Author: carmenyount

AI · Thoughts about Stuff

Chatbots?

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Over the last couple of weeks, I have been trying to track down, and then replace, a lost shipment of medication.

Because I have chronic conditions that require daily medication, I use a mail pharmacy. I can get a 90-day supply for less than it would cost to go to the retail pharmacy three times for 30-day supplies. Win – win.

Except when it gets lost in the mail.

Express Scripts will not let you talk to a human being, so everything has to be done by email. It took a week to establish that the package was shipped from Express Scripts, and that it had not been delivered to me.

It took another week to establish that yes, I understand that it’s important for me to keep taking my medicine, and that yes, I understand that I will have to pay for the new prescription (lame, but another conversation for another time), and that I have run out of the medication in question and NEED YOU TO SHIP A REPLACEMENT.

So a refill was ordered. But it’s out of cycle (BECAUSE IT SHOULD BE A REPLACEMENT, NOT A REFILL), so it was flagged for being too early (BECAUSE IT’S REPLACING SOMETHING THAT WAS LOST IN THE MAIL.) That caused another delay, because someone had to approve it at that point.

I actually have no idea if I was corresponding with people who are overworked and have no influence over how these conversations should be handled, or it was an AI at work. It felt like I was dealing with an AI.

While this isn’t a life-or-death situation (yet), and is highly unlikely to become one, it needs to be resolved sooner rather than later.

I’m trying to keep an open mind for things like chatbots, automated systems and AI. I’ve actually seen some good uses for all of them… but customer service isn’t one of them.

Chatbots and AI can handle the ordinary, which, presumably, makes up the greatest volume of communication. Most of the time, I would prefer to not have to go through a person, for things that involve calendaring, or reordering prescriptions for which I have remaining refills. It’s easier for everyone if I can have some autonomy.

A conversation with a person is usually the best way to handle the unusual.

Microsoft SmartArt is not easy to use… just sayin’.

If a situation is or becomes urgent or emergent, it requires human intervention. While health care has infrastructure for handling the urgent and emergent, neither health care organizations, nor retail organizations, have accounted for handling the unusual; they either treat the situation as if it is ordinary, ignore you, or try to push you off to somewhere else.

In my case, the unusual (a missing shipment of medication) has become urgent (I’m out of medicine that I need to take daily, and need a small supply to bridge the gap until the refill arrives), and I’m having exactly the same communication issues with my primary care clinic that I have had with Express Scripts.

If you are an organization that wants to use automation for customer service, you need to train that AI to recognize when it can’t answer the question, and make sure you have representatives on hand to manage those unusual situations.

Off my soapbox.

Have a photo of Lu, the sweetest puppy, who is also a menace like Dennis.

“Seems like there should be hot dogs for being this cute, yes?”
Lucy the Pup

Puppy Kindergarten

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Part 2: Clicker Training

We started puppy kindergarten, part 2, yesterday… it was a trip.

Lucy was so excited to be back amongst her best friends in the whole world, Michelle and Allie (the trainers), and she wanted so badly to meet the other dogs (one of which looks like a little bit smaller version of Lu!).

It’s not great to have a dog that’s so excited she can’t focus, but 1) she’s 6 months old, so she’s still very much a puppy, and 2) given that she was found, abandoned, in a laundry basket, our earlier concern was that she would grow up to be afraid of/reactive to everything. Thankfully, that’s not the case.

She still has no recall, loves to counter surf, steals the TV remote (and shoes, and things off of tables and desks) — everything is a game to her. And she’s overwhelmed with excitement when meeting new people and dogs. We definitely have a ways to go before she’s ready for primetime.

But, even in her excited state, she can sit, lay down, sit pretty, twirl, and boop (touch her nose to our hand in exchange for a treat). She thinks that training is a very fun thing to do, and we’re working on the first part of place (having her go to designated spot and sit — we’ve been working with a low agility platform, and the goal is to be able to get her on the scale at the vet’s office, among other things).

Newsflash: she’s still very, very cute.

Dana’s photo of Lu, now my phone’s wallpaper.
Studenting · Thoughts about Stuff

It’s been a week.

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There are a couple of things I’m glad I learned during the pandemic, back when everything was closed because we couldn’t breathe on each other.

One of them is how to make coffee that I like to drink.

Mocha/latte in the commemorative pandemic mug (“This sucks and I hate it,” by Effin’ Birds.) Lu starts puppy kindergarten, part 2, today, and the document under the mug is for that.

Here’s how I do it: Moka pot coffee (High Drive roast, from Indaba Coffee, here in Spokane), with soy milk (agitated in a Bodum milk frother), and about 2tsp of chocolate syrup (Hershey dark chocolate syrup, to add a subtle chocolate flavor and cut the bitterness of the coffee with a little bit of sweet).

The coffee continues to be the highlight of every week. But this week was memorable for a couple of reasons:

I got my first black fly (Buffalo Gnat) bite of the season… on my face. (OK, that’s not a highlight, but it was significant.) Black flies inject you with a numbing agent and then saw a small, impressively round, hole in your skin. The wound bleeds, and then swells up like a mosquito bite and remains itchy for several days. Usually they get you on the hairline… this one is just to the front of my ear. I was bitten on Monday afternoon, and on Saturday morning, it’s still itchy and a little bit swollen. I’m pretty sensitive to bug bites anyway, but I hate black flies… at least their season is short. (Treatment: hydrocortisone cream and antihistamines (Allegra or Zyrtec — we probably shouldn’t use Benadryl anymore).)

I finished my first semester of graduate school. For our final project, my group had to rethink and redesign the navigation structure of a website, and we finished it on Thursday. I suggested the OLC’s district site, because it doesn’t (at present) adequately represent what the OLC does, how, or for whom.

(For what it’s worth, school districts generally don’t do a lot of great web development; funding is inadequate, and school employees don’t have time to maintain a complex site, because they’re, you know, teaching kids. It’s unfortunate, because there are significant information needs for students, parents, and the community, that are just not being met. And yes, I know, not all school districts.)

We got to do a card sort with the OLC staff, which was amazing. Card sorting is a really great way to get a glimpse into other people’s ideas about how the world should be organized. There are apps and orgs that allow you to do them online. We used index cards, which for a group hybrid sort, is an easy, tactile experience (nice after the teachers had worked with kindergarteners all day).

Since I’m the one who suggested it (and the OLC is where I live), I got to do some of the heavier lifting with the foundational pieces. I’m lucky the group had a tech person who could read my early drafts. It was a gift to have someone who could check to make sure she could visualize what I was describing. And then to be able to hand it off to writers and editors who could take our observations and ideas (~ 12 pages, at that point, with some photos and sitemaps) and create a cohesive report about the project. (It was quite a bit of work for 10 points.)

[5/14/23: We got full credit! Yay, us!}

I’m (still) not a huge fan of group work, but not for the reasons you might think. I enjoy collaborating with people, one-on-one or in small groups — different perspectives often makes for stronger work. And I was lucky to have landed in the group I was in; everyone was interesting and insightful, hugely talented, and wanted to be involved and get things done in a timely manner. That said, we all have lives outside of school that need to be attended to, and matching schedules and availability for project work turned out to be a bigger challenge than doing the actual work of the project. That’s a little too “real world” for work that has hard deadlines and offers no compensation.

I spent yesterday morning decompressing with a tropical smoothie. (Shakes and smoothies are like donuts to me. I really enjoy them… about twice a year. Anything more ends up being… too much.)

And now it’s on to the next semester. This summer I will be coding… a lot. I’m taking SJSU’s MLIS foundation front-end coding class, and working my way through a front-end coding certificate through the University of Washington.

(And hopefully, continuing to work with the Outdoor Learning Center on building out their district website.)

At the OLC with Ruby (the Barn Owl) last month, while the district guys were replacing the windows in the sanctuary. She spent most of the day in her crate, where it was dark and quiet, but we got to hang out in the shade for a little while in the afternoon.

Outdoor Learning Center · Volunteering

Coffee with Raptors

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In February of 2020, the West Valley Outdoor Learning Center raised a bunch of money to replace the windows in our raptor sanctuary.

You know what happened next.

Spring and summer of 2020 were… affected… by the pandemic.

In 2021, the school district replaced the parking lot of the school next door (and the OLC), and it was really, really hot that summer, so working in the heat would not have been easy.

Not sure what the hold up was in 2022, but whatever happened, we couldn’t schedule the window replacement.

Doing this kind of work over winter isn’t feasible. It’s cold, there’s not a lot of daylight, and everything freezes.

So here we are in spring of 2023. The windows are being put in as I write this. I got here to move the birds at 6:45a. The workers from the district got here at about 7:45a, and, as I write this at 10:40a, they’re going strong… yay!

When that kind of construction happens on the building, we move all of the birds out and away from the structure. (Marcus, the Great Horned Owl, lives in an outdoor mew and is staying put.) When it’s warm enough, the birds hang out in the small meadow outside of the director’s office. Right now, because I’m here and I have work to do, they’re in one of the classrooms with me.

The set up this morning. Stan (right), and Arden in front, Oroville and Pants behind screens (the tables), and Ruby in her crate in the bathroom (where it’s dark and quiet).

There are no kids here today, and the teachers are leading a field trip, so it’s just me and three hawks and two owls.

Oroville, in his little “room.” He feels most secure when nobody can sneak up on him.
Arden, who is afraid of nothing, but annoyed by everything, looking non-plussed about being in the classroom and having to stare at Stan all day.
Stan, who would like to be the center of attention all the time, thank you very much, not bothered at all hanging out in the shadow of a black bear.

There are two classrooms, but the OLC’s 75-lb tortoise is roaming in the other one. It’s not fair to him to make him stay in his small enclosure (where he would kick up a fuss and make a lot of noise anyway), or to the birds (who can’t get away from him if he’s wandering, because they’re tethered), to try to make them occupy the same space for the day. (It’s warm enough that we could let the tortoise outside, but he likes to wander where the district folks are working with their power tools, so…)

The new windows (and framed bars that allow us to open them up to clean the windows) are amazing, and I’m glad this is finally happening.

Also today: hanging plastic strips inside Marcus’s mew so that he can’t get a wild hare and fly out when we open the door!

That should slow him down a little bit!

He hasn’t shown any interest in sharing space with any of us for any length of time, and that’s what would be required for him to get out of the mew. But now we have an actual physical barrier, and I think that makes all of us feel a little more comfortable with the situation.

Right after we finished putting it up, he settled back on his perch across from the door, so he apparently isn’t too bothered by the new accessory. Let’s just hope he doesn’t chew on the strips…

Studenting

On Being a Noob

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Welcome to Information Science, Beginner Edition

Yes, there are courses devoted entirely to the topic of information retrieval systems… that seems pretty specific, and yet, this course is actually very, very broad. We’re doing in a bunch of group work this semester, and still have a couple more projects to do before mid-May.

For this class:

  • We built a small database of things (pillows, in our case), made it searchable, and wrote rules to describe how an indexer would enter new information into the database. (Was it technically a good database? Consider that none of us are database designers, so… it was functional.)
  • We just finished creating a controlled vocabulary to describe a group of ten academic articles. (Super squishy, conceptually, but a few great conversations came out of it.)
  • Next up: a user research card-sorting exercise, using ourselves + family and friends as our sample group.
  • And finally, something about redesigning a website? Not sure what this will be, because we have a couple of other things to do before we get there. (We’re not designing or coding anything, so my guess is that this will be a written exercise addressing UX design?)

One of the articles we read for this class describes information science as a cross between the social sciences and engineering practice. In other words, it’s pretty technical conceptually, with the challenge of creating systems that make information accessible to specific user groups. There is always a user — apart from the designer/builder — to keep in mind.

The technical challenges are a thing unto themselves. I enjoy technology, so that learning curve doesn’t bother me too much, and I’m looking forward to doing a lot more development work (front-end and back-end).

Finding solutions that meet the needs of people will be a worthy challenge. Any human-centered system involves uncertainty, and some of that uncertainty will never be able to be solved for, or mitigated. Simply put, there isn’t one right answer that meets the needs of every member of a group.

One thing that I’m learning in other parts of my life, though, is that by seeking to address the needs of people who are marginalized, we end up addressing similar issues for others.

Take, for example, quiet rooms in schools designed to allow kids with sensory challenges to take a break from the chaos of the classroom or playground. Coincidentally, those spaces also meet a need for kids with anxiety, or any kid who’s feeling dysregulated (sometimes people act out when they feel overwhelmed… even neurotypical people). As a person who has struggled with anxiety for my entire existence, a space like this in, say, an airport, would be a game changer.

I think that, in situations where the goal is to meet the information needs of a community, I will look to organize my thinking around addressing the needs of marginalized people within that community.

BTW, I recognize that there are lots of ways that people can be marginalized: race, class, ability, gender, sexuality, socio-economic situation. This will be an imperfect quest, at best, but since the perfect solution doesn’t exist, having an organizing first principle seems like a reasonable place to start.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk. And now, have a dog portrait.

Photo portrait of Lucy, a black lab mix, with a bully stick hanging from her lips. She looks *really* OG.
Lu is such a rebel…
Lucy the Pup

Still Life with Puppy (Not)

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Lucy graduated from puppy kindergarten last Saturday. She’s very good at sitting, laying down, giving a paw (without punching anyone), and, if you have the right treats in your hand (string cheese), she will follow you to hell and back.

She has less than zero recall. Despite being very good at jumping onto the couch and the bed, she refused to step on platforms. She’s almost done teething (thank goodness!), and is getting better at not chomping on hands, but she still has a ways to go on that front. She’s still sometimes doing that puppy thing where she’ll go and spend some quality time outside, with us or on her own, and then she’ll head inside… and poop. And, because she’s a 5-month-old puppy (almost), she’s out of her damn mind… the poor girl doesn’t have two brain cells to rub together.

Does it feel warmer to you? Because we’re heating the outside now!

We’ve been assured that this is perfectly normal pre-adolescent puppy stuff, that it will pass, and that she’s developing as she should be. She’s sleeping through the night (from 11p to 6:30a). Her appetite is settling; she has decided that she doesn’t need a separate lunch, in part, I think, because we do 5 – 10 minutes (closer to five minutes, until she gets bored) of lunchtime training with superfun treats.

Our next training class (puppy kindergarten, part 2!) starts in mid-May, so we’re going to work on some leash training and reinforcing some of the things she’s good at… and I just bought some entry-level training equipment so we can have some fun in the backyard.

We love her… I love her. I have to admit, though, that puppyhood is hard, and there are some really unfun things about it.

All that said, I’m not sure how anyone could resist this sweet, funny, very good girl.

Lu loves her blue dragon stuffie. (It was one of her first toys, and it still has its squeaker!)
Studenting

Spring Break: Grad School Edition

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My spring break is supposed to be next week. Originally, in early January, we had planned to go to Costa Rica…

… and then we got a puppy, who needed shots, and socialization, and puppy kindergarten, before we could even think about boarding her. So those plans went by the wayside.

Lucy (now almost 5 months old) is very cute, and smart, and delightful.

Photo of a black dog (with white accents) shaking a "soccer" ball that has fabric tabs sewn into it.
We have a couple of “soccer” balls with tabs sewn into the ball — they’re turning out to be really great toys for us. Lucy enjoys chasing them, carrying them, shaking them.
They’re proving to be good for training “drop it,” in addition to being wildly amusing, and we can (carefully!) kick the ball around outside. Perfect!
(We like Chuckit! ultra balls a lot, too — for all the same reasons —
though they’re not great for playing “soccer.”)

In light of postponed travel plans (which became apparent almost immediately after Lucy arrived), I was going to use the time to catch up on some of the “suggested” reading for my information retrieval class, and watch some video reviews for previous weeks to reinforce some of the more complicated concepts.

And learn some stuff about HTML5 semantic tags. (I was not kidding about learning Javascript, but I’m going through the front end to do it.) Y’all, it looks like we’ve come full circle from the bad old days of HTML3 when we were appropriating table tags to make web pages legible. These newfangled (kidding, they’ve been standard for ~10 years) tags have no bearing on appearance; they exist to delineate different parts of a document outline: header, footer, article, section, aside. (My graphic designer self is champing at the bit to get back to CSS already… I understand and appreciate the utility of semantic tags, but the semantic tags alone… in terms of appearance, which is not the purpose or goal of these tags… it’s like “1994 called, they want their home pages back.”)

Oh, and getting a better handle on Git and GitHub. (Confession: I haven’t used the command line in a L-O-N-G time.)

Anyway. You get the idea. I had plans! My plans had plans!

But no. It looks like, in addition to those things, I’ll be doing a bunch of reading to prepare (with my group) to put together a very small controlled vocabulary… a completely new concept to me/us. Right now it seems extremely complex — a “wicked problem,” if you will, in the sense that it does not have a single solution, because the decisions we make will depend on the needs of a specific user base. (A controlled vocabulary for an information specialist working in web design will be a bit different from a one working as a youth services librarian — there will be some overlap, for sure, but their information needs are likely going to be a bit different.) We’re meeting about it on Friday morning, preparing so we can hit the ground running after “spring break.”

In the meantime, I’ll be getting a haircut on Friday (right after the meeting), doing a Women in Stem open house at the OLC on Saturday morning (might use the time, while chatting with folks, to make some new jesses for the birds), finishing up our last puppy kindergarten class (!) on Saturday afternoon, and hopefully (fingers crossed), attending a webinar on creativity on Friday the 31st.

What’s that saying, life is what happens… ?

mental health

Therapy is Great #406,858

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Therapy sucks. A lot of times, it’s less than no fun. But… it has been really good for me.

Starting grad school and having to do group work is bringing up some things from that time I spent more than a decade in a work environment that was abusive.

That was a long time ago, and I’m still trying to process some of it. I still need some help to manage the anxiety triggered by memories of that time.

It didn’t come out of nowhere. I grew up with the explicitly stated expectation that I would defer to the authority of adults general, men in particular. Even if/when they were wrong or had unhealthy/unrealistic expectations. The expectation was absolute.

And then I landed in a work situation with a supervisor who had some unresolved anger issues of their own, that they took out on young women around them. I was not the only (or even the preferred) target, but I ended up in the line of fire with some regularity.

Newsflash: human systems involve chaos. There’s no way around it. You might be the most organized person who ever walked the planet — you cannot plan for every eventuality. At some point, somewhere, someone is going to find a way to introduce the unexpected. It often happens when the stakes are high, it’s painful to resolve, and there might be explanations required after.

Living, for years, with the threat of being screamed at, having your work ethic or competence be questioned behind your back to your colleagues or supervisors, or fired, because you can’t exert absolute control over the chaos… leaves a mark.

Look. I went to art school; I can do critique, even if it’s hard to hear. I appreciate good editing. I understand that my way of doing things is, often, not the best or most efficient way (though I can be slow to accept that in some situations). I also expect that when I make a mistake there will be some accountability.

What I’m talking about is not any of these scenarios.

I’m talking about being yelled at about how incompetent you are, in front of your colleagues, by someone who is not in control of their emotional state, and having no recourse to respond because a) they’re your boss, and b) you don’t have any coping or mitigation skills for that kind of situation.

Back to now: this group project is operationally well defined; there are parts to the project we’re working on as we go, and deadlines we have to meet. My group has been amazing — we all seem to want to make sure that no one has to carry more than their fair share of the burden, so we’ve been working together, adding individual contributions that can be used or not, according to progress of the assignment, and meeting to discuss progress.

One of the challenges is that it involves both technology and concepts that are new to everyone in the group. Add to that the objectives/expectations/rubrics are kind of subjective… because of new technology/concepts and lack of experience, the expectations for the quality of the product should probably be pretty rudimentary… but nobody mentions expectations for use of the technology anywhere, so…?

Combine that set of circumstances with a history of unrealistic expectations and emotional abuse, and the what-ifs in your head crescendo until you (I) find yourself (myself) sitting in 30-degree weather on the back stoop trying to talk yourself (myself) down.

Healthy people seem to be able to right-size what we can accomplish under the circumstances and time constraints. I’ve been an unrelenting hot mess for the last few weeks. I haven’t felt that way in a really long time, and it was kind of frightening.

And that’s why therapy is important for me. I need help contextualizing my past experiences, because I wasn’t able to do it for myself at the time. And I didn’t know how to ask for help at the time — I just assumed that I was really bad at adulting. (Frankly, sometimes I’m surprised I survived that period of my life.)

Have a cute puppy taking a nap; it’s good for the soul.

Studenting · Thoughts about Stuff

The Value of Critique

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I took a class this winter, in a subject I have no experience with. It was gloriously fun, but very challenging. It moved very quickly, and there were a lot of deadlines. My goal with this class was to develop a greater understanding and appreciation for the topic.

I produced a lot. I learned a lot. I am not now, and may never become, an expert, but it was a good experience.

I just had a final critique with the instructor.

It was brutal. She was not unkind, but she was not shy about letting me know many of the ways my project was lacking.

She was not wrong. It was a good critique (good critiques require quite a bit of skill). It was illuminating, and I have some better ideas — from an expert! — about how to approach this kind of project going forward.

But here’s the thing: critique can be hard. When you’ve invested a bunch of time and work in something, it’s hard to hear all the ways it doesn’t measure up. It hurts the ego; it can bruise the heart.

But it is important to be able hear it and accept it — or at least to listen to it, and decide what you want to take away from it.

I’m not sure I could have done anything better or different with this project, so even though some of it was difficult to hear, I am a beginner at this — I am not capable of greatness, at least not yet (and there were a few other life circumstances going on in the background, so even if I was capable of more, I might not have been able to bring it to the table) — and my goal for this class was to finish.

So I will let this experience sit for a minute, digest the advice I have been given, maybe do some drawing for fun and find an approach (slower, more methodical, more iterative) to this kind of work that makes more sense to my brain.

And then I will try again.