The month of March was marked by moving in different directions.
In the first half of the month, we finished the first half of our final semester. At MIT Sloan, there are half semester courses and I'm happy to report the end of Systems Dynamics. As I've mentioned before, it was a great course, but a lot of work. We each had to develop a personal project and mine was an analysis of the cycle of the growing volume of data in the world, wanting to improve data privacy, and the creation of new data in an effort to protect privacy. (I didn't solve the problem but I did learn from this course that I tend to see intractable problems as vicious cycles. This gives me a lot of insight into how to address them differently in the future.) The most impressive output of the course was an analysis of the problem of violence in the Middle East jointly prepared by a citizen of Saudi Arabia and a citizen of Israel.
Two weeks of the month were out of class and away from Boston. One week, we took a trip to San Francisco/Silicon Valley and heard from some of the country's leaders of technical innovation. We also had a chance to meet some of our Stanford counterparts (there is another Fellows program there) over lunch. That was enjoyable and informative -- it turns out that we have a lot of the same experiences and concerns. I also got to sneak in some time with a Stanford member of the TAMI research team - Deb McGuinness - and help with the preparation for the AAAI presentation. All in all, March was a time for a lot of of private consulting and some intense thesis drafting, so there wasn't much "break," but I did get to do a bunch of my work at home on the back porch in the Arizona sunshine with the dog at my feet. :-)