Stryker: The Seige of Sadr City by Konrad Ludwig

Stryker: The Siege of Sadr City by Konrad R.K. Ludwig
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Ludwig gives the story of the Siege of Sadr City as he saw it, as an infantry part of the 2nd Cavalry. And as in all stories that do this right, he does not start with the battle itself, but with how the elements were prepared to be sent into battle, so this book is a story of how a U.S. infantryman is trained, then equipped, then prepared for battle.

The first parts of the book could be subtitled as the making of an infantryman. Ludwig writes of his state of mind in choosing infantry as a branch when his recruiter told him that he had options. He focuses on his desire to challenge himself, and demonstrate that he could meet all challenges. And the disappointment he had when after finishing school he gets sent to a unit that was not deploying into combat anytime soon. The goal here is to explain the aggressiveness of infantry, why it is needed, and how it is distilled. We also get the source of their pride. It is not just the aggressiveness, it is also the excessive attention to detail required even under stress that is developed in training and emphasized and honed when infantrymen arrive at their units and are further trained by the NCO masters of their craft.

The second part was his unit deploying to Iraq, as part of the 2007 surge. I remember this period as the time I was preparing for deployment and my actual deployment into Afghanistan. And I also remember at this time we laughed at people who said that we (the U.S.) were doing well or even that we really had a handle on what kind of wars we were in. Ludwig's stories here are of what that confusion looked like on the ground. Of soldiers in combat who completed the tasks assigned to them, whether they be kinetic combat or direct interaction with Iraqi civilians or training Iraqi security forces, but those of us who were trying to direct them were still feeling our way through. And then there were those who liked to think they actually understood what they were doing, which made things harder on those who were in direct contact with reality like Ludwig. We see the conflict that he had of being highly trained, focused instrument, but with those who were directing that instrument blind and not willing to admit it, and the combat troops were the ones who paid the consequence, physically and mentally. And this was up against Iraqi militants who were the ones who had survived three years of battle with U.S. forces, and they had no trouble with recognizing reality. It was an environment that U.S. soldiers entering for the first time had to grow up in a hurry. And they did.

The third was the actual battle of Sadr City. Here we see both the situation in contact, the overall situation, and the situation as seen by the platoon and squad level (Ludwig's understanding is probably informed by the time he spent in the tactical operations center). Ludwig shows the effects of some policies that we put into place by people who were removed from the reality of contact with either the Iraqi people or the militants we were in combat with. But he also shows how some leaders could adapt when confronted with reality. What makes this part shine is how you can see the battle changing character as both sides are adapting and responding to each others actions. The U.S. utilizing their training and resources, the Iraqi militants using the lessons learned by the survivors of years of combat. This part is probably more interesting because I've read some reports that were from the viewpoint at the company and battalion level. And I can see this narrative on the ground interweaving with how this battle was reported at higher levels. There is one scene where Ludwig leaves his unit to see General Petraeus. It was an amusing scene, and one where Ludwig depicts Petraeus in a highly positive light, unlike how he tends to view those removed from actual combat.

The last part is the aftermath. And Ludwig's goal is not to talk about the war in general, but to continue what he has done and what the aftermath looked like to the individual infantryman. And this meant what happens after they return to the U.S. For those who did not re-enlist, this meant re-entering the civilian economy with all of its difficulties. But this is the part that makes the book different, it starts with the young man who leaves his home to find the challenge of infantry, and ends with him returning after serving his nation in combat, and struggling to reintegrate himself after his nation has prepared him to face challenges under stress, but it itself is a society that does not value that.

I would put his as one of the books that should be read. Maybe even up there with Caputo A Rumor of War or The Things They Carried because of its completeness, for starting with the formation of a soldier to the return of that soldier to a not always remembering nation. And maybe we can remember what we have created with our Army. Men who are disciplined and focused to meet any challenge and mission under stress, but out of place in a society that works so hard to remove challenge and stress from life.

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Heinz Hall, Where the Wild Things Are

When we found out about the 'Where the Wild Things Are', we started to prepare my two year old for it. We don't have the book, but I found videos of dramatic readings and readings set to music to get T familiar with the story. So we talked about it every day this week. Finally the day came. Today was a daytime father and son (and grandma) outing. Part 1. The train. Because while the train is a favorite toy in the house, T does not actually get to ride in one very often, and a concert during the day in Heinz Hall is a good excuse. Part 2. The concert. We said hi to one of the Pittsburgh Symphony staff who recognized T from Fiddlesticks concerts. And after walking around Heinz Hall to burn off some two year old energy, we got our seats in the family section. Front center of the Grand Tier. The best seats I have ever had!

We did not check the program, but I found the format to be a lot of fun. There was a piece with every scene of the story to fit the mood of the story. A Mendelssohn for the conversion of the room into the forest. Schumann for the voyage on the sea. Music to go with meeting the terrible Wild Things and for the rumpus. And the voyage home where there was good food to eat.

The kids enjoyed it. One of the nice things about this is that there is no artificial constraint to not respond to the music like normal concerts. So you had kids dancing in their seats. T would alternately huddle in nervousness and laugh and wiggle in glee as the scenes and the music changed.

But by the end he was ready. As the voyage home started T picked up on his cue and asked to 'go home.' And this very happy little boy enjoyed a train back home. My wife has informed me that 'Wild Things' has entered his vocabulary, so I think we are declaring this to be a successful outing.

Parenting 30 months: Toddler in motion

This past month T has turned into a proper toddler boy. Constantly in motion and talking. Some well used phrases include "I needs a ___" and the related "Is that a ___?" (where ___ is usually food) "Look daddy/mommy" "This way" "go home" (when he is tired). And then his favorite toys "marble run!" "Handy mandy" And some favorite videos "Pocoyo" "fun fun elmo" "three-two-one" (a video that includes a rocket)
 
He also has the proper toddler attention span where he switches activities about every minute. We think that this is a result of being socialized at day care. He is having more fun there. He plays with a couple of other kids (who seem to have selected each other on the basis of equal verbal skills). Actually, some of the kids in the day care act like moms and as one of the least verbal kids there, these kids like to act like he is the little brother (I think they do this with any of the less verbal kids) Its funny when I come to pick him up, if he did not notice me come, one of the mommy type kids will announce "T's daddy" and go get him, and his jacket, and maybe other things that he needs to bring home. He is still a very curious little boy and likes to explore. Of course, this seems to be more true when either mommy or daddy are around. One of his latests interests is rockets. He likes to watch rocket launches "five four three two one zero liftoff!" and the Lego set is currently set up as two rockets ready for launch.




The next month highlights will be visits from auntie and grandma, and the end of school for mommy and daddy, which means mommy and daddy school begins in earnest :-)

A recap on work flow, note takers and task organizers

Some experiments I have been doing with workflow over the past semester as introduced on this post back in January. 

1.  Using Pandoc, Markdown, and pweave for class preparation.  

I did the notes for my Logistics and Supply Chain course completely in Markdown.  This included slides for in class presentation, writing homework solutions, and everything else with the class preparation.  I wrote a Makefile that took care of everything.  Basically what it meant is that to create slides for class prep I wrote it as a text file.  It does force some simplicity because there is no ability to tweak a slide or an image.  But that is probably a good thing because it forces efficiency.

One nice advantage of using pweave for homework and exam solutions is that it makes it easy to have multiple versions of an exam.  If I have equations and steps in place, I can change a few parameters, and maybe an assumption or two and I have a new problem with not much extra work.  Also I did a lot of cut and pasting of code.  The code I wrote for presenting in class became the code that I used to solve the homework.  And since I let them see the code (and I also copied over the equations needed to solve the homework) it connected the homework solution to the lectures.  One issue is that so few of my students were competent programmers in any language that the Python code was not all that helpful to them (other than proving that I did indeed solve the problem)  But this was a definite success.

2.  Using Mercurial as a hosted version control system.  

I had to work with a new team on one project I was working on, so the first thing I did was to move the  former post-doc's work into a version control (Mercurial) and put it on a hosted repository (bitbucket).  And we spent a month refactoring the entire thing to separate out the code from the site specific bits (because we were going to apply it to a new location).  The repository meant that we were able to be aggressive in refactoring (yes, I did have to completely through out a day of work at one point because what I was thinking was not going to work.  All I did was wipe my directory and reclone the repository)  The others got into the hang of putting everything in the repository as well.  Now, the comments are not all that good on the part of the post-doc and grad student working with me, and we tended to work in separate areas so it was not true collaborative programming, but it was not bad.

I plan on continuing this over the summer with a few students who are learning agent based modeling together.  The intent is that if all of us are putting our models in the repository, we can ask questions like "why does ___ not work" and we can have their model to look at.  We'll see how that works.

3.  Google Tasks as a task organizer  

This worked out pretty well.  I ended up using Google tasks as a note taker (more on that later)  I was off an on regarding being consistent, but there were periods where I had a lot going on that this to-do list being available on all of my computers, my iphone and ipad was very useful.  Keep doing this.

4.  Tomboy as a notes organizer. 

Note taking sounds like a no-brainer.  Not.  This one pretty much died.  In February Canonical eliminated an API that enabled use of Ubuntu One as a storage place.  So I ended up storing the notes data on Dropbox (so my Windows and Linux machines were synced).  But the iPad app that integrated with Tomboy no longer worked, so if I was using the iPad, the notes were not integrated.  And this pretty much meant I was not using Tomboy notes.  Sometimes I would create a task in Google tasks and create a note if I needed something.  But generally this went unused.

I'm going to try this again.  But since I realize now that having it on my iPad and syncing to my computers is the key to the whole affair, my main focus was on the iPad integration.  So I am looking at Simplenote for the note-taking. It is originally designed for iPhone/iPad, and there are applications on Windows and Linux that integrate with it (and also the Google Chrome browser)

Lean Analytics: by Croll and Yoskovitz (book review)

Lean Analytics: Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster by Alistair Croll
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Lean Analytics bills itself as how data can be used as a startup. But it really is how you use data to make and check business decisions. And it takes the discussion of key performance indicators and puts them into a context where 1. data is readily available and 2. analyzing the data is relatively easy if you knew what data to look for and what and why you are analyzing it.

The first part is fairly standard fare for metrics oriented organizations. A discussion of what data is, how to choose measures, recognizing that data is never clean. But the rest of the book starts through a range of scenarios. Different types of businesses. Different stages of business development. Different competitive environments. With the variety presented, the point is not to find the chapter that matches your situation or to pick at a description and find ways that it does not apply, the point here is that data-informed decisions have a place in a wide range of contexts. The goal with metrics is not to decide that because it is not perfect it cannot be used, the goal is to use data in a way that complements experience, instinct, and intuition in making better decisions. For that, Lean Analytics is good to read for anyone thinking about how data can be made to work, not just in internet based startups.

Disclaimer: I received an free electronic book edition of Lean Analytics through the O'Reilly Press bloggers program.


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Fernando Perez: "Literate computing" and computational reproducibi...

Fernando Perez: "Literate computing" and computational reproducibi...: As "software eats the world" and we become awash in the flood of quantitative information denoted by the "Big Data" b...


I am teaching a course in logistics and supply chain.  Because the course is focused on the modeling of supply chains, and the students are generally using Excel (I actually did all of the homework solutions in Python) I used the Reinhart and Rogoff’s “Growth in a Time of Debt” discussion as a mini-case (every class I find an article to discuss.  Usually it focuses on business decisions, but this time I chose this topic.)

The focus on the class discussion was on how you look for errors.  Because Excel makes this nearly impossible, the real question was on how you focus your time.

But the real answer, as Perez mentions, it to use tools that make reproducible research simple.  The homework assignments I gave resulted in spreadsheets that covered 4 tabs and were a couple hundred columns and thousands of rows.  My solution in python was about a page of commented code which had a near one to one correspondence with the mathematical formulation of the model (with the addition of a few lines to read and massage the data.)  The spreadsheets were pretty much un-auditable.  My code had comments that would tell a reviewer what to look for.  Even for smaller problems, my students spreadsheets were fairly obtuse while my Python programs (I use Pweave) alternated between the explanation of each step with the calculations described.

The Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash, and Robert Pollin paper included R code that both demonstrated the effects of the errors of Reinhart and Rogoff.

http://www.peri.umass.edu/236/hash/31e2ff374b6377b2ddec04deaa6388b1/publication/566/

For fun, Vincent Arel-Bundock has converted the Herndon, Ash, and Pollin into an iPython notebook, suitable for looking at (and reading) as well as downloading it and playing with the data to test any thoughts someone may have about testing the impact of various types of errors.

http://nbviewer.ipython.org/urls/raw.github.com/vincentarelbundock/Reinhart-Rogoff/master/reinhart-rogoff.ipynb

Going to Fiddlesticks concert, and it was a MEOW

This was our second Fiddlesticks concert. And this time around S joined T and I. First, we got early so we could enjoy the pre-concert festivities. To celebrate Fiddlestick's birthday, T decorated a birthday party hat.

Next was learning the songs for the concert. The Pittsburgh Children’s Festival Chorus was performing some of the singalong songs along with some movements. The first time T sees anything he does not really react but is very intent so we never know what he is understanding

Leading up to the start of the concert we brought T up the concert hall. He loved the view from the balcony where he could see everything going on. The instruments, the performers coming on stage, the audience filing in.

But (surprisingly enough) it was the music that took first place for T. Since the theme was Fiddlestick's 20th birthday, the theme was cats (Fiddlesticks is a cat). So the first song was The Waltzing Cat by Anderson and Ms. Williams cued the audience on when the 'meow' came up so the kids could join in. Then the Cat Duet by Rossini was performed featuring Ms. Williams and Ms. Maloney. By this point T was very happy, enjoying the music, the silliness presented on stage, and generally responding to the music. When we got home, it was clear that he remembered everything. We found a video of a performance of the Cat Duet that we played in the background while eating lunch. And if we were wondering about his remembering the concert, we found that he remembered the Fiddlesticks Theme Song dance. Clearly, he spent the sing-a-long session committing it to memory. A thoroughly fun time. And something that we will do again someday. [Preconcert thoughts at the Pittsburgh Symphony Blog]