The Changing Face of Education Part 1

April 14, 2013

So I’m reading page A2 of the Feb 8 edition of the PR and this headline catches my eye: “College credit recommended for free online courses”. Reading further,  I learn that Duke University is offering a course, “Introduction to Genetics and Evolution” --- a topic that has long interested me but I’ve never had enough time to investigate fully.

I was also curious to see how much progress has been made in the past (roughly) 40 years in the area of Computer Managed Instruction (CMI) which not only delivers courses but manages the total learning environment by assigning resources (e.g. books, videos, teachers) and evaluating the student’s progress through exams, labs and other learning experiences. In fact in the mid-seventies I had designed and implemented a CMI system named ACCOLADE around a course in Computer Literacy.

Next I went to my favorite search engine (rhymes with “frugal”) and entered, “ “Genetics and Evolution Duke University” and before I could  lift my coffee to my lips,  I was presented with a page of links that beckoned and promised to guide me in my quest. I also learned that these massive, open, online courses were referred to as a MOOC and that the New York Times, about six months ago, named the “Big Three” MOOCs as  Coursera, Udacity and edX  (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/04/education/edlife/the-big-three-mooc-providers.html)

while The MOOC List website which claims to be: “A COMPLETE LIST OF MASSIVE OPEN ONLINE COURSES (FREE ONLINE COURSES) OFFERED BY THE BEST UNIVERSITIES AND ENTITIES.” seems to have a more comprehensive list (http://www.mooc-list.com/).  I strongly suspect both lists are not current since the content of the Internet changes so rapidly that nothing is ever really up-to-date.

I chose to register with the Coursera Corporation and while only moderately badgered to join the “signature” edition of the course which accredits the experience for only a small sum I suppose, I soon reached the Home page  which looked  as follows:

Welcome to Introduction to Genetics and Evolution!!!

As you begin the course, please do the following:

• From the menu, select "Philosophy" and read about what we are offering and what we expect from our students.
• Review "Due Dates" to see when problem sets and exams will be open and due, and "Grading Policy" to find information about grades.
• Look over the "Video/Topic Schedule" to get a sense of the overall plan for course topics and the key ideas in each lecture.

... and much, much more including information on lectures, problem sets and exams, discussion forums (like chat rooms) and so on and so forth. (Due Dates presents an interesting problem as students register from time zones all over the world.) I eagerly began the course and my initial impressions were twofold:

1.CMI had changed a lot

2.CMI had not  changed very much at all.

Impression  number 1 was based on the slick presentation and the sheer quantity of resources available to the student under the newer system.  Impression 2 was the realization that while the quantity and speed of delivery of the resources had radically accelerated, the type and kind of resources were pretty much the same. My ACCOLADE system of the 1970s contained a “Yellow Pages” of resources which comprised: Printed Material (books, magazines, journals, etc), Other university courses, Other lessons on the computer, People, Movies, Videotapes and Audiotapes. These resources were linked through a Semantic Network that displayed the topics to be learned as well as the relationships between them.  Like Coursera and similar MOOCs, ACCOLADE also provided an email and a Bulletin Board system so that Learners and Teachers could communicate as well as the opportunity for students to take self-paced tests and evaluations.

While Coursera can provide its resources online to truly massive class sizes (claims of over 100,000 are common), ACCOLADE had a more tightly integrated navigational system via the semantic net. Overall, I would choose the modern MOOC over older CMI systems, but the really important question is would I choose a MOOC over a standard college course with live students and a live professor?

In the next columns, I will explore the future of MOOCs and the interesting politics of changing education.

Automation Part 2

In my February column,”The Challenge of Automation”, I began a review of some of the ideas in Martin Ford’s book,“ “The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future” . His basic premise is that as technology grows exponentially so will automation and its net effect will be to destroy more jobs than it creates causing unemployment to grow and economic chaos will ensue. He concludes that we must start now (this was 2009) to plan for this crisis and take what steps we can to deal with it.
The title of the book is a metaphor for the way free market capitalism works. The Tunnel represents the boundaries of our global economy. Consumers (the workers as well as the capitalists) are represented by floating lights of varying intensity depending on their wealth. Businesses are represented as TV screens which advertise their products. The purchase of a product by a consumer shows up as one of the lights touching a screen and, as a result, the screen gets a bit brighter and the floating light dims a bit representing a transaction (a transfer of wealth) within the Tunnel. I found this metaphor a bit of a stretch but I liked Ford’s later metaphor of a river out of which water is pumped --- you’ll have to read the book for a detailed description.


The author argues that since near full automation is inevitable, the best solution is to bite the bullet and pay people who have lost their jobs to automation so that they may continue to consume goods and services so that the overall economy will not collapse. He views both capitalists and workers are consumers but since the workers are a much larger population, when the workers lose their jobs, they can no longer participate in the free market and the economy eventually tanks. He suggests that the businesses which save money by replacing human workers with machines(machines are cheaper and no payroll taxes) be taxed to pay the displaced workers. He understands that there will be a massive pushback against this idea as it smacks of Socialism but believes attitudes can and will change especially under massive economic pressure.

In fact, much of the criticism of the book revolves around a free-market vs govt-imposed solution. However, I believe that it’s not an either/or situation --- it’s both/and. Our economy has evolved into a hybrid Capitalist and a Socialist one like two horses pulling one chariot (to use Plato’s imagery). Our job is to keep the chariot on course by not letting either horse pull us too far to the right or the left. We have to regulate the unfettered freedom and underlying greed of capitalism which can crush the working class as well as the over-regulation of unshackled socialism which can constrict individual choice and create a bloated bureaucracy. The enemy is not Capitalism or Socialism; to paraphrase Kafka ,“The enemy is laziness and impatience “ in ourselves, not the economic systems we devise.


Ford also argues that while providing additional educational resources will slow the job displacements of automation, it cannot stop the ultimate result of massive job losses. In fact he makes the claim that education alone is not the determinative factor deciding whether a particular job can be automated or not. Until recently, most economists have opined that automation displaces low-skilled workers more than skilled ones; basically blue collar jobs are more likely to be replaced than white collar jobs. However, Ford provides several counterexamples throughout the book such as a housekeeper vs a radiologist --- which would you predict is most likely to be replaced by automation? Certainly the radiologist needs higher level skills than a maid, but Ford makes a strong case that it is the job of the maid that is more difficult to automate.

Computers are getting very good at pattern recognition --- the armed services use software to analyze aerial photos --- they can spot a tank in a forest. Why then couldn’t a program analyze an X-ray or an MRI? Ford believes it’s only a matter of time before a computer can replace a radiologist or at least most of their functions so that fewer and fewer need to be hired by hospitals. But what about the maid’s job? One could argue that most anyone can it, but it turns out to be very difficult to program all of the situations that a housekeeper has to deal with. For example, what should our robot do when it finds a pair of glasses on the dining room table and the case for them by the TV? A human housekeeper would have no trouble identifying the item on the table no matter what its orientation and making the inference that these glasses belong in the case by the TV --- but this situation is easily left out of the program that drives the robot. In determining what sort of jobs are easy and hard to automate, Ford points out that it is more important how well a job description is suited to conversion to software. Once a process can be fully described in a language the computer can understand and execute then we can say that we’ve made tremendous progress towards automating that process.


An interesting counterargument that Ford considers is that nanotechnology will save us. With nanotech we will be able to create food and medicine, indeed any material, by manipulating molecular structures --- the building blocks of all matter. When this day arrives, we can surely rest easy as all of everyone’s material needs will be met and we can revert to great-ape behaviour where we spend most of time eating and lolling around in the sunshine. But will we be truly happy? Many people’s idea of hell is an eternal vacation in Miami Beach. Work supplies meaning to our lives and without it many would be deeply unsatisfied and unhappy. That said, Ford does not see the nano solution arriving anytime in the near future and he advises not to put many eggs in that basket.


For more see Paul Krugman’s article, “Robots and Robber Barons” at: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/10/opinion/krugman-robots-and-robber-barons.html?ref=paulkrugman&_r=0

and Matt Miller’s, “The Robots are coming” at:
http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-01-09/opinions/36233090_1_egg-nog-technology-robots

as well as (some of ) the reviews of the book at Amazon.com, one of which makes the same observation that I made in my doctoral dissertation almost 40 years ago: humans and computers are connected more and more each day. The correct view is a partnership in which we humans do the things that we do best and let the computers do what they do best. All we have to figure out is who is best at what...

Finally, let’s take a look at what the great twentieth century philosopher Alfred North Whitehead has said about automation, “Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. “ For example, I can use an automobile to transport me from location A to B without knowing anything at all about mechanical engineering. But he also cautioned, “It is the first step in sociological wisdom, to recognize that the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur: — like unto an arrow in the hand of a child. “ In other words, technology is a double-edged sword --- we must be careful not to let it cut us as we use it to cut our problems down to size.

The Challenge of Automation

Living close to Lake Champlain we know about the tension between cormorants who feed on the fish that are eaten by the fish that sports fisherfolks like to catch. Are the cormorants an invasive species? Loosestrife, the beautiful purple plant with the electric purple hue, is classed as an invasive species because it will crowd out some of the other plant species considered to be native. This could mean that birds who depended on the native seeds for food will have to migrate elsewhere and animals which depended on those birds become the dominoes in a cascading sequence of cause and effect. But let’s not forget the ultimate invasive species: mankind. We move around a lot and do have a habit of trying to modify our environment so that it’s more to our liking and ofttimes these changes are not for the better. When we use technology to make these changes and these changes create and destroy jobs, we call it Automation.

I have recently been reading some books that deal with the problem of Automation. One of them is “The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future” by Martin Ford. In this and the next column I will  be discussing Ford’s views on the problem and some proposed solutions.

I received “The Lights in the Tunnel” as a Kindle e-book so it’s ironic that while it attempts to explain and suggest remedies for humans losing jobs to automation, in fact it contributes somewhat to the problem. How many jobs are replaced when Amazon wirelessly sends me this book? Depending on how far back in the chain we go, we had to get in our car, drive to a bookstore to purchase the book and then drive back home. From the supply side there were trucks driven by people delivering these books to store, not to mention the owner and the employees of that store. So lots of folks are impacted when technology enters the process.  Technology acts like an invasive species which comes into a dynamically balanced environment and crowds out one or more species from their niche. There's no question that it changes the environment. Does this make things better or worse? That's the question.

The challenge of automation is that while it’s fairly easy to identify the problem; it’s extremely difficult is to propose useful solutions. However, a good diagnosis improves the odds for a useful prescription. The problem is that new technology destroys some jobs and creates others; in the long term we don’t know whether more more jobs get created or destroyed and so we cannot judge a net gain or loss for society as a whole.


One of the claims made by Ford is that as technology grows exponentially so will automation and although most economists seem to think that the net effect of automation will create more jobs than it destroys, the author strongly disagrees. But what exactly is “exponential growth”?  Ray Kurzweil gives an excellent example of exponential growth in his talk at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zihTWh5i2C4  where he points out that if a process is only 2% complete at the end of the year but it’s progress is exponential there’s no reason to fret as it will be completed within 7 years. It works like this: at the end of year 1 due to an exponential growth that doubles each year, the project is 2% complete, at the end of year 2, the project is 4% complete --- doesn’t sound too good does it?  But at the end of year 3 it’s 8% complete; by year 4 it’s 16% complete; year 5 it’s 32%; year 6, 64% and by year 7 it’s been completed!
According to Sigmund Freud as well many other philosophers and social scientists, one's ability to love and work is linked to one's degree of happiness and satisfaction with life. As Freud said, "Love and work..work and love..what else is there really?" --- so if we really need work to supply meaning to our lives and be happy, and automation will destroy more jobs than it creates as Martin claims, then we’d better start planning for some radical economic disruption.

Next time: Ford’s diagnosis and prescription to the challenge of automation.

Teaching is not so Easy Part 3

Well, it’s the middle of January once again and very soon you will notice an influx of students eager to begin the spring semester at Plattsburgh State. You may recall in my Sept 9 column “Teaching is not so Easy as it Looks “ I recounted my progress and lack thereof in preparing for and offering CSC372  “Ethics and the Information Age”  ---  the required Ethics and Writing course for Computer Science majors at SUNY Plattsburgh. I had great (albeit misplaced) confidence I could easily do this as I had developed this course for the department a couple of decades ago.

I described college teaching using the metaphor of the Acting Company where the professor plays all of the roles: Starring actor, producer, director and the most difficult and frustrating --- stage manager. The part I totally underestimated was that of stage manager who must attend to gazillions of unanticipated details (ranging from making sure the software actually works to getting the right keys for the right doors). You can go to: http://tec-soc.blogspot.com and then click on the CSC 372 link for the full syllabus to the course.

Now the most interesting part of the course (after the ethical theory of course) was the slick way the writing part was handled. Professor Del Hart, a colleague, had developed an Online Peer Review System (OPRS) based on the SWORD System developed at the University of Pittsburgh (sword@pittedu) that could be used locally and tailored especially for our students. On a Monday, Wednesday, Saturday (the computer never sleeps and apparently similarly for our students) schedule they would submit a first draft, critique the essays of 3 other students and using them to improve their papers, write the final draft (usually very close to 11:59 PM Saturday). Although the SWORD project’s research has shown that students come remarkably close to issuing the same grades that an instructor would assign, I still read the papers and assigned the final grades. I can attest that the student criticisms were very similar to my own and so the system could have automatically assigned the students’ final grades on the papers based entirely on the other students’ evaluations.

The OPRS supplies a rubric the student uses to assign quantitative evaluations to their reviews of the writing. For example, the rubric uses the criteria of Evidence, Sufficiency, Presentation, Insight, and Overall Quality on each paper and for each of these categories a dropdown menu allows the reviewer to assign a specific value; for example, Evidence could be measured as: none, weak, adequate,very good, and exceptional which could be assigned grades of E, D, C, B, and A. respectively. The instructors can manage these settings as they see fit.  Another advantage to the computerized system is that it can enforce deadlines and deduct points for lateness also determined by the instructor. I can be the good cop and the computer the bad cop.

But, I hear you asking, “What about easy graders? Or overly harsh ones?” --- won’t they skew the results?  Not really --- the full-blown system can correct for that situation.  As the semester progresses, each student’s reviews are compared to the class average and the easy and harsh graders are thus identified. It is then just a small step to weight these students’ reviews so that they don’t count as much as the other reviewers. Certainly not a perfect solution but a good one and as our politicians are reminding us these days: “Don’t sacrifice the good for the perfect.” A good followup is to have the instructor review the student reviewers occasionally to make sure he or she agrees with them and with the system’s weightings.

In the past I had to use a full class meeting period for the reviewing process --- now I could spend the class time supplementing and clarifying the ideas in the textbook. I liked the OPRS and think other writing instructors will also. We are currently in the process of reading the student evaluations of the system for their comments and criticisms so that improvements can be made and the system can be offered to other writing courses on campus.

I had a great time.

The Media and Politics

I enjoyed Colin Read’s Nov 4 Press Republican  column where he points out that technology has contributed to a vanishing centrist view in politics. In the past, when newspapers were the main delivery medium for news, editors had to be careful not to skew the facts too far to the right or the left as the readers were sure to contain citizens of both persuasions. As a result the news was nudged  towards the middle of the political road if ,for no other reason, it would outrage fewer readers and was certainly the best choice in terms of the bottom line.

Now most everyone has the Internet and cable TV which can provide the type and slant of news most any individual desires. In addition to cooking, pet and golf channels there is Fox which caters to the right and MSNBC on the left of center. This tends to polarize the politics of our nation and could certainly be a significant cause of our gridlocked government that , like the weather, everyone complains about but no one seems to be able to change.

However, that said, I must respectfully (there’s a word you don’t hear very often anymore) disagree with my colleague. Newspapers, even in their heyday, were divided into right, left and center politically in their editorials and worse, their choice of headlines demonstrated their political leanings. I recall back in the Sixties a headline from the Manchester Union Leader stating, “UN Mercenaries Invade Congo”. Of course, this was the opinion of  the owner (Loeb) of the publication but the people who regularly purchased this paper were also the choir he was preaching to. This seems very little different than what Fox and MSNBC News are doing when they broadcast the opinions of Hannity and Maddow. Actually Fox and MSNBC are being more intellectually honest and transparent with us as they do not claim that Mr. Hannity and Ms Maddow are newscasters but are merely commentators. And as commentators, they can vent their biases to their bases rather freely. The issue is, however, when you sit down for a meal, do you want your soup with  one flavor overpowering all of the others or would you rather they all work to complement each other?

Whether the “good old days” when the Fourth Estate (i.e. newspapers) chose which news was worth reporting were better than the cornucopia of TV channels and Internet (includes newspapers) sites that are currently available is debateable.  If I have to chose between the elite few publishers who decide what news is and the delicious diversity of offerings on the Internet, on the whole, I have to go with the choice that maximizes my choice. I think it’s better to have too much choice than not enough even though there are times when too much choice seems overwhelming --- like shopping in a super-duper market for cereals for example. In fact, some think that this overabundance of choice contributes to the sense of ennui and irony of our age.



Unfortunately, having an abundance of choices does not necessarily mean we will use them  wisely. Sites that analyze Twitter feeds clearly show that visitors to conservative and liberal websites do not overlap very much at all; if you are a conservative you visit mostly conservative websites and liberals visit liberal websites. One would hope that  a plethora of information would inform the populace and promote toleration of other’s viewpoints but, sadly, this does not seem to be the case. Instead of tolerance we get arrogance and righteousness which leads to insularity and polarization. And although it was Abraham Lincoln who said, “A friend is one who has the same enemies as you have.” we must ask ourselves: Are we all in this together or are we not? Sulking in our enclaves is not only counterproductive, it is just plain childish.

Maybe we can find some ironic solace in the message from Kahlil Gibran, “I have learned silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet, strange, I am ungrateful to those teachers." If we could just follow his example but learn instead to be grateful to those teachers I’m sure the world would be better for it.

Political Rhetoric

November 11, 2012

By the time you are reading this article  the Election will be over and it will be time to step back and view the events from a longer and more objective perspective. During the runup to it, Ron Jackson (Essex County Republican Committee Chairperson) wrote a letter to the editor (10/16/2012) which listed a litany of reasons to vote against the democratic incumbent , Bill Owens. Included in the list was the claim that Owens “co-sponsored the SOPA bill to allow the government to take away your Internet freedoms without any due process of law”. Jackson ends his letter with the admonition: “He (Owens) can’t be trusted.”  

I was puzzled on two accounts: first, I remember reading about SOPA but couldn’t remember exactly what it was about let alone what the acronym stood for; second, I knew Owens personally, as he helped my wife and I draw up some legal documents in the past  and I recall that he was a compassionate and competent lawyer. So I did what everyone else does when confronted with a problem: I googled it (I know, I know,  the Google Corporation doesn’t like it when a citizen uses their name as a common noun or verb because it degrades the patent on their good name but that is their problem and not mine --- I should be so successful that my name becomes a verb).

Anyway, I found out that SOPA unpacks to “Stop Online Piracy Act” and that like any complicated piece of legislation it contains many complex interacting parts due to the compromises that must be made during any effective political process. It was introduced in the House of Representatives on Oct 26, 2011 by Lamar Smith (R-TX) with bipartisan support  and its intent is to strengthen the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) by making it easier to prosecute online lawbreakers who violate intellectual property copyrights (e.g. music, video) as well as counterfeit products. Naturally there are pros and cons to the passage of any new law and this is no exception.

On the negative side, it would force Internet Service Providers to block the sites of copyright violators and even stop search engines like Bing and Google from displaying them in their search results. Most internet users are opposed to SOPA ( as well as the ACLU, Google and Facebook) as it will limit their free access to information, They claim that the law is overly broad and will be nearly impossible to enforce as pirates, when closed down, usually pop up again somewhere else on the web --- usually offshore the US (as pirates are wont to do)

Those arguing for SOPA including the AFL-CIO and the US Chamber of Commerce (politics does indeed make for strange bedfellows) point out that jobs depend on commerce and that commerce depends on copyrights, patents and trademarks. Also, as expected, the large internet music, movie and video vendors support the legislation.

As of now, the legislation has been tabled but expect it back in a new form  as it seems to be a very effective fund raiser for both sides.

For quick incomplete description of SOPA visit: http://www.emedialaw.com/sopa-the-debate-in-plain-english/

For a longer more complete treatment of what everyone seems to agree is a very complicated issue see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act#cite_note-washingtonpost-4


What I cannot understand is why Jackson is so vociferously against Owens --- according to govtrack.us Owens is a centrist whose voting record places him smack dab in the middle of the ideology scale (in fact Obama and Owens disagree on SOPA). So Jackson’s claim was either oversimplified or simply not the whole truth. Is not telling the whole truth equivalent to a lie? I’m not sure but I do know that when someone dissembles in this manner, I am much less likely to swallow any other claims he has made. It’s really too bad that so many politicians on both sides of the aisle use this tactic to discredit their opponents --- at best it destroys our trust in the person and at it’s worst it undermines our democracy. It’s easy to understand why little kids tell lies and half-truths to get their way,  it’s much harder to explain in adults.

Teaching Not so Easy: Part 2

Guess what the French word for “paper clip” is. Give up?  It’s “trombone” or to be more grammatically correct,  “un trombone” --- what a much more imaginative word to capture the shape of what we anglo speakers mundanely call the paperclip.

Perhaps you read in the 9/25 PR,  “Speech Jammer among 2012 IgNobel Winners”. It’s a device that repeats an individual’s speech a few hundred milliseconds after they’ve said it and it purportedly completely discombobulates the speaker. It’s proposed use is to warn conference speakers that they have exceeded their time limits. I know this works because when I was a typical bratty teenager, I had the ability to do the same thing --- repeat almost immediately one’s speech which really annoyed the speaker. I quit this practice after my seventh grade English teacher stopped lecturing, glared at me and slowly said, “Stop That!”. I may have been a wisenheimer  but I was also wise enough to know when enough was enough.

Why am I writing about trombones and speech jammers? Because they are both educational experiences that I never would have remembered if I had not agreed to teach the computer ethics and writing course at SUNY, Plattsburgh as I mentioned in the previous column. Associative memory is a strange and amazing thing.

I also promised a Part 2 to complete my thoughts regarding this process and so, here they come:

I began preparing for this course several months ago by perusing my last Syllabus which lays out the goals of the course and the scheduled assignments --- what to read when and when the writing assignments on the readings are due. Fortunately, the textbook is the same one I chose 5 years ago although it is now in it's fifth edition but the content is pretty much the same and the ethical theory covered has not yet changed. The supplementary readings were a bit out of date so I thought I could replace that with readings from the web (including perhaps some of the articles from this very column accessible at: tec-soc.blogspot.com )This required reading ethical articles on the web.
In the process I found that in addition to the standard ethical theories of : Relativism (Cultural and Subjective), Divine Command Theory, Egoism, Kantianism, Utilitarianism (Act and Rule), and Social Contract Theory --- I had overlooked investigating the Free Will vs Determinism issue even though it's resolution is critical to the study of ethical theory. Determinism has been described as the view that the past determines the future. However,you must first believe that humans have free will, that one can rationally choose their actions before you can hold them accountable for them. And since Ethics can be briefly characterized as What you Ought to Do, you implicitly accept Free Will over Determinism which, in its extreme form states that we cannot control our actions as every action is predetermined by its many causes.  No wonder this issue has been debated for over two millennia without resolution, however, I found the links below to be useful:


Humans have Free Will
http://www.des.emory.edu/mfp/JamesDilemmaOfDeterminism.html
Humans do not have Free Will
http://danielmiessler.com/arguments/free_will/two_lever_argument/
Humans are Determined but still have Free Will
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism
Buddhist View of Free Will
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will#In_Buddhist_philosophy

It’s been quite a bit of work but it’s been worth it.
A long-time friend and colleague once told me that that whenever he hears from someone that claims we profs have an easy life on the gravy train, he responds, “Yeah, that’s right, I only work 9 hours a week and 30 weeks a year --- anyone who’s not a teacher is crazy!”. The reply is usually stunned silence and hopefully, eventually the realization that not only is this a gross oversimplification, it’s just not true. I’ve worked for over fifty years in the federal government, private industry and in academia and I can say without a doubt that I’ve never worked harder or been happier than when working as a teacher.  Next to being a brain surgeon performing a successful operation, I cannot think of a more fulfilling profession.