy who was hired a week ago do it. That fresh perspective would've created a document more in tune with the average user of the program and been a far more effective tool for me in helping them create an online program that will educate users about the organization.

After all, someone took a lot of time to put together a power point presentation and a twenty page outline of the course, without thinking for a moment what the user needs to know. All the producer of this document thought about was how their work is affected by this issue. But it's the user who is the focus of the project, just as the student should be the focus of classroom pedagogy. That's what I mean by the post title - the world needs more people who can think like teachers rather than practitioners.

LATER: So I create this post out of minor frustration at a current work project. I finally muddle through an outline for the elearning component and decide to move on to working on my dissertation (yes, I know it's Friday night, why do you ask?). I'm reading up on metaphor, since part of my argument in the dissertation will be that clones and cyborgs are metaphors for other things, and I come across this passage in an interaction designer's thesis:

One of the challenges of being a designer is the difficulty of working in unfamiliar subject areas. Designers are often thrust into domains where they have little to no background knowledge. Traditionally, the way to overcome this is to utilize the help of a subject area expert. But this too can be problematic, as the expert might have too much knowledge and things that seem obvious to him or her are not as apparent to the designer.

Kinda interesting to read of someone else's similar frustration (which is a much nicer description than mine), and in a different line of work - still design, but a different kind of design. There's some solace in knowing other designers often pull their hair out too!

Argh! the agony!

For someone who will be required to write for the rest of her career, I really dislike the writing process sometimes! Some days, it's really, really hard to get words down on paper.

I'm furiously trying to finish that chapter I've been asked to submit. It's not due till the end of the summer, but I want to have it ready and sent to my advisor so she can read it and give me some feedback next week when I (hopefully) see her. But right now, just trying to organize my thoughts is really difficult.

In fact, it's more accurate to say that I have a hard time thinking, rather than a hard time writing. Writing it easy. Writing intelligent, well thought-out arguments, that's the hard part! Ugh...

Who knows how long this will last?

Just popping in to post what's been going on. Don't know how long my internet connection will last though...

On Friday we had a wicked thunderstorm that knocked out our internet. The company had to repair it; by Saturday, all our neighbors had access but we still didn't so we booked a repair appointment. The appointment isn't till Friday, but the internet has been sporadically working since last night.

Sporadic service is less annoying than no service. But since this will be the 4th - 4th! - time since September (yes, that's only 10 months) that we've had someone have to come fix it, I'm getting pretty annoyed overall.

So posting will likely also be sporadic...

This weekend felt like an actual weekend, you know where people do things other than read books and sit in front of a computer all weekend! We went house shopping on Saturday - an eyeopener and very interesting first-time experience for me!

On Sunday we had a really nice Canada Day barbecue - smaller turnout than last year, but entirely different crowd, so not surprising. And it was still a really nice day (well, except for the perpetual wind here in Little City on the Prairie - can't wait till we move into Big City on the Prairie!)

Monday we went hiking up Castle Mountain. A pretty big elevation gain for the distance, so we all pushed ourselves and are a little sore now. But gorgeous views at the top. I'll try to post photos if the internet stays on.

You know, two weeks ago when we lost the internet, I was complaining to a friend who pointed out that it's actually nice to do without the connection sometimes. I agree that it's nice to be disconnected. But I do resent that I don't have a choice over when I'm connected and when I'm not. That's what's so annoying about this whole thing. So keep your fingers crossed for me that stays working, okay?