John Steensen’s Blog

Plug-in’s for Humans March 7, 2009

Often when I’m working on a novel I push myself into a “free association” mode. This is where I try and meld recent experiences, exposure to new knowledge and my extensive collection of random knowledge (a cranial land fill – not necessarily a good thing) to try and derive some new yet plausible extensions to everyday situations or technologies.

Earlier this week I had been working on an IT audit at a very innovative company in the East Bay that helps reduce the cost of moving empty cargo containers from where they are to where they are needed. As you can imagine the cost of repositioning empty containers adds significant overhead to the cost of moving goods just like empty trucks returning to the depot to be refilled. While I was doing my part of the audit one of the accountants kept repeating about how he wished that Excel 2007 had a mode where the older Excel 2003 menus could be used instead of the new “Fluent User Interface ribbon” (did it occur to Microsoft that, just like the abbreviation for Graphical User Interface or GUI is pronounced goo-ey, then the Fluent User Interface or FUI  would be pronounced foo-ey???). This sounded like a product idea that must have been addressed so a little googling turned up my old friends at Mr. Excel whose macro solutions I have used for years. They had a product Classic Menus in Office 2007  that immediately solved the problem for under $30.

Now here’s where my Cuisinart©-like brain punched frappé and some new associations spilled out.

Wikipedia  states “In computing, a plug-in (also: plugin, addin, add-in, addon, add-on, snap-in or snapin; but see also extension) consists of a computer program that interacts with a host application (a web browser or an email client, for example) to provide a certain, usually very specific, function “on demand”". If you consider that many people believe a human to basically be a “meat popsicle”  with a biologic computer called the brain the question becomes “What plug-in’s are available to extend the capabilties of humans”. Your first thoughts go to Borg-like extensions but I thought that there are many experiential plug-in’s already either in-use or available to use.

For example, earlier this week I talked in my blog about a program at my alma mater called the Engineering Entrepreneur’s Program or EEP . This program allowed students to add a real-world knowledge plug-in to their coursework that would give them specific experiences they could then draw from “on-demand”. In my coursework at North Carolina State University I worked at the Hybrid Computing Laboratory started by Dr. Don Martin, one of the university’s visionaries of education in both computer science and chemical engineering. This real-world experience provided me multiple “plug-in’s” to my academic coursework.

In one project at the lab Dr. Martin obtained a research grant from IBM to develop system software and applications to enable an IBM System/7 to control and monitor X-ray defractometers, gas chromatographs and various other laboratory equipment. In this project I got to design and build a monitoring panel that allowed a visual display of the various software modules as they loaded into memory, executed and exited the system. IBM required an immense amount of documentation to be produced to document our research and this was an important real-world lesson that I would have never seen without this project. One of the benefits of this project was that the crystalline structure of materials could be analyzed at 10-100 times faster than had previously been possible. Laboratory automation in the making.

I believe programs like EEP can be plug-in’s that change a student’s life in a very positive way. Working in Dr. Martin’s Hybrid Computing Laboratory was my “mini-EEP” because I got to work in areas such as process control with IBM, cartographic analysis of training expenditures with NC Department of Education, simulation of human interaction with medications with the School of Pharmacology, hardware diagnostics, programming an infinite precision computation library for the School of Nuclear Engineering, and many more that I never would have had without the HCL.
 
The roots of EEP run deep at NCSU – a belief that broadening a student’s exposure to real world experiences will grow a student in ways that classes and projects cannot do alone.

Plug-in’s can occur at any time in life and include participation in sabbatical’s such as those offered by Intel which let employees pursue areas of research or interest that may or may not be directly related to their primary jobs at their employers.

Like every computer plug-in which provides a new set of functionality there is also a cost in money or memory or both. So choose the experiential plug-in’s you use, or you provide your employees (or your children – summer camp may not always be a good thing) carefully to get the benefit without the bloat.

P.S. I just thought – Borg-like plug-in’s are already in use – they’re just called Ipods.