ORB Visualization
(soon)
communication to David Moore
from Paul Prueitt
1/30/2004 8:00 AM
In many scientists opinions Cognitive Task Analysis (CTA), as being defined by a small group of DoD funded scientists, is NOT the (only) science that needs to be understood - if we are to fix the IT dysfunction within the US intelligence community.
There are fundamental problems that a larger science community might be able to set straight, and might be able to set straight rather quickly. But the very best have to be call forward and supported in developing issues that are doubly difficult because of the (claimed) funding imbalances of the past several decades.
This discussion leads into my call for a national project funded by the White House and Congress and not controlled by DARPA.
http://www.bcngroup.org/area2/KSF/nationalProject.htm
(but this is just one suggested path) Clearly - the Presidential election itself might revolve around just this very issue, so people at NSA and elsewhere need to make time for this discussion and this open debate.
One should address the science at this larger level, as I believe Dr. Woods is doing. My concern is that Dr. Wood's work is already a little pulled towards what the funding mechanisms will allow, and that the very expensive software development process that Hicks & Associates are beginning to gear into (again) will be a waste of tax payers funds (again as it was with the 18M TIA "technology evaluation" bill that we paid H&A last year).
I greatly appreciated the framework that Woods has developed.
Was no one listening to Sarah Geitz’s presentation and the discussion that followed where others in the audience pointed out that the failure rate in software systems delivered is as high as 90% (or more). Will the Glass Box be just one more failure. Is anyone learning? Why cannot we say that it is the decisions made by contractors and program managers that is leading to these failure rates? Perhaps Kelcy Allwein agrees and wants to do things differently, to be a real change agent, but cannot because of the influences of contractors? I do not know. Perhaps she will say.
My sense is that John Josephson (theories of inference), David Woods (behavioral frameworks), and Gary Klein (sense-making) could address directly whether the science is being un-necessarily focused on cognitive engineering (again if “cognitive engineering” is taken in a hard AI type sense). My objections at the FOIC meetings was about Brain Moon's concern expressed to me that I was exposing what I saw as an agenda as expressed in the white paper that was distributed at the Jan 21 – 24 FOIC workshop at NIST.
"Proposal for a Mechanism to Promote Collaborative Cognitive Engineering for the Intelligence Community"
First, I would have thought that the Glass Box would have been taking a more scientifically grounded approach to cognitive task analysis (CTA), and I just do not see that that happened at all. I asked several questions whose answers lead me to understand that human behavior is not being deconstructed into behavioral atoms (which can be done – if one does not require the same type of 100% precision and exactness that is often incorrectly assumed in cognitive engineering) and that there is absolutely no appreciation of the work by the Human mark-up Language group:
Second, CTA must be framed into something that is at least as grounded as Dr. Woods framework.
Third, there are core issues OF SCIENCE that are pushed aside by the Cognitive Engineering discipline. John Josephson addresses some of these, and he and I can certainly lead a discussion into the cognitive neuroscience and into disciplines like evolutionary psychology and ecological psychology.
http://www.bcngroup.org/python3/fortyeight.htm
Dr. Paul S. Prueitt