Author Archives: witchyrichy

How Do They Know?

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When Beethoven or Mozart wrote a piano sonata, how did they know someone else might be able to play it the way it was supposed to be played? I am a piano player and I can “play” most anything both of these composers wrote as long as you don’t look at the time signature. If it says Allegro, I’m probably in trouble. If we think of a sonata as a game, it would mean I might only get one or two of the possible three stars available for that level.

Which brings me to the question that led to this entry: Do video game creators like League of Legends always know that you can beat the game or, as the scenario above suggests, play the game so that you achieve the highest level possible? I suspect they do some testing and with all the walkthroughs available, obviously someone figured out how to do it, but I found myself wondering as I work through a new game.

The Northern Tale series are time management building games of the sort that I love. Pick up resources, build sawmills and farms, repair roads and bridges, and complete various tasks to move through the levels. You can move on even if you get less than three starts but the bonus levels require a three-star rating on every level, something I normally can do without too much fatigue. But, Northern Tale has several levels that have stumped me. I actually gave up in the first series and still have two levels I haven’t beaten. In the second series, I just this morning managed to beat Level 25 with just seconds to go, following some walkthrough advice. But I still have another one that needs attention and the walkthrough advice didn’t seem to do the trick. I do find myself blaming the game as being laggy and unresponsive. (I clicked that button, darn it!, really I did!)

So, I found this video from Andrew Carboni very interesting as he explains why it may be our brains to blame:


Or maybe it’s because I’m distracted by typos 😉

Image of Game with Mispelled Word

Covering the Water Bottle Story

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In case you missed it, a plastic water bottle showed up in a Downton Abbey Season 5 promotional picture. Opinions on the appearance of the bottle ran from epic fail to clever publicity. But, the best coverage of the story came from the Today Show who collected lots of remixes of the photo, showing off the creative spirit of many Internet users. Might make a good Daily Create assignment…

Dick Francis on the Power of Photography

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“You’re amazing. You have this talent, and you don’t use it.”

“But…everyone takes photographs.”

“Sure they do. But not everyone takes a long series of photographs which illustrate a whole way of life.” She tapped off the ash. “It’s all there isn’t it? The hard work, the dedication, the bad weather, the humdrum, the triumphs, the pain…I’ve only looked through these pictures once, and in no sort of order, and I know what your life’s like. I know it intimately. Because that’s how you’ve photographed it. I know your life from the inside. I see what you’ve seen. I see the enthusiasm in those owners. I see their variety. I see what you owe to the stable lads. I see the worry of trainers, it’s everywhere. I see the laughter in jockeys, and the stoicism. I see what you’ve felt. I see what you’ve understood about people. I see people in a way I hadn’t before, because of what you’ve seen.”

From Reflex, Dick Francis

Happy Birthday, Wendell Berry

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I just finished reading Distant Neighbors: The Selected Letters of Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder, which I bought, along with Farming: A Handbook, on a recent pilgrimage to City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco. I followed up with A World Lost, one of Berry’s Port William books. If I had to name one person who most inspires me, I believe it would be Berry. I have only been farming for a few years but I understand his love of the land and how it has informed both his politics and his philosophy. Berry turned 80 today.

In this paragraph from his 2012 Jefferson Lecture, Berry gives homage to others who have shaped his ideas:

As many hunters, farmers, ecologists, and poets have understood, Nature (and here we capitalize her name) is the impartial mother of all creatures, unpredictable, never entirely revealed, not my mother or your mother, but nonetheless our mother. If we are observant and respectful of her, she gives good instruction. As Albert Howard, Wes Jackson, and others have carefully understood, she can give us the right patterns and standards for agriculture. If we ignore or offend her, she enforces her will with punishment. She is always trying to tell us that we are not so superior or independent or alone or autonomous as we may think. She tells us in the voice of Edmund Spenser that she is of all creatures “the equall mother, / And knittest each to each, as brother unto brother.”7 Nearly three and a half centuries later, we hear her saying about the same thing in the voice of Aldo Leopold: “In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it.”

I’ve been curating web resources related to Berry. Some great videos of him speaking and the terrific interview by Bill Moyers last fall.

Why “Teach” Social Media

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This post is in response to Maryam Kaymanesh in the VCU thoughtvectors MOOC who is thinking about why high school students should be taught how to use social media for a future job. I wouldn’t have seen the post but Tom Woodward tagged me in his reply to her and I got a ping to alert me to the reference. Why mention this? Because it gets at the heart of why we need to “teach” social media: it IS the way we communicate these days, and we have always taught students how to use contemporary media.

When I started teaching high school English in the late 1980s, my curriculum included formal letter writing and research skills using paper databases like the Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature. I think we understand better why we need to teach students the research skills, but it’s 21st century writing that we grapple with as teachers roll their eyes when kids use emoticons or Internet slang in their research papers. Case in point: check out the Wikipedia entry on LOL. The authors spend a lot of time quoting the critics of the use of these abbreviations as inappropriate in formal writing. But they certainly have a place in the fast-paced, shortened world of Twitter and texting. So, lesson one for all 21st century writers is how to distinguish between the wide variety of writing outlets and the kind of writing they demand.

The other challenge for contemporary media users is how to use social media to portray yourself publicly. The Washington Post article When Young Teachers Go Wild on the Web is one I still share with the adults I work with as it asks the hard questions about sharing on social media. In the six years since that article was published, stories continue to come out of grownups, including veteran teachers, doing dumb things in public using Twitter or Facebook. This incredibly kind interview demonstrates clearly that it isn’t just high school students who need a lesson or two:

But, despite the possible pitfalls, social media is also where we go to connect with others. Whatever your passion or area of study, social media can help you connect with others in the field. I require the students in my educational administration course to get involved in social media professionally by discovering the important voices and publications in education. Who are the bloggers and tweeters and googlers that you should be reading regularly? And, how can you become one of those voices? What can you contribute to the conversation?

There are also important questions for businesses to ask as they move into this hyper connected world. As someone who runs an organization that uses social media to both communicate and connect, I think about how to use it all the time. What do we want to do with it beyond just simple marketing? How can we become a portal to help curate the web for our followers? It is very much a similar kind of question to that for individuals: just how do we portray our company in social media? I can pretty much guarantee that unless your future job is hermit, you will, either as an employee or employer, ask these kinds of questions. 

And, while I can craft a persona for myself and my business, I can’t control the message completely since everyone has a voice. Reactions to a story are part of the story. The Today Show had a clip about getting good customer service and spent a good bit of time offering consumers tips for how to get noticed by a company by using Twitter or Facebook. Companies must be monitoring these outlets to be able to respond and react quickly before something goes viral. 

I’ll end with a recent example from my field of the complexities of being part of this new world. A brutally honest blog post about terrible experiences at a conference in 2013 appeared just as folks were gearing up for the 2014 version. The post, which has been removed by the author but is easy enough to find in an archive, was prompted by the #YesAllWomen campaign. It garnered a strong response from some in the field but others pushed back suggesting that this is a complex issue that requires more than a visceral, black and white response. Some spent time just trying to figure out who she was talking about. A second bog post tried to sort out the writer’s reactions to these different responses while the organization in question crafted its own response.

There are lots of lessons in this one event, not the least of which is that deleting stuff on the web doesn’t always mean it goes away. I’m not sure we can “teach” our students or ourselves exactly how to live in this social mediated world, but these kinds of case studies can help us grapple with the issues in powerful ways. If schools choose instead to ban and ignore, they miss the opportunity to truly prepare their students to live empowered lives in this world.

 

Questions and Answers

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This week’s reading for the thoughtvectors course is Man-Computer Symbiosis,  JCR Licklider‘s 1960 reflection on the relationship between man and computers. I was born just two years after the article was written and have been fortunate to watch Licklider’s vision become reality to the point where, as Just An Average Guy points out, my mobile phone not only understands me but answers back to let me know what she has found or not found in response to my queries. Jala points to Google Glass as an example of technology as an extension of man.

I do not think we have reached the level of symbiosis with machines being able to make decisions. There is Watson, of course, who put humans to shame on Jeopardy. IBM describes the machine as more human than computer, able to understand natural language and learn as it goes. Other writers give lots of fictional examples of symbiosis, with Iron Man being the most popular. I guess they are too young to remember, KITT from the television show Knight Rider, an artificial intelligence module installed in car who helped his human counterpart solve crimes.

The question that haunts everyone seems to be just where this is going. Imelda does an excellent job of summarizing the various reactions of her classmates. Symone chooses to stick with humans as both intellectual and emotional human beings and as I read her response to Justin’s more optimistic view of computers and rational thought, I thought about ideas related to moral reasoning such as Kohlberg’s stages of moral development, a theory developed just about the same time Licklider was imagining man-computer symbiosis. Just how would Watson react to the various moral dilemmas such as the Heinz dilemma?

As for me, the nugget I chose seemed to get at the heart of Licklider’s notion of symbiosis:

Present-day computers are designed primarily to solve preformulated problems or to process data according to predetermined procedures. The course of the computation may be conditional upon results obtained during the computation, but all the alternatives must be foreseen in advance. (If an unforeseen alternative arises, the whole process comes to a halt and awaits the necessary extension of the program.) The requirement for preformulation or predetermination is sometimes no great disadvantage. It is often said that programming for a computing machine forces one to think clearly, that it disciplines the thought process. If the user can think his problem through in advance, symbiotic association with a computing machine is not necessary.

However, many problems that can be thought through in advance are very difficult to think through in advance. They would be easier to solve, and they could be solved faster, through an intuitively guided trial-and-error procedure in which the computer cooperated, turning up flaws in the reasoning or revealing unexpected turns in the solution. Other problems simply cannot be formulated without computing-machine aid. Poincare anticipated the frustration of an important group of would-be computer users when he said, “The question is not, ‘What is the answer?’ The question is, ‘What is the question?'” One of the main aims of man-computer symbiosis is to bring the computing machine effectively into the formulative parts of technical problems.

As an amateur programmer, I understand the first paragraph completely. Long before I wrote a line of code, I have outlined the system I have clearly identified my problem, outlined a system that will address that problem and tried to consider all the various pieces of the system I wish to put in place. Then, after using the system for a time, I revisit it to revise and update based on gaps that have appeared.

But, when we move into the second paragraph, we begin to move beyond those kinds of problems to ones that do not lend themselves so easily to systematic solutions. Here is where Licklider believes a symbiotic relationship between man and machine can make all the difference as we attempt to ask the best questions we can before we ever even consider looking for an answer. Sometimes, researchers engage in the lamppost approach, so named for the story of the man who, after a few too many drinks, is found by his friends searching under the lamp on the street corner. He tells them he has lost his keys somewhere. When they question why he is looking at this particular place, he explains that, even though he knows they aren’t really here, the light is better.

Francis Collins, Director of the National Institutes of Health, outlines the problem with this approach in the field of genetic research:

That’s the same situation we faced in the mid-1980s when trying to find the genes for most Mendelian conditions. We really desperately wanted to understand them, but we lacked enough biological or biochemical information to be able to know where to look. That challenge inspired a host of people to develop a new strategy, which we now call “positional cloning.”

Harnessing computers to help us get at the heart of the issues before we start coming up with answers, making sure we are asking the best possible questions, is the essence of Licklider’s notion of symbiosis.

And to go back to the  notion of associative trails, I’ll end with some thoughts about this particular quote from Gardner Campbell that popped up on a Google search as he imagined the networked world as helping enlarge our capacities:

Licklider dreamed of using computers to help humans “through an intuitively guided trial-and-error procedure” to formulate better questions. I am hopeful that awakening our digital imaginations will lead us to formulate better questions about our species’ inquiring nature and our very quest for understanding itself.

 

 

 

http://www.gardnercampbell.net/blog1/?p=2158

Good Enough: Associative Trails

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My afternoon was moving along nicely, promising lots of time to grab a drink and work on my trail map. Then, after a dog walk near the pig pens, I discovered several baby pigs suffering from dehydration in the heat. One ended up in the “emergency room,” otherwise known as my den. I’m happy to say he has recovered and been reunited with mom and siblings. But somehow it turned into 8 PM and I had not worked on my trail at all. So, I have decided that what I have done so far is just going to have to be good enough.[1]
I didn’t want to do a screenshot of my history as it seemed to be too messy. I did do a collage of some of the tabs that were opened during this research:

tab collage

I then created a mind map but just couldn’t find the time to make it interactive. Here is the trail without any of the links I wanted:

associative_trail

It starts officially in the upper left hand corner. I really started this trail last summer when I began reading a mystery series set during WW II in England. The main character, Maggie Hope, is a mathematician who has ended up in England as the war begins. She starts as a secretary for the Prime Minister but proves her problem solving abilities and soon becomes part of MI-5. We learn about Bletchley Park and the Enigma Machine. I brought this interest with me to the summer MOOC.[2]

Other pieces of the trail that could use some explanation: I was a senior in high school and working at the Lancaster County Tourist Bureau when Three Mile Island melted down. We were just on the edge of the area of concern and many people left town anyway. It was a frightening time with evening updates on the news. The China Syndrome, a story of a meltdown at a nuclear power plant, had only been released 12 days before the disaster and locals left the theater shaken after hearing the infamous line about the disaster destroying an area the size of Pennsylvania.[3] The surprise in my searching was that there are people who consider Three Mile Island to be a hoax intended to sell more tickets to the movie.

Growing up during the Cold War meant worrying about the possibility of a nuclear war. I was fortunate enough to hear Allen Ginsberg at McCabe’s Guitar Shop in Los Angeles in the mid-1980s where he sang his Hum Bomb poem. Looking for recordings of that poem led to a video clip of an interview with Daniel Radcliffe who played Ginsberg in Kill Your Darlings.

The video I could not find online was A is for Atom, B is for Bomb, which we watched in my physics class senior year. An episode of NOVA, it had just been released and profiled Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller, two of the architects of the atomic bombs. Oppenheimer seemed to regret his participation while Teller reveled in it, sure that such horrible weapons could somehow ensure peace.

Just before beginning the course, I started reading Turing’s Cathedral: The Origin of the Digital Universe by George Dyson. This book describes the creation of computers, focusing on the work done at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), founded before the war and still in existence. There is a great video clip of an Edward Murrow interview with Robert Oppenheimer who served as director of the IAS for many years where he talks about the IAS being a place where great scientists and mathematicians could come to get away from the usual demands of academics, mostly teaching.

In poking around the IAS website, I found a very intriguing paper by Thomas Streeter, a sociology professor at University of Vermont who spent a year at the IAS. Called The Net Effect: The Internet and the New White Collar Style, it describes the changes in rhetorical styles due to online communications. And as trails often do, this one seems to double back on itself by quoting JR Licklider, who I should have read for this week.

One final comment about the persecution trail: Robert Oppenheimer, resistant to the development of the hydrogen bomb, was stripped of his security clearance, with many of his former colleagues testifying against him including Edward Teller.  Even worse was the story of Alan Turing who was chemically castrated as a treatment for being homosexual. He committed suicide not soon after at an early age. It seems that being a national hero is no protection.

Eventually, I will get some links put up, most of them going to books I plan to read related to these various parts of the trail.

[1] I hate it when students ask if an assignment is “good enough.” I often respond by asking them what they think.
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[2] The books led me to sign up for my first and only Cousera course
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[3] The associations continue even as I write this post. I went out to see if I could find out which character uttered that line and found a website commemorating the 35th anniversary of Three Mile Island which was this year. It featured the stories of those who lived through the event and included someone talking about see the movie.
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The Challenges of Choosing to Learn

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I committed to the Thoughtvectors in Concept Space course last week and found myself spending every free minute (and even some not-free minutes) having fun learning and exploring. I blogged, I commented on blogs and I spent a lot of time creating an associative trail, all things I would not have done if it weren’t for the course.

Then, the weekend came. If I were a “real” student in the course, I would have spent the weekend completing the syllabus requirements including reading ahead for this week. As Gardner Campbell, one of the course masterminds, points out in his Letter to a learner, this course is intense because it is not easily compartmentalized and requires continuous attention. Just take a look at the syllabus. This is a course that has an intensive assignment every day. It demands more than some quick reading and writing or a few math problems submitted via Blackboard.

But I’m a part-time farmer and this weekend was a little crazier than usual. Saturday mornings are spent at the local farmer’s market ,and this week I was on my own because my husband was going to a poultry workshop. Before he left, he came in with the news that ten baby pigs had been born sometime in the middle of the night, adding to the five that had been born the week before. As I picked mustard greens, I heard loud squeals coming from the pen and found two of them crying because they had gotten out and now couldn’t figure out how to get back into the pen with their siblings.  (Believe me, there is real truth to the “squeal like a pig” simile!) I rescued them and quickly texted a friend to arrange baby sitting services while I was at the market.

Sunday was reserved for my flower garden. It’s about 1200 square feet and desperately needed work: dead heading, weeding, new planting. A labor of love for which I never have enough time. With a week of heat and humidity being forecast, I wanted to spend as much of the beautiful day digging in the dirt.

In between, I worked on my associative trail. I didn’t just want to take a screenshot of my history. I made a collage of browser tabs and had a plan for creating an interactive image map of my graphic organizer. I had ideas for tools but this wasn’t a typical organizer with a central point that branched out but more of a journey. After putting the whole thing into powerpoint, I realized it no longer offered the option to export as a webpage. I have an idea for how I’m going to do it but it needs another hour or two or three of work to get it done.

Which brings me to this blog post. Even with its focus on learning rather than grading, the course is a course and the real students will eventually get a grade, which provides an incentive for them to make the course a priority over other activities. Because I’m not working for a grade, I do not have that incentive. As I mentioned in my post last week, I like the freedom that brings. I can pick and choose what I want to do, pop in and out as I like, spending more time on the assignments that interest me and taking them someplace they weren’t necessarily meant to go while ignoring items that don’t necessarily fuel my imagination. If I don’t comment on ten other blogs, who is going to know or care? No professor is counting, I’m not going to get any gentle reminders, and I can’t be removed from the course. (I suppose they could take away my RSS feed from the course site but I don’t think that’s going to happen.) In fact, the only person who might be disappointed in my performance is me. And that is something of an overwhelming thought.

Am I happy with my work so far? YES! I can’t wait for you to see the trail I created. There are links from my distant and not-so-distant past that weave together personal experiences and areas of interest, all coming from reading and thinking about the Vannevar Bush article from last week and how it connects lots of threads for me.

My biggest challenge is keeping up the original enthusiasm, carving out time and making the course a priority in a way that makes sense for an “open” student. I find myself wondering if this is why the drop out rate for Coursera courses is so high: we think we want to learn something but realize that making a priority for learning is hard when we don’t have to do it.

What It Feels Like When I Think

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Video shot yesterday from my kitchen window. I realized afterwards it was perfect for this post with each bird representing thoughts. I start with one thought, it gets interrupted by another, then suddenly there are thoughts flowing all around. (Be sure to look in the background of the video as well as the foreground as you’ll see multiple birds buzzing around.) If I’m lucky and I can focus, something I find increasingly difficult as I get older, I can hone in on one thought and really work through it, letting the others drift in the background without giving in to them.

From War to Check Proofing To Feminism: Thinking About How We May Think

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I have read Vannevar Bush’s How We May Think in the past and, like many, marveled at his surprisingly accurate view of the future, particularly the more recent evolution of the Web as a tool for collaborating and creating rather than just consuming. Reading it with the thoughtvectors “nuggets” assignment in mind led me down a few different trails. That is a warning to let you know that this will not be a “linear” blog post…I plan to jump from one idea to another, and some may lead to longer posts later. But for now, I’m getting it on the page and it will take longer to read than the average 15 seconds most people spend on a webpage. In a way, this blog entry is an example of how I think, the associations I make, the way my mind works:

The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. It has other characteristics, of course; trails that are not frequently followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is transitory. Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature.

The Tools of the Memex Machine

As I read the article, I found myself thinking about the tools themselves that I have watched emerge since I first got involved in the Internet in 1996. I am an avid Diigo user and was able to highlight and annotate the article in a way that matched Bush’s ideas about the memex machine. I could create my own version of the article easily and efficiently by grabbing sentences here and there and making quick comments as they occurred to me. Then, these snippets get reposted to this blog: scroll down on the right hand side and you’ll see what I’ve saved. I’ve also been toying with the auto-post feature on Diigo and doing weekly “of interest” posts is part of my commitment to this process of learning and sharing.

These tools allow us to feel reassured that we can find things later, the way Bush envisions:

His excursions may be more enjoyable if he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things he does not need to have immediately at hand, with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important.

One of the commenters on Bush’s article suggests that we are only part way towards this ability as our ideas are often scattered across a variety of “walled gardens” like Evernote and Pocket and more. And there are lots of tools…the key, I think, and an essential “digital” skill is to find your own way amongst them, choosing those that work for you and your flow.

War, Peace and Innovation

Writing just at the end of World War II, Bush was trying to figure out how science could continue to innovate in peace time. I had already been thinking about the intimate connection between war making and innovation as described by George Dyson in Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe. In the preface, Dyson writes about the parallel development of nuclear weapons and computers with John von Neumann, a member of the Manhattan Project, as the center of both:

The race to build the hydrogen bomb was accelerated by von Neumann’s computer desire to build a computer, and the push to build von Neumann’s computer was accelerated by the race to build a hydroden bomb. Computers were essential to the initiation of nuclear explosions (p. x).

In his blog post, Dark Matter and Trailblazers – @mpedson and Vannevar Bush, Greg LLoyd includes the text of a letter from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Bush asking him to consider how, as the country moved from war to peace, science could begin solving problems of the living, from curing diseases to encouraging young people to go into science. Here’s the lingering question for me: would we have had the explosion of innovation in the 1950s if we hadn’t lived through the horrors of World War II?

Nibbling Bits

LLoyd also links to @mpedson’s article about technology and museums, where the main point seems to be that our great cultural institutions are simply not using the Internet effectively as a way to promote creativity and culture. Bush hints at this as well when he comments that we can compress all the knowledge of the world, but getting at it is the important part and sadly, not many people are doing that: “Even the modern great library is not generally consulted; it is nibbled at by a few.” I shake my head sometimes that we have this amazing collaborative tool available to us and we use it to share selfies and take silly quizzes not to mention all those cat videos. One of the goals of my participation in the thoughtvectors course is to explore the possibilities of digging into the 90% of dark matter that we can’t see. And maybe redirect all that time I spend trolling Facebook to something a bit more constructive.

Replacing the Repetitive

Bush believes that the first thing machines can do most easily is replace repetitive work:

Adding a column of figures is a repetitive thought process, and it was long ago properly relegated to the machine. True, the machine is sometimes controlled by a keyboard, and thought of a sort enters in reading the figures and poking the corresponding keys, but even this is avoidable. Machines have been made which will read typed figures by photocells and then depress the corresponding keys; these are combinations of photocells for scanning the type, electric circuits for sorting the consequent variations, and relay circuits for interpreting the result into the action of solenoids to pull the keys down.

As I read this paragraph, I was reminded of one of my earliest jobs that helped get me through student teaching. I was a check proofer. Each evening, from 6 pm until about 10 pm, I showed up at the bank headquarters, settled in behind a machine and checked the work of the bank tellers. Checks and deposit slips moved past me and I entered the numbers using a calculator. Mismatches were flagged and it was my job to ferret out the mistakes. I got so good at this repetitive activity that I was awarded the “big” deposits, the ones with hundreds of checks where it was important that the proofer not make her own mistakes. I wondered if this repetitive activity in which I engaged nearly 30 years ago was still a job or if they had managed to replace the human element. It turns out, they have not.  It may have to do with, as Bush points out, the “clumsy” way we write figures. 

Girls At the Keyboards

While I wouldn’t necessarily classify myself as a feminist, I grew up in the heady days of womens’ liberation and believe I have benefited greatly from the battles fought by the generation before mine. I was four years old when NOW was created and considered Gloria Steinem a role model. I was lucky to be surrounded by family and friends who never told I couldn’t do something because I was a girl. Unlike at least some women in the ed tech field, evidently, I have never felt marginalized because of my gender. But this sentence just leapt from the page and, despite all his futuristic ideas, put Bush squarely in his own era:

Such machines will have enormous appetites. One of them will take instructions and data from a whole roomful of girls armed with simple key board punches, and will deliver sheets of computed results every few minutes.

I suppose we should be happy that Bush found a place for the “girls” in the whole process. And I can’t help but wonder how the women involved in the Manhattan project fared as part of this male-dominated world. Because there were women and while many of them were typists or clerical assistants, many others were scientists. The Atomic Heritage Foundation features some of these women and Denise Keirnan tells some of the story in The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Behind the Bomb. 

In Conclusion

I’m done for now…these were the nuggets that impacted my thinking as I read Bush. I don’t have a grand wrap up, I’m afraid, some larger conclusion that will make everyone sit up and say “aha.” I’m happy for my own sake for having written this and hope at least one piece was useful to someone else.