July 2009 Archives

Dr Linus Nyiwul's dissertation defense was conducted almost exclusively in the language of math, with very little generic English explanation for the non-resource management layperson. So I cannot write very much about it, except that it was obvious that his faculty members are excited about the potential of this framework Dr Nyiwul has created for government regulators to exploit market mechanisms by leveraging emissions standards against the needs of firms to attract investors.

There are a couple of premises that Dr Nyiwul builds upon, including a perception that investors would prefer to put their money into "green" companies, and evidence that companies who improve their own environmental management systems experience increases in stock value (e.g., Feldman 1996). Dr Nyiwul described a whole lot of complicated stuff that needs to be properly balanced:

• setting a standard,
  
• needing to monitor to ensure companies are meeting the standard,
  
• keeping the cost of monitoring low enough to be reasonable (for government) while
  
• making the threat of monitoring real enough that companies prefer to comply rather than risk being caught and having to pay the penalty.
  

Somehow all those things get crunched through some equations that calculate

1. "marginal damage" (whatever this means! it apparently refers wholistically to "society") and
2. monitoring costs (to the government) and
3. costs of compliance (for the firms)

.... now, where it gets real interesting is when the government establishes two emissions standards: a regular standard (the minimum to be deemed "in compliance" and avoid penalties) and an overcompliance standard - which would earn a special certification proving uber-greenness (or something en route to such glorified status). There is pilot project currently underway, the National Environmental Performance Track (NEPT), which has weaknesses but whose results - plugged into Dr Nyiwul's equations - demonstrates that TWO STANDARDS IS GOOD POLICY! Not to mention that firms which earn the overcompliance certification have a special marketing asset to appeal to investors. (They have to meet the minimum "regular" standard first, then apply and demonstrate accomplishment of the overcompliance standard.)

There was some fancy problem-framing, as Linus described one finding, saying that it came about in one way if you set the problem up this way, and comes about in another way if you set the problem up that way. (I love the fact that subjectivity can be found in math!) There are some issues with firms getting to self-report emissions (apparently without verification, unless the regulator goes to conduct the actual monitoring?) And there was quite a discussion about looking at the problem endogamously: with free entry into and out of the market. And output and size effects really matter (but cannot be reversed) in terms of the direct and indirect effects of enforcement costs. Yea, I don't really know what those sentences mean in "real" economic terms, but there may be other things in play at times which can lead to inconclusive results.

but.... drumroll please! Dr Linus Nyiwul concludes, and his faculty agree:

The challenges that issue forth from Dr Nyiwul's work include (in no particular order):

1. identifying which are the important uncertainties (given that anything could be uncertain except for whatever is under direct regulatory monitoring)


2. defining clearly what "overcompliance" means (if "compliance" means paying the right tax, i.e., reducing emissions in order to minimize tax.... does overcompliance move a firm into a "credit" situation?)


3. how to extend the framework from a single firm to an industry


4. identifying how the framework as it is fits within known policy issues and concerns, and


5. extending the frame beyond emissions to look at a lot of other policy issues.

For her final oral examination for a Ph.D in Resource Economics, Siny Joseph presented an analysis of Country of Origin Labeling (COOL) for seafood. I echo the words of the external member of her committee, who said,


Dr Siny Joseph's field is I.O. Economics - a term that I had to Google after the defense! My complete ignorance of the jargon in this field should alert you to the high probability that I have misconstrued or misunderstood major elements of her work. I will do my best to summarize and hope for correcting comments as needed.

Extrapolating from the wikipedia entry and my limited exposure to other disciplines, Industrial Organization explores the economic interaction between two dynamic forces:

1. the strategic behavior of firms (which I believe is the purview of my friends specializing in strategic management) and
2. the structures of markets (statistical analysis like I've never seen!)

Given my lowest-score-in-the-cohort competence in all things math, most of the substance of Siny's analysis and discussion with her Committee Members occurred in a language I cannot even pretend to understand: replete with "k-bars," and K's with subscript L's and H's, "thetas" and fixed parameter values composing profit maximization formulas... Go grrl go! Her findings, however, were described in comprehensible English - and they are fascinating.

Seventy percent of seafood purchased by consumers in the U.S. is imported; of these imports, 80% comes from less developed countries. COOL (Country of Origin Labeling) is legislation introduced in the 2002 Farm Bill, and implemented with seafood in 2005, with the idea that food quality and food safety are linked with where the food originates. Coincidentally, COOL is being extended to more foods this year with continuing debate over exemptions and on-going criticism of delays, making Dr Joseph's research findings immediately relevant. Regarding seafood, huge sectors are exempt: restaurants and other food service providers, specifically, and products deemed to be "processed." In general, then, COOL applies to the seafood you buy in a grocery store or market to cook at home.

It seems the first major task in an I.O. economic analysis is to define the boundary between what is included and what is excluded from the study. Siny focused on the US market, presumably because the boundaries could be readily established. (In a case study on shrimp, she explained the distinction between a "covered" and "uncovered" market, explaining she'd had to go with the former - specifically an undifferentiated market - because the mathematical expressions for the latter were unmanageable. Basically (I think!) this means using idealized equations rather than ones more representative of real life.) Generally, Americans will assume that seafood of domestic origin is of higher quality than seafood of foreign origin, and consumers are most willing to pay the costs of labeling during and immediately after food scares - so that they (we, smile) can make (at least) this basic differentiation.

But (I kept thinking to myself) - labeling after a scare doesn't do much to protect consumers during the scare and of course has no contribution to risk prevention whatsoever. So why isn't labeling just done, as a matter of business habit? "Because," Dr Joseph explained, "firms can masquerade low quality seafood as high quality when consumers don't have all the information, and that's where the profit comes from." She and her committee members debated nuances of the statistical measurements, recommending and justifying choices of particular statistical tools, but did not question Siny's basic finding that (now, with only three years of info available) the greatest profit comes under what's called "voluntary COOL" (which does occur with some seafood products), followed by partial implementation of COOL (the status quo), and drops the lowest under "total COOL" - an ideal she recommends because "real consumption is greatest when there is full implementation of COOL."

The rub for me during the whole presentation is the use of this indicator called WTP: Willingness to Pay. What I'd like to see is a complementary WTP2 (squared) equation: Willingness to Profit. Somehow the whole debate seems framed with WTP2 as an unquestionable given - companies have the inalienable right to maximize profit and consumers have to pay for safety. It just strikes me as wrong; at least out-of-balance. Firms can afford to pay much more than any individual can! Anyway, Siny's Committee engaged vigorously with her findings: "I like the story you're trying to tell," said a professor by speakerphone, wondering about pursuing the angle of diversion, and all of them wondering about policy recommendations based on these findings.

There was a measure of "Total Welfare" that supposedly mixes the best consumer outcome with the best business outcome.... and Dr Joseph did present some evidence that companies would label voluntarily under certain/specific conditions (of known/demonstrated consumer demand?), but for the most part companies are trying to duck this completely. For instance, shrimp traders are required to label unprocessed shrimp, so they would rather do something that qualifies as "processing" in order to avoid labeling. Doesn't it cost to do that, too? Honest - I get very confused! Why is one type of cost preferable to another? I think someone needs to institute an equation such that consumer WTP cannot exceed 1/2 the square root of the actual incurred cost apportioned over the entire volume in order to somehow link a decrease in the firm's WTP2 (willingness to profit) with the increase consumers are willing to pay. (Which is probably why I'm not an economist.)

Nonetheless, even if the current data is not totally amenable to a single clear and concise argumentative point, I definitely agree with Siny's committee member: "I like your plan of attack." I want to be able to argue convincingly that the government (through legislation) should be on the consumer's side - not only in the grocery store, but I would also like to be able to confirm the quality of seafood purchased in restaurants.

Keep it up, Dr Siny Joseph!

Sven thought it appropriate to frame our first meeting with a bio-fact he'd just learned from the local dinosaur museum. I'm not a biologist, so I don't know the life chances of tadpoles, but I certainly hope the light of our collaboration isn't so bright that we get eaten by bats!

Things happen.
Things happen and we make up their reasons.

We never know if others perceive phenomena in the same way that we do; all we have are references points of presence, perception, and language. Today, gazing upon the Saw Mill River, I wondered if I hadn't been alone, if someone was with me, would they have been as immersed in the gentle rumble of these quick shallow rapids as I was? And what of previous shared experiences - do we remember them similarly? If we both/all recall the event, are the same or different features highlighted in memory? How did we interpret it at the time, and has that interpretation become more fixed and rigid, or has it softened, becoming more fluid with the expanded lens of hindsight?

At any junction history stretches back, a biographical momentum that imbues each person with impetus for being in the present moment of shared spacetime. Until the moment of meeting, each person is on an independent course - a course shaped by previous relationships and experiences but as yet unaffected by the now-unfolding encounter. What will come from contact is unpredictable, yet not beyond the ken of knowledge, intuition, and intention. What do we want to result from mutual exposure, from the mixing of our life trajectories?

Upon return to Amherst I stumbled into another beginning - a friend's dream project, well underway. Could these two beginnings, initiated so close in time albeit on opposite sides of the Atlantic, complement each other? And if they could, what would be my role? I've been thinking (metaphorically, as I do) that I want to be part of a pile supporting bridges over deep water. I'm not "a" bridge, myself, and the support I can offer is insufficient of itself to keep any bridge aloft and protected from scour. But, perhaps, from the relative stability of my own perch . . . this web of inter-relations connecting mentors, colleagues, friends, professional contacts . . .

and meanwhile, as always, the river flows on.

somewhere between Albuquerque and Amherst

While hanging out with mom last week, I finally asked her about blogging. Did she remember the writings about Uncle Sam? I've been weighing whether or not to do this since very soon after the emergency notification posted to my Facebook Wall by my sister-in-law. That day, I blundered my way through the opening of the Bakhtin conference trying to pay attention but distracted with worry. The hospital would tell me nothing because mom had not authorized them to do so. By the time (two days later) that Michael asked me about lying (in relation to the conference topics and his research on blogs), I had a quasi-grip on mom's medical situation halfway around the world. She had talked her way out of emergency surgery to tend a bit of emotional/relational business that she simply refused to leave undone in face of the (admittedly very small) risk of dying under anaesthesia. We had spoken, and I cannot recall - ever - her being so clear, direct, and sure of what mattered most and what she needed to do about it. Not only did she convince the hospital psychologists that she was sane, "Sissie" had also convinced her siblings along with me and my brother that this was the way things were going to be. And so they were.

The surgery to remove a large mass from her colon was, wouldn't you know, only the tip of the iceberg. We're still waiting results of a bone scan, but we know that chemo of one sort or another lies ahead, and in the meantime - because why have one major ailment when two are possible?! - the vertigo she'd been having for a few months suddenly worsened, and was traced to a 70% blockage in both carotid arteries. She'll have surgery to clean the plumbing in the left carotid in a few weeks..... the right carotid will get its turn in due time.

While I tried to stay focused on the last month of fieldwork, family members played tag team and kept mom company and in good care. Brother Rich, btw, has just been stellar.

Despite everyone's love and attention, it felt good to finally lay my own eyes on mom some six weeks after the drama began! After learning results of the first battery of tests, we spent most of our time walking, talking, eating, and just hanging out. Over the weekend we had a wonderful day with my good, longtime friend Laurel, and then mom took the next day just to read. Mom gave me the book after she'd finished, to read on the flight home. "It's painful in the beginning," she said, "but stick with it. You'll like it!"

After our fun day sightseeing I remained in tourist mode, so Laurel and I squeezed in a visit to the Albuquerque Museum of Art & History. They had an exhibit called The Shape of Time, about Charles Ross's massive earth/artwork Star Axis, that I wanted to see. The security guard allowed me to take photos of the brief description by museum curators, describing how "star geometry [is] anchored in earth and rock," enabling viewers to track precession - the 26,000 year cycle of the earth's shifting axis.

Also on display was an incredible collection of black and white photographs by Craig Varjabedian. Ghost Ranch became the home and inspiration of Georgia O'Keefe, who named one her paintings From the Faraway Nearby.

"Do you ever lie [on the blog]?"

I practically choked. It was not only an inappropriate moment to be forthcoming and blurt fear but also inopportune. At least I've learned that over the years of externally processing emotional experiences - and living through the interactive, relational consequences. But there was the question, the challenge, the opportunity, the dare: the crisis, right in my face, immediately. Always - until that very moment - when people asked me about blogging I would explain that I write about the most important thing happening in my immediate subjective world. These things vary considerably, from politics in the world at large to learning about language or cognition or interpretation to microsocial interactions with friends. But in that moment I knew I had to choose along a public/private dimension - would that make it a lie?

No. Yet the dilemma remained. Why do I blog? Why have I kept at it all this time? Do I really believe in my earliest inspirations for doing this public process of developing a consciousness . . . or will I shrink at the sharpest moment?

"To be able to reproduce a feeling so that others could recognize it, and perhaps understand it for the first time, one had to have some idea of what it felt like in reality. To show that one knew meant revealing what one had felt."

Linc, the fictional protagonist in Smokescreen, is describing acting, but I read it as any kind of performance. Performing (such as writing) can also reveal what one has not felt, what one does not know. The first time I had to interpret someone's grief in American Sign Language (nearly 20 years ago), my mentor said something to the effect of, "Well, it's obvious that you don't cry." (This deficit, fyi, has since been corrected.)

Of course Mom remembers the blogging I did about Uncle Sam.

"Mom, I've been wondering whether or not I should - or want - to do some blogging like that about you, about this. How do you feel about it?"

"Well honey I don't mind. If you think it will help somebody. Or you."

"I don't know if it will help anyone, mom. It might. It might not."

Of course I am hoping it might.

Only four sets of feet open this quiz...it was not a twelve pillow night, although there were more than a few direct hits!

The Innocent One displayed her growth by leaps and bounds. The (nearly always) Late One had his first shock when he saw that the jar was empty: no driving until that sucker was caught! (Not to be confused with the fictional movie, Man in a Car, although a conflation of Man&Snake in a Car might make decent competition with Snakes on a Plane.)

Warning: tea sharing customs vary, as does etiquette for surprise birthday parties. Age protects one not from the practical joke, but it sure helps the food preparation!

Personal favorite: "Someone called the lab and asked for my partner and I said he wasn't here. 'There's another guy,' he said, 'but I can't pronounce his name.'" (Me either.)

Rules:

• Five points each to the first person who correctly identifies all four sets of feet, and both pictured dishes, in order.
• One point each to the first person who answers the following questions.
• Five points for each speaker identified in any/all included references.
• Five points for each explanation of context for any/all included references.
• All responses must be posted as 'comments' to this post.
• No responses will be revealed for at least 24 hours from email notification.
• Points will be tallied and posted as a comment within 48 hours from the original email notification.
• The winner(s) will receive a home-cooked meal from yours truly.

Ready, Set, Go!

1. Who was even later than me and my erstwhile hosts to the famed Mumbai wedding?
2. Who's snores might bring down the house?
3. Which First Lady is shopping for a dog as spouse of the President of the Indian Student Association?
4. Whose birthday was it?
5. Who and what was the issue with that shirt's cut in the back?
6. Does someone really eat like a camel?
7. Who is the perfect stand-in for a working-class driver (in any country)?
8. Visa? Who needs a visa?

Re-reading this entry, "no mother tongue" (inspired by yesterday's thrilling conversation with Rhona and Katya, grin) what re-jumps out at me, post-fieldwork, is "how language makes human interrelations visible."

Yes. That is what my dissertation will strive to show. From the basis of choices that Members of the European Parliament make to use or not use the simultaneous interpreters (or, to minimize and under-utilize the system of simultaneous interpretation instead of embracing and maximizing its culture-creating potentials) one can describe the current structural/power relations. From a clear picture of 'here-and-now,' and the judicious use of institutional and cultural theories, I suggest one can also project the continuing or resultant outcomes of these power relations into the future.

But - and here is where I continue to experiment with action research - if I spell out the projection, then I contribute to its manifestation. Instead of giving more power to an already established momentum of what seems pre-determined, I aim to present the logic of language choice with a scattering of openings that invite readers (as interlocutors) to choose among alternatives. Rather than writing in such a way that interlocutors are compelled by the (presumed!) power of my voice to accept/resist or otherwise engage only with a single, central, fixed point of argumentation, a variety of modes and unfoldings of communicative interaction should not only be possible, but actually occur.

Then we enter dialogue, and have a chance to reconfigure discourse.

The forty-six "glance points" represented in this graph illustrate eye gaze tracking during driving. (Now!) Dr Anuj Pradhan has been crucial in co-developing the RAPT novice driver training in risk perception over the course of a six-year doctorate degree and four experiments. Risk Perception and Awareness Training combines simulation and field techniques for assessing new drivers' scope and skill in anticipating potential risks while driving.

Did you know?

• Car accidents are the leading cause of death for teens in US
• Teenagers, during the first six months of driving, have an eightfold increase in the risk of dying in a car crash
• Teenagers, in general, are four times more likely than older drivers to die in a car crash
• In numbers: teenagers are involved in 4.7% of the six million crashes annually in the US but compose 13% of the fatalities

Previous research has identified three main causes of teenage accidents, including failure to adjust speed appropriately to conditions (20.8%), failure to maintain attention to the task (23%), and - the biggest - failure to conduct an appropriate search of the driving environment (42.7%).

After his presentation, Dr Pradhan's Dissertation Committee gave him some grief about the distinction he wants to draw between "tactical scanning" and "strategic scanning." (They also asked him, right at the beginning, to take off his suit jacket and relax. This may have been the signal that they planned to heat up the room...!) The first question, however, came from one of the faculty during the presentation, and it involved clarifying the dependent variable of eye movement. Dr. Pradhan's first experiment established a correlation between the recognition of risk (seeing it) and the knowledge that risks may be present (use of eye gaze to scan in order to identify (i.e. see) them if they are present).

Two more experiments refined the technique for linking eye movement with perception and recognition of risk. Results from the three experiments indicate improvements in visual search behavior in all driving situations, from the benign - when no risks are present, to situations with a minimal possibility of risk, and on up to situations with obvious dangers.

In other words, the students and volunteer test subjects who participated in these experiments learned about the strategic need for constant maintenance of visual attention across the broad driving environment which might require the driver (i.e., me - or you!) to engage in specific tactical behaviors in order to reduce risk - or be able to implement evasive action should a risk materialize because one has seen it in time! My contribution came with the fourth experiment, I got to test out the version in development - my experience (as an "older driver," grin) may or may not have aided in refining the program, but it certainly reinforced for me that there is a purpose to where, when, and why I look and watch in the ways that I do while driving. (I learned that I could still do better!)

The need for this kind of training tool in driver's education programs everywhere is immediately and obviously apparent. I was also fascinated by the application of temporal and spatial algorithms to the eye movements captured by the Mobile Eye movement tracker. Time and space coordinates for every eye movement had to be combined and crossreferenced in a Fixation Identification Algorithm with prior and subsequent eye movements in order to define a glance. These glances are then superimposed on the objects in the driver's visual range, and categorized as on-road or off-road. In this way, the Mobile Eye Tracker pinpoints whether the driver's eye looked directly at the truck parked on the side of the road in front of a passenger crosswalk, when (from near or far), and for how long. Does the gaze return or simply pass on to other objects?

In other words, the direction of eye gaze can indicate the driver's perception of risk - or lack of it. Once a driver is informed of their own eye movement behavior, then their awareness of risk is enhanced (or should be, I think the larger research program of the Human Performance Lab is lacking a necessary qualitative element). In fact, after training in the tactics of using visual scanning to perceive the possibility of risk, Dr. Pradhan shows that drivers improve risk awareness in four significant ways:

1. Trained drivers maintain a wider horizontal range of vision
2. Trained drivers shift half their glances offroad, more trained looking to right - where more risks presumedly originate (compared with the untrained who look left & right more-or-less evenly)
3. Trained drivers glance off-road for slightly longer times (presumedly considering the extent to which the conditions in sight compose/obscure a risk or not)
4. Trained drivers learn not only to transfer recognition of risk types between similar scenarios, but also transfer the skill of tactical scanning to different scenarios than those they were exposed to during training

Throughout the presentation, I kept thinking, "if only" - if only I had had this knowledge five years ago -- the language of "visual scanning," "risk perception," and "risk awareness" -- then Hunju's driving practice might have gone more smoothly for both of us!

Anyway, Anuj's defense rolled along. Dr Krishnamurty pressed him on the relevance or distinction between top-down and perspective views, which Dr. Pradhan handled with aplomb: "I got you, excellent answer." No wonder Jeff calls Anuj, "my Yoda." The (self-named) Curmudgeon wouldn't let go of the tactical/strategic distinction but I wager this is merely ground for the next stage of hypothesis testing and theory building. The Committee Chair, Dr Fisher, supported Anuj throughout. They grilled him for a mere quarter of an hour after kicking out us observers (selected members of the fan club). And then they only made him wait for about that much longer (or less) before Dr Fisher came out and ushered him back in with a handshake and announcement:

Forty years ago, my dad embarrassed me by stopping on a winding highway in the Colorado Rockies and waving down other drivers asking if they wanted to watch the moon launch. I was six years old. We were on the annual summer camping trip. Dad had had the foresight to load up our black-and-white portable tv with a powercord to the cigarette lighter, and he had kept an eye on the time. Not too many cars passed by, and none took up his offer. My brother and I understood that he was excited, but the significance of watching that grainy image of a rocket launching into space was beyond us at the time. Ever since, I rarely remember the event without tears - my own bit of vicarious spaceflight, an historic event witnessed by one of the largest global television audiences at that time. I do not recall watching the moon landing (although we probably did), it must have been under more ordinary circumstances and thus did not imprint as deep.

The photos from The Big Picture's Remembering Apollo 11 entry capture the glory as well as the sheer hard labor. One of the experiments (photo 29) has functioned ever since, demonstrating that the moon is moving away from the earth at a rate of 2.5 inches/year. (How does this influence, I wonder, the tidal flow of rock that the folks at CERN need to track?) A friend pays tribute to Neil Armstrong's expression after the moonwalk (#24), a man who kept his cool "in situations that would have most of us soiling our pants -- this incredibly brave, stoic man -- is photographed by Buzz Aldrin with an incredulous, half-smile, his eyes brimming with tears after having just friggin walked on the surface of the friggin Moon."

Stephen Hawking writes,

"Sending humans to the moon...changed the future of the human race in ways that we don't yet understand and may have determined whether we have any future at all."

I'm partial to the views of Earth. If only they were enough to keep us mindful of the very narrow conditions that sustain our atmosphere. Humanity is like the population of a spacecraft, only not everything is mechanized according to our abilities for control. In #35, Michael Collins describes the three billion human inhabitants of earth, two explorers in the Eagle, and one moon captured by chance. Now, we have still one moon, and there are plenty of explorers - but adventures of this type seem more rare. Meanwhile the population on earth has more than doubled. We have food and fuel issues that require massive infrastructural adjustments. Unlike a NASA spaceship, there's no dedicated team working collaboratively to secure the future of our hardy planet. Tough as she is, there are vulnerabilities that need to be addressed in order to continue supporting a viable human population. Hawking argues that we need a more aggressive space exploration program to inspire more young people to enter the sciences, and that we need to be thinking in terms of centuries: 200-500 years to find Goldilocks Zones in star systems only thirty light years away.

The Goldilocks Zone refers to the conditions necessary for a planet to have surface water. Gilese 581c was discovered just two years ago, only 20.5 light years away. The thing is, while technology probably can get us there eventually, we've somehow got to keep this planet going at least as long as that takes! We now have the group communication tools to make incredible collaborations possible. Watch this ten minute video from Clay Shirky, an expert on internet communication technologies: UsNow: Part 2 of 7.

Americans smile a lot. It feels good! :-) Occasionally someone gives a fake smile, one of those that is offered up because it is socially expected, but most of the smiles are accompanied with eye contact that acknowledges, somehow, what a pleasure it is to recognize mutual presence. No more carefully-controlled neutral (or somewhat suspicious) "European" expressions. I mentioned to mom that I've hardly heard any Spanish - the monotony of English only accents how accustomed I became to the patter of diverse tongues. Now conversations around me unfold with too much information - I understand all the words, even if I lack context or background. She says people aren't shopping (we've been taking multiple daily walks in the mall or Walmart), and I wondered if there are measurable effects of the bad economy according to language group.

After dropping mom for her PET scan I drove off to find a glass of iced tea. The Tomato Cafe was still under construction, so I wound up in Stoneface. I wondered how to reconcile their gang warning sign with the Lavender Festival.

Dad called to explain that the first thirty pages of Deaf Sentence (by David Lodge) describes perfectly his life with hearing loss.

Between medical appointments, spectacular sightseeing. We began with local architecture, specifically contemporary modern, in a new neighborhood with a bit of everything, even the hint of gargoyle.

The Lavender Festival was in Los Ranchos, with its long river-to-road lineas or tripas lots. We hooked up with my old pal, Laurel, and met some of her friends. I enjoyed the predatory bird exhibit.

From there, Laurel, mom and I took off to drive the Jemez, which turned into a long wander. We stopped at the Zia Pueblo. (I snapped the picture before the sign forbidding photography.) The New Mexico state flag features

"an interpretation of an ancient symbol of the sun as found on a late 19th century water jar from Zia Pueblo. This red symbol is called a "Zia" and is centered on a field of yellow.

Four is the sacred number of the Zia and can be found repeated in the four points radiating from the circle. The number four is embodied in the four points of the of the compass, North, East, South and West; in the four seasons of the year Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter; in the 24 hours of each day by sunrise, noon, evening and night; by four seasons of life, childhood, youth, adulthood and old age. The Zia also believed that with life came four sacred obligations: development of a strong body, a clear mind, a pure spirit and devotion to the welfare of people/family. All of these things are bound together within the circle of life.

The red and yellow colors are the colors of Isabel of Castilla brought to the continent by the Spanish Conquistadors."

We then took the historic Jemez Mountain Trail National Scenic Byway winding up through gorgeous red stone and lush early summer greens - mom kept exclaiming at the abundance of foliage due to the higher than average rains this year. We stopped at the Walatowa Cultural Center, learning about the "4 climate zones, 5,000 years of human history and millions of years of geological ferment" (quoted from the museum timeline). This land is home to the Hemish, who built some 62 major villages, with 9-12 major pueblos, since 1275 (the approximate time they began to build permanent dwelling places in these areas where they already lived). I didn't imagine my camera would do justice to the majestic views (although now I wish I had tried, sigh) of huge vistas, majestic stone, and the magical open vista of the Valles Caldera (see wikipedia for a few decent shots). We drifted on through Bandelier National Park, marveling at its mix of beauty and destruction; the Cerro Grande fire of 2000 still much in evidence.

There was to be no science tourism, unfortunately. Security did let us in with no fuss (three white women in a old minivan apparently not enough to warrant more than the most casual wave-through - perhaps we fit the profile of "one of those liberals from Los Alamos" which we saw on an adopt-a-highway sign on the way down from Bandelier). Eventually (after what felt like a few passages through Area 51) we found the Science Museum (which closed two minutes prior to our arrival) but managed to enjoy the museum shop. I'm failing to capture the quality of the day's light banter covering subjects ranging from family histories, genetic forecasts, singing fish, incidents and moments that didn't happen, what we don't know about geology, and other assorted random topics but I will say it was an entirely happy day!

It is cool for summer. In fact, the chill at night feels more like autumn. Otherwise the lush, bright greens (of trees, grass, cultivated crops and wild bush), sky and mountain blues, and varying tones of white in the clouds are as they ever were. I got out on the bike trail yesterday, smelling freshly mown hay and listening to birdsong . . . aaahhhhhhhhh.

Although re-entry is relatively painless, I have noticed slight and subtle differences in the US now compared with when I left nearly a year ago. CNN has a news program, Black in America. Susan told me that standardized test scores for young African-Americans are improving in a crucial way: historically if students were asked to identify their racial demographics at the beginning of a standardized test their scores would be lower than if they were asked to provide this info at the end. Now this gap is decreasing! In other words, flagging racial identity used to work "against" confidence/competence for some black youth; now - after Obama - this internalized self-perception is being transformed.

I was startled, the first day back, when strangers addressed me in English (instead of Flemish or French). Riding in a taxi from the airport to a temporary destination in DC brought me in visual contact with a familiar landscape. I found it comforting to be closed in by tree-covered rolling hills instead of looking out on the centuries-tilled farmland of Belgium - which always somehow conveyed the hint of battle. Not that history is pristine, here. The namesake of this university town in western Massachusetts is infamous for having provided smallpox-infected blankets to the local Indians. Most of the original peoples from the East Coast were decimated in the colonial invasion, although some tribes managed to survive and even establish authenticity in the eyes of federal law (which is deliberately designed to make such claims as difficult as possible while appearing to be fair).

Whiffs of cow manure are occasionally overwhelming.

It's been windy since I arrived, but Ambarish assures me it is not always like this. I had been quite aware of the wind in Belgium, and it had crossed my mind that this might be a sign of global warming: as the planet's atmosphere heats up, there might be more likelihood of "weather". I wondered if, some day in the future, a still day when there is no wind might be a rarity, a phenomenon only remembered by the very old . . .

"It was not because of Ah Fatt's fluency that Neel's vision of Canton became so vivid as to make it real: in fact, the opposite was true, for the genius of Ah Fatt's descriptions lay in their elisions, so that to listen to him was a venture of collaboration, in which the things spoken of came gradually to be transformed into artefacts of a shared imagining."

Index: references to Ghosh in Reflexivity

• talking turkey, making tools (US Thanksgiving with Fulbrighters and other Americans in Brussels, 2008, includes a quote from an essay by Ghosh on the perils of comparing the November terrorist attack in Mumbai to 9/11 in the US)
• Comps (Question #4: "dissertation area") (already two summers ago!)
• The Hungry Tide (a beautiful and inspiring novel)
• Ghosh on Interpreting (quotations from The Hungry Tide)
• What Saar would teach (a quote from Ghosh that illustrates, by metaphor, the kind of discourse diagnostics that motivates my being)

"I would produce my secret treasure, a present sent to me by a former student - a map of the sea-floor, made by geologists. In the reversed relief of this map [the students] would see with their own eyes that the Ganga does not come to an end after it flows into the Bay of Bengal. It joins with the Brahmaputra in scouring a long, clearly marked channel along the floor of the bay. The map would reveal to them what is otherwise hidden under water: and this is that the course of this underwater river exceeds by far the length of the river's overland channel.

'Look, comrades, look,' I would say. 'This map shows that in geology, as in myth, there is a visible Ganga and a hidden Ganga: one flows on land and one beneath the water. Put them together and you have what is by hard the greatest of the earth's rivers' (181).