Meg Houston Maker

On Narrative

There are a few essential requirements of narrative. Here are two.

The author must show us something of what she knows to be true. She must find something to say, something worth saying. The author does not tell this story; rather, the story tells the story, it transforms itself by its own telling. The author must simply stay out of the story’s way, mindful not to break frame.

By the end of the story, the reader will have moved from one place to another, riding the momentum of the narrative. Something must be changed, something must be different. The reader should be able to answer the question, “What was it all about?” His answer won’t be the same as the author’s. That’s okay.

 

 

One Line of Advice to Bloggers

Try referring to your blog as a "publication," your efforts as "writing," and your posts as "articles." Then watch what happens.

On the Journal

Writers: one of the best ways to improve your writing is to keep a journal, and to write in it daily. It works as do Czerny studies for pianists, keeping you flexible and practiced. Also, private writing will lessen your urge to infuse your public writing with your own personal machinations. By focusing your journal on yourself, you can better focus your writing on your reader.

A Letter to my Donor

 
Dear Mr. X, 

On Sunday, 12 June 2011, I received my Masters of Arts in Liberal Studies degree from Dartmouth College. It had taken me six years to complete my studies while working full time, but this spring I had at last finished my thesis, a nonfiction account of an effort to find, fix, re-make, and re-make again a house in Lyme, New Hampshire. So with my fellow graduates, under gray skies that threatened to soak us all, I donned robes and hood and mortarboard, and marched onto the Green. 

I was seated next to a colleague who had likewise pursued Creative Writing in the MALS program, an accomplished and talented writer who, like me, had undertaken graduate study in mid-life. The ceremonies are a lengthy affair, and the advanced degree candidates must sit through interminable speeches, plus forty-five minutes of undergraduate degree conferral. (Such is ceremony.) During one particularly slow moment, my colleague began idly perusing the printed program. Suddenly, she pointed to the page with a jolt. “Meg, look! You won the thesis award!”

When I enrolled in the MALS program in the winter of 2005, I had intended to focus my scholarship on studies in human-computer interaction, a field loosely connected to my career in software and web services. But my first course was in nonfiction writing, and in nine weeks I learned, first, that I enjoyed writing, and second, that it was one of the hardest things I could do. My professor was unfailingly patient, gamely reading through my novice efforts and pointing out the parts that were working well. But he also had an uncanny ability to see what was missing, to ask the key question that could crack open a piece at its hinge and lay bare its works for inspection. Writing is thinking, and thinking is hard.

As I worked my way through the creative writing curriculum, writing became part of my life’s mechanics, an essential process, deeply internal. It served as a kind of thinking-through in text of the subjects that most compelled me: nature, culture, food, wine, place, home, meaning, creativity. The results were usually shared only with one professor and those scattered others to whom it was assigned (like my classmates), or on whom it was foisted (like my husband). Working on my thesis these last several months, I expanded my understanding of the craft of writing, and developed techniques for planning and working out a book-length project. But I also learned more about myself, about what I know to be true about the poetics and praxis of home, and about what it means to make my own true place in the world—as a woman, wife, gardener, cook, and homemaker.

When my colleague blurted that I had won the award that bears your name, the news sent me reeling, delighted but also thoroughly astonished. I had heard about the award, of course, but that day the MALS program was graduating forty-one scholars, every one deserving of special approbation, and it was a great honor to be tapped by the faculty committee. Winning said, in essence, you are worthy, and your writing is good; it matters.

But in the very next instant, I realized something else, too, something much more important: that while writing is a deeply internal process, it is not merely internal. Writing goes forth, reaches with long fingers and toes, fingers its way into another’s mind, and maybe even changes it. Writing is, or can be, one of the most intimate and beautiful of acts. And so that moment on the Green I was suddenly forced to acknowledge that I now had yet another role, and that there was yet another dimension constituting my true place in this world: as a writer.

Thank you, Mr. X, for giving me a jewel that I will cherish always.

Faithfully yours,
Meg Houston Maker ’87, MALS ’11 

 

Words of the Day, 2009

When I encounter a word I don’t know, or don't know well, I look it up and write it on a list. Often later, reviewing the list, I've forgotten what the word means, this word that had such audacity as to be new to me—me, a word person, right? So I look it up again, and since I’ve read its meaning once before, the word is a little more familiar. But it's now bereft of context, detached from its original mooring, stripped clean, incorporeal. It's no longer noun or adjective or verb; it cannot do the work of meaning making. It just lies mutely among its brethren, waiting.

I look at this list every day, lately, this impertinent, chanting crowd: violacious, adumbrate, exculpate, eidetic. And I pluck one word from its raucous company, and give it primacy that day. One day recently was cathexis. It was a deeply cathexis day. Another day was jejune, another revenant.

And so the word, connected to its day, re-acquires context, meaning, its queer significance. It can do some work, and so it lives again. 

addlepated adumbrate ambage ambit ambsace anent anodyne antipodal aperçu apothegm apposite argot asperse assay asseveration atrabilious augury bathos bight bonnyclapper carom cathexis cenobite chimera cidevant crepitate demotic dithyrambic doppelgänger dulcet echolalia éclat eidetic elision

enate endomusia equerry eristic esurient exculpate exiguous fantod farrago febrile felix culpa fixity folderol frit gelid gnomic grimalkin hamartia heliopause heuristic hight holpen hortatory ignominy illation inveigle invigilate isogloss jejune jeremiad kilderkin landrace lanthorn magus

malefic manqué merlon metonymy monitory noumenon nowell numinous panegyric parvenu pelage pelf pellucid percipience peripeteia perspicuous philter pinguid pis aller plangent plash pleonastic pneuma popliteal praxis prolix propinquity prosody punctilio purlieu radix refulgent revenant rubescent

runcible sanguine sapid sate sept shrive sigil solecism stilly stochastic stria sublunary surcease syncretize temerarious thew thill threnody Torschlusspanik triskelion twee ungual uxorious veraison videlicet violaceous virescent vocable wattle witting wont

The Everyday Christmas Miracle

Yesterday: Christmas day. The highlight, much more than the jollity of presents and family and music, was the companionship, throughout the day, of a barred owl hunting in our yard.

We saw him first at mid-morning. I had seen out the window a swoop of wings and a settling, and I followed the gesture to the spot where a large bird now sat, streaked and stony, just inside the wood’s shadow. The three of us—my husband, my mother, and I—gathered at the window in the back bedroom to watch him, using our small spotting binoculars to get a better view of his contours and expression. He was beautiful, enchanting, but after awhile this idleness of watching made us restless, and we quit the bedroom for the warmth of the kitchen, called in by the smell of fresh Christmas tea bread warming in the oven, and the tea itself on the boil.

We were eating and sipping and chatting when my mother looked up suddenly and exclaimed, “Oh! Now the owl’s right here by the door!” The bird had pounced on some unseen quarry, and was now half-submerged in snow, his wings lightly aloft. He was not more than fifteen feet from the house, and this time when we gathered at the door to watch him, he looked straight up at us, his eyes meeting ours. These eyes were a deep coal-black, glossy and round, and his bill was a curl of yellow just in the center of his face. Around each eye was a ruffle of buff and gray feathers, a corolla that gave him an awake, penetrating look. It was hard to look away.

Perhaps the lot of us spooked him, or perhaps he had simply missed his quarry, and he retreated suddenly to a high branch at the back corner of the yard. But he quickly settled there and began another scan, twisting his head nearly half-way around, first right, then left, and then looking straight down at the snow below. And then he pounced again, landing hard, feet-first in the snow with a little plash, his head hitting lightly, too, and then raised himself up and stamped his feet once, then paused, and stamped them again. He swiveled to look this way, then that, keeping an eye for his own predators now that he was earthbound. He gave a few more stamps of his feet, and then with one powerful claw hauled from the snow a long black mole, lifeless and sagging, and placed it in his bill. Then, jerking his head once, then twice, then a third time, he swallowed it whole.

Up, and up, he lifted himself again to the trees, and without any pause began to hunt again, scanning downward, scanning the landscape, listening for the minutely audible susurration of tiny feet under snow, of fur and tail brushing channel walls, of the purr and chatter of near-blind mice as they met in surprise and greeted each other in the blue-white dim of their snowy passageways. The owl pounced again, but this time came up empty, and he moved to another part of the yard. And then, after another few attempts, he lifted away, off into the mottled gray of the winter woods, and was gone.

He was back in the afternoon, though, startling me by appearing once again through the window of the back bedroom, this time perched on a thick branch of our towering sugar maple. He saw me again, too, and our eyes met briefly, his black gaze looking deeply through me, and I felt a transfixed chill, as if it were I that was his prey. Then suddenly he broke and turned, looked down into the open plain of the yard, folded open his wings, and glided in a flawless arc to earth, landing hard in the snow once again. But at this moment my cat Rhubarb joined me at the window, and the owl looked up suddenly, startled by the cat’s appearance, and lifted up into the woods again, and again was gone.

◊

Later, I pulled on my tall boots and my parka and gloves, and I stomped into the yard to look at all the places the owl had been. Each landing spot was a hole in the snow about six inches deep, with a small, concave indentation at one edge that could only have been the impression of his bill. Sometimes his wingtips had made a fan in the snow around the hole, and some holes were bermed with loose snow at the edge where he’d kicked his feet.

I dug into every one of these holes, looking, and everywhere I dug I found the tunnels, part of the sub-surface network of comings and goings we humans see only in late spring, when the snow is on its last breath and the channels lie half-open, the plain evidence of a once-vibrant under-snow community. But the owl sees these channels all winter, sees them precisely and with both eyes and ears, and then leaves his own tracks in the snow, his own evidence of the miracle, this everyday miracle of hunting and feeding.

Reading Glasses, Snow Shovel

Earlier this year I canceled my subscription to the New Yorker. The damned thing comes on like a snowstorm, all prose and folly, a blizzard of words. It's impossible to read it all in the time allotted, and the following week it comes around and hits you again. It seemed so bourgeoisie to subscribe and yet not read it all, almost unethical. I felt ashamed of the issues lying about, drifts of them languishing, reminding me of my inattention, my dilettantism. So I canceled.

Usually I feel better after a decision. Not so here. I missed it. Friends would occasionally remark on New Yorker stories they'd read, and while I'm never bothered when a friend talks about a television show (I haven't lived with a television since moving to college), I felt sorely left out. This mattered more. Here was compendium of our best writing by our best writers, the mouthpiece of our culture's mind, our collected ideas about who we are and what we are about. But I had willingly, willfully, set it to mute.

So today I re-subscribed. There was no one to stop me, to throw themselves, open-armed, before me, pleading sense and reason. I figure I'll read it at the gym while climbing my one hundred twenty-five stories on the stair mill (thirty minutes of slightly breathless vertical effort that always lands me, oddly, in the same place).

Batten down the hatches.

The New Corporate Website

Even second generation corporate websites are looking pretty stale these days. The broadcast model, where the website was roughly a hyperlinked brochure, lasted about a decade. But now social media has permanently changed the way we communicate with our customers, and changed our customers' expectations of us. Customers expect dialogue. As I've written before, communications can no longer be one-way or even two-way; they have to be multi-way.

It seems we are finally fully awake to the notion that companies are cultures, and since cultures are people, companies are, essentially, communities or ecosystems of people. More enlightened companies realize that this interconnectedness means they must be transparent in their communications, and that it's no longer possible, in a multi-connected landscape, to speak to one constituency one way and to another constituency another way, or to hide conversations behind thick velvet curtains. This suggests that a corporate website should reflect community, too, a community in which each constituency—customers, shareholders, executives, managers, staffers—has a presence and a voice and is able to talk to, and with, each other.

Some might consider this multi-way conversation to be chaos. But it's only as chaotic as any real community is. Healthy communities have policies, rules of engagement, and norms to cope with chaos. In a corporation, there's usually a clear, if collective, agenda that everyone's working toward: better products, better customer satisfaction, better market share, better profitability, better experience. These goals don't need to be in opposition—and when they are, it can be useful to have a structure in place to work it out.

So maybe the corporate website of today should stop being a fancy brochure, and convert into something more like a social network, one that supports varying roles and myriad conversations. Sure, a customer could still download a Features and Benefits sheet if he wanted, or a pricing table. But the real meat of the matter, the real communication, would happen between constituents as a constantly evolving conversation. Meaning is made in the interstices, and the outcome could be a more organic, and more genuine, experience for everyone.

Magazine Archives: Easier is Better

It must happen a thousand times a day, all across North America. Someone picks up a copy of The New Yorker, maybe in the hair salon, maybe while waiting to tell their psychotherapist about the latest development in their extramarital affair. She, or he, gets through three quarters of an article before her dye job's ready to be rinsed out, or his analyst's previous client exits discreetly through the side door.

So later, maybe much later, she, or he, goes online to the New Yorker website to try to find the article and finish it. Now, who was that author? Was it Atwan or Menand? And what issue was it in? Maybe the Fiction Issue—which was, maybe, a two-week issue. But which two weeks was it? I think it was in... June?

This happened to me, recently (I was the one at the hair salon). The article was in fact by Menand, and it appeared in the June 8th and 15th Fiction Issue. But I didn't remember all that when I began.

There is an "Archive" section of the New Yorker site, and I started there. But the archive doesn't present a list of issue dates, with articles contained therein. Instead, users are invited to search for contents. But search, of course, requires you to know something of what you're searching. My hair appointment was a week ago. I didn't remember all the particulars, so I had to poke away at it to coax the final answer.

Search is nice, but for my use case, a simple taxonomy of the last hundred or so issues, in reverse chronological order, would have gotten me there sooner.

MySQL Poetry

There's just something incredibly ironic and wonderful about this:

Lost connections, lost sessions. What can you do with this poem? How does your perception of these warning statements alter when you view them as art, not life?

Take its advice: "work with this poem."

Modify Your Posts Based on Search Engine Referrals

Last August I posted to my food journal, Maker's Table, tips for making really good turkey burgers. I provided two recipes, but introduced them with a long article about my personal experiences learning to cook meat. This exposition included information on safe cooking temperatures for both solid and ground meat, tackling red meat before moving to the somewhat trickier subject of poultry.

It was one of my longer posts, but it also become one of the most viewed. In the weeks after publication, I noted significant daily traffic to this page arriving from search engine queries about safe cooking temperatures for turkey burgers. In just the last 24 hours, for example, this page has been viewed by people searching for "turkey burgers still pink," "hot [sic] to cook turkey burgers," and "turkey burger internal temperature." 

The problem? I'd buried the lead. In order to learn the right internal temperature for turkey burgers, a reader would have to wade through 500 words of my personal narrative.

The solution? Put the most critical, most sought-after, information at the top. I edited the post, highlighting the key information in a "quick take-away" header with a link to the FDA guidelines. I made sure to include the words "internal temperature" in this introduction, since that seemed to be the keyword phrase most often used in searches.

The result? A clearer and more definitive summary statement in Google results lists (see above). And, hopefully, a better user experience.

Meaningful Titles and Clear Descriptors Drive Traffic

Last Friday I noticed a spike in traffic on my food journal, Maker's Table. A number of visitors had arrived from search engine results for Flaio, an Italian red wine I'd blogged about in March 2008. I'd assumed the wine had recently gotten some press.

That evening, opening our copy of the Wall Street Journal, I got my answer. Dorothy Gaiter and John Brecher had focused their Friday "Tastings" column on Primitivo, the Italian twin of Zinfandel. One of the few wines they really liked was Flaio, and at $10.99, it was also the cheapest. The sidebar showed a photo of the bottle and listed it as "Flaio 2006 (Salento)."

Returning to my site stats, I found at least three search engine referrals for keyword searches of precisely that string. I ran a few of these to recreate the users' search experience—to see what they had seen. My post was on the first page of Google search results for that query, and both the title and search summary gave a good indication the page was a review:

 

I've witnessed similar outcomes when recreating my visitors' searches for turkey burgers, three ingredient meals, and Stella's restaurant in Lyme—three other popular posts whose titles reflect the main point of the story. This underscores that clear titles, good first lines, and detailed particulars in the post body help searchers find your pages.

Sisters

Sisters

My little hurricane,
my little thunder
storming
around the house.
Gray raincloud cats
with claws like lightning
eyes gold like fire.
In your legs,
the strength of
mountains.
In your paws
the speed of light.
Nothing can catch
one
except the other.
Sisters, you live
racing the moon,
winning.

Absolute Pronouncements Corrupt Absolutely

In the last few days I've been treated to an overabundance of blanket pronouncements by experts. Here's a sampling:

"There are only five or six, maybe seven, real authors alive today."
"There are really only three or four pieces of literature that have ever been written about the Holocaust."
"There is almost no literature now. There's a lot of writing, but little of it is literature."
"The Back button is the button of doom."
"Users do not come to browse your site. They have a purpose."
"Web users want actionable content; they don't want to fritter away their time on (otherwise enjoyable) stories that are tangential to their current goals.

Okay, you're entitled to you opinion, and I'm entitled to mine. If you back up your opinion with data, you're more likely to convince me. But if you postulate easily disprovable axioms, or if you postulate axioms that are impossible to prove or disprove, I'm going to shut my mind to you. And that's not really what a pundit wants, is it?

Communicating Design

I'm reading Dan Brown's new book, Communicating Design: Developing Web Site Documentation for Design and Planning (companion website at communicatingdesign.com). The book deconstructs ten core web design process deliverables, including usability test plans, strategy docs, wireframes, site maps, and flow charts.

Brown highlights the critical role process deliverables play in keeping team members, stakeholders, and clients harmonized. It's not enough for a team to focus on the end product—the website, web app, intranet, or microsite they're developing. It's also equally critical to develop clear, concise documents that describe visually, numerically, and structurally what's happening, when, and why.

Perhaps a topic many regard as soporific, but one that's kept me awake at night: How can I convey the complexities of the schedule without using Gantt? How can I show dependencies in the application while keeping the schematic diagram to one page? Should I break this project apart into constituent pieces or show it all together? Do I need more detail?

My key stakeholder-slash-internal client is visual and concrete. I think in Myers-Briggs parlance she's probably an ESFP. She's not going to follow me if I speak abstractions about what a site should be and do. She needs a diagram, and she needs me to talk it through with her. She also prefers to see a design comp early in the process, which is always fraught with danger, since graphic design is optimally done as a very last step.

So all my design deliverables for her and her immediate colleagues are detailed, complete, and convey visually as much intelligence as is available about the project.

Another client naturally inclines toward abstraction. She couldn't really care less about visual design. She needs a different kind of deliverable (and fewer deliverables overall)—outlines and schematic site maps work just fine for her, as do low resolution prototypes.

The point is to adapt your diagrams, designs, and deliverables to your audience. Any good experience designer knows to do that for the end-user. But the message of Brown's book is that we don't really have one client to please, we have two. Which doubles the work, but it also doubles the fun. What's your experience developing design deliverables?

Whose Polar Bear Is It?

I recently completed a survey for Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville, who are developing the third edition of their book Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, a.k.a. "The Polar Bear Book." Here are the questions, and my responses below.

Question 1: What's obviously new in IA? Over the past five years, what major trend(s) have emerged in the field of information architecture?

Okay, this is super obvious, but tagging and folksonomy; i.e., forcing-slash-permitting the user to classify their own content, with messy, ambiguous, inappropriate—and often very powerful results.

Question 2: What's new in IA that's not so obvious? Over the past five years, what's changed in information architecture that hasn't received the attention it should?

Maybe this is an extension of the first question, but collective tagging/authoring/collaborative use is creating an even more webby web, and it seems like it's getting harder to tell the boundaries of a publication or system. So, if a site or app repurposes content from flickr using google's API and custom code, and allows users to add comments and tag or track or classify, whose site is it, really? Whose hand is on the dials? Who's in charge of saying how the thing's information structure should behave? Sites are becoming more like cognitive systems—computationally complex, yet still reason-respecting, and deeply embedded in their enviroments. But the additional complexity can yield an unruly creature that nobody really owns.

Verbing Nouns

In college we learned to use the word "party" as a verb. The grammarians would have argued with us about this, but nobody invited them, because they were no fun. They would just hang on the walls, drinking herbal tea, smoking clove cigarettes, and refusing every invitation to dance.

Anyway, over at Language Log, linguist Geoffrey Pullum writes about the latest fashion in verbing nouns: the practie of completely redefining things as actions. In a recent Salon article, for instance, the author insists that "Science" is a verb. Pullum writes:

It has become clear to me that there's no point in railing against this trope, or telling these people to get the dictionary out. They cannot conceivably think they are talking about the correct part-of-speech classification of words. They don't need or want a dictionary. When they say "is a verb" they clearly mean something like "is something that must be engaged in, or be engaged with, as an active practice".

So, okay, here's my stake in the ground: "experience" is a verb. And "engaging experience" is even more verby. (But verby definitely isn't a verb.)

Information Underload, or, The Medium is No Longer the Message

The Pew Internet & American Life Project (http://www.pewinternet.org/) recently published a report on the role of the internet in helping people make major life decisions. Their report shows 45% of internet users, or about 60 million Americans, went online last year to find information to help them cope with a major illness, secure a job or a place to live, buy a car, choose a college, or make a financial investment. (The report is available for download - 264K PDF.)

Why use the internet? It's simple - it works. For those five decision types above, only 5% of online users felt they got bad information, and nearly two-thirds of users felt the internet was their most important source of information compared to other, offline sources.

More significant, these users "do not feel overwhelmed by the amount of information to consider in making decisions. Information overload was not experienced by the majority of those who relied heavily on the internet in the five key decisions." This is excellent news. It means the web is finally becoming - at least for experienced users - a viable research option, with enough rich content to satisfy users. It also implies that web information design and information architecture best practices are finally taking hold. And it shows that our collective information literacy is rising: that far from feeling overwhelmed, internet users are canny and judicious in their exploratory behavior.

Marshall McLuhan famously quipped that "the medium is the message." But as the information age progresses, the significance of the medium decreases. The information is the message; content is king. People care less how they get it than that they get it. The medium becomes transparent.

Semantic Transparency Redux

Excerpts from my recent paper on semantic transparency - see previous post

Classical artificial intelligence (AI) holds that cognition is computational and so is primarily about information processing. Information is encoded within a cognitive system as symbols, manipulated according to rules to produce meaningful output. Symbols are persistent, reusable, and re-combinable elements that hold their meaning over time and across various contexts. The symbols are tokened in the system whenever they're needed to represent old concepts or to learn new ones. Systems that express these properties are called Physical Symbol System (PSS) architectures, because they run on physical hardware (whether biological or electro-mechanical) and rely on symbolic representation to model mental processes.

Symbols in PSS architectures carry meaning - express semantic properties - within the system. A system is said to be semantically transparent if the symbols express agreed-upon, natural language concepts. For example, in a semantically transparent PSS, the symbol "dog" is the symbol for a dog; "3" is the symbol for the quantity 3; and "John loves Mary" is an aggregation of symbols for "John," "loves," and "Mary." These symbols would be stored in the system's lookup tables or memory; the PSS architecture is structured so that these tokens are searchable and accessible. Simple or rudimentary ideas are thus represented by equally simple symbols, and the task of the system is to manipulate these, following the specified rules and requirements.

In semantically transparent AI systems, therefore, symbols closely map to the way humans articulate a concept. This highlights the significance of semantic transparency to researchers concerned with modeling human cognition. Clark (2001) notes, "These kinds of symbols reflect our own ideas about the task domain... they make it immediately obvious why the physical device is able to respect specific semantic regularities." Clark continues that since Classical AI holds that "intelligence resides at, or close to, the level of deliberative thought. This is... the theoretical motivation for the development of semantically transparent systems - ones that directly encode and exploit the kinds of information that a human agent might consciously access when trying to solve a problem."

Not all cognitive models rely on PSS architectures to represent information and carry meaning. In so-called connectionist systems, knowledge is not tokened in re-purposable symbols, as in the Classical AI model. Rather, information exists as a set of connection weights between the system's processing units. These units are connected to each other with various strengths, and each unit's activation (stimulatory or inhibitory) is a nonlinear function of the sum of all influences from the units feeding into it. Concepts are therefore expressed as a pattern of distributed activity; these models are often called parallel distributed processing (PDP) systems, acknowledging both the distributed nature of the activation patterns and its parallel (versus serial) processing methods.

Such connectionist networks have been found to be successful at both representation and learning. In practice, researchers feed a PDP system data and, depending on the output, tune the connection weights to reduce errors. Once suitably trained, a network can produce accurate output. A simple network was able, for example, to discriminate sonar echoes from undersea mines (vector output <1,0>) and rocks (<0,1>) (see Churchland, 1990). A more complex network was able to convert English text into recognizable speech, "discovering" the 26 English phonemes and the vowel/consonant distinction in the process (see Sejnowski and Rosenberg, 1987).

These systems cannot be said, therefore, to be "semantically transparent" like Classical AI systems. One cannot peer into them and find tokens representing natural language inputs or outputs, like "coffee" or "rain." Clark (2001) observes, "whereas basic physical symbol system approaches displayed a kind of semantic transparency such that familiar words and ideas were rendered as simple inner symbols, connectionist approaches introduced a much greater distance between daily talk and the contents manipulated by the computational system."

However, it is not impossible to regain the concept of "coffee" from a connectionist system. Smolensky (1991) notes that connectionism is committed to the notion that "mental processes are vectors partially specifying the state of a dynamical system (the activities of units in a connectionist network), and that mental processes are specified by the differential equations governing the evolution of that dynamical system." Since the system's knowledge inheres in a set of connection weights, it's possible to mathematically transform the output to reveal its constituent parts.

Clark (2001) observes, "The activation of a given unit... thus signals a semantic fact: but it may be a fact that defies easy description using the words and phrases of daily language. The semantic structure represented by a large pattern of unit activity may be very rich and subtle indeed, and minor differences in such patterns may mark equally subtle differences in contextual nuance."

Connectionist systems, then, are not without semantics; they are merely without readily (human-) accessible semantics. And what's more, the ability within the system to represent a range of values, not simply "on" or "off" states for each tokened value, as in Classical systems, means that connectionist systems offer more flexibility in representing ambiguities and, concomitantly, possibility or potential meaning in a way that a simple activated symbol system could never afford. For example, a connectionist system might read a series of sonar echoes and determine that the readings are more "mine-like" than "rock-like," but not necessarily one or the other, with, e.g., a unit activation pattern of < .8, .2 > rather than < 1, 0 >. Such system, in it capacity to represent these ambiguities, offers a broader expressive range than is possible with simple PSS architectures.

Churchland (1990) notes, "What we are confronting here is a possible conception of 'knowledge' or 'understanding' that owes nothing to the symbolic and sentential categories of current common sense and of traditional approaches in AI... An individual's overall theory-of-the-world, we might venture, is not a large collection or a long list of stored symbolic items. Rather, it is a specific point in that individual's synaptic weight space." In other words, even a system that does not represent knowledge with natural language may, nonetheless, be capable of inhering semantic content - content that is meaningful and, possibly even more representative of the continuous or "gray-scale" nature of human knowledge.

Sources and Further Reading
Churchland, Paul M. (1990). Cognitive Activity in Artificial Neural Networks. In Robert Cummins and Denise Dellarosa Cummins (eds.), Minds, Brains, and Computers: The Foundations of Cognitive Science. Malden MA: Blackwell Publishers, Inc., 2000; pp. 198-216.

Clark, Andy (2001). Mindware. New York, Oxford University Press.

Fodor, Jerry (1975). The Language of Thought: First Approximations. In Robert Cummins and Denise Dellarosa Cummins (eds.), Minds, Brains, and Computers: The Foundations of Cognitive Science. Malden MA: Blackwell Publishers, Inc., 2000; pp. 51-68.

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Show Don't Tell

I'm headed to a higher-ed fundraising conference next week in Chicago. I thought my presentation was in the bag - it's the same one I gave this summer at another conference. But I need to add more "showing" to the "telling." It's hard finding good examples of higher ed sites that create a good user experience. But why? Is it lack of market pressure? Lack of exposure to real product development? I'd love to see higher ed site developers start taking more risks.