Tuesday, 7 September 2010, 4:00 p.m., McMurtry Auditorium, Duncan Hall - Afternoon Lecture

James Pomerantz, Rice University

"Failures of the Mind & Brain: Perceptual Illusions and What They Tell Us about Cognition"

As the most complex structure in the known universe, the brain possesses a vast range of abilities but also a nearly infinite number of potential points of failure.  As owners of brains, we humans are all too familiar with mental mishaps of memory, decision-making, and attention.  In this talk I focus on errors of perception, illustrating failures of vision – so called “optical illusions” although they rarely are optical in origin – and what they tell us about cognition and our visual system.  Many illusions result from cognitive and neural processes that rely on shortcuts in order to deliver quick and accurate perception.  Thus these illusions actually reflect the workings of highly efficient and adaptive processes that usually serve us well.  In cognition, the occasional failure appears to be the price of success.

Video available here.

Tuesday, 29 September 2010, 4:00 p.m., McMurtry Auditorium, Duncan Hall - Afternoon Panel Discussion

"The BP Deepwater Horizon Catastrophe: Causes, consequences and cures"

Simon Grant, Lay Family Professor in Economics & Finance
Peter Hartley, George and Cynthia Mitchell Chair in Sustainable Development and Environmental Economics
Amy Jaffe, Wallace Wilson Fellow of the Baker Institute and Associate Director, Rice Energy Program
Steven Klineberg, Professor of Sociology and Co-Director, Institute for Urban Research
Satish Nagarajaiah, Professor of Civil and Mechanical Engineering
Moderated by Richard Grandy, McManis Professor of Philosophy

Scientia's colloquium series this year is dedicated to an examination of failure and its impact, not just on what we know but how we work, think, and live. The Deepwater Horizon event is a recent and conspicuous instance of multi-level failure. A panel of Rice faculty will draw on their expertise in engineering, sociology, economics, psychology, business, policy-making and other disciplines to offer perspectives on that event. In addition to attending to the technical and human causes, the panel will look to the consequences for energy policy, and beyond that to potential lessons about other critical but risky aspects of our highly technology dependent society.

Video available here.

Tuesday, 5 October 2010, 4:00 p.m., McMurtry Auditorium, Duncan Hall - Afternoon Lecture

Vimla L. Patel, The University of Texas Health Science Center, Center for Cognitive Informatics and Decision Making

"Failure to Detect Medical Error: Debunking the Myth of the Infallible Expert"

The notion that human error should not be tolerated is prevalent in both the public and personal perception of the performance of most clinicians. However, researchers in other safety-critical domains have long since abandoned the quest for zero defects as an impractical goal, choosing to focus instead on the development of strategies to enhance the ability to recover from error. Strategies to eradicate error fail to appreciate that error detection and recovery are integral to the function of complex cognitive systems.

In this presentation, I will discuss evidence that shows that unlike popular belief, expert doctors do make errors, but their ability to detect and recover from these errors is far superior to that of trainee physicians. Complex real-time critical care situations appear to induce certain urgency for quick action in a high alert condition, resulting in rapid detection and correction. Understanding the limits and failures of human decision-making is important if we are to build robust decision-support systems to manage the boundaries of risk of error in critical decision-making. 

Video available here.

Tuesday, 2 November 2010, 4:00 p.m., McMurtry Auditorium, Duncan Hall - Afternoon Lecture

Dan Wallach, Rice University

"Adventures in Electronic Voting Failures"

In elections employing electronic voting machines, we have observed that poor procedures, equipment failures, and honest mistakes pose a real threat to the accuracy of the final tally. The event logs kept by these machines can give auditors clues as to the causes of anomalies and inconsistencies; however, each voting machine is trusted to keep its own audit and ballot data, making the record unreliable. If a machine is damaged, accidentally erased, or otherwise compromised during the election, we have no way to detect tampering or loss of auditing records and cast votes.

This talk begins with our experiences in real elections where we have observed these issues in the field, including a disputed primary election in Laredo, Texas as well as the recent Congressional election in Sarasota, Florida.  These issues motivate a new design for a voting architecture we call "VoteBox" which networks the voting machines in a polling place, allowing for replicated, timeline-entangled logs, which can survive malice and malfunction to provide a verifiable audit of election-day events.

Video available here.

Tuesday, 30 November 2010, 4:00 p.m., McMurtry Auditorium, Duncan Hall - Afternoon Lecture

Gordon B. Mills, MD, PhD, MD Anderson Cancer Center

"Failing to Learn from Our Successes and Failures: Overcoming Hurdles to Delivering on Personalized Medicine"

A number of early spectacular successes in implementing targeted therapy for cancer led to a remarkable optimism that personalized approaches would rapidly change the face of cancer therapy. However, most new personalized medicine approaches have turned out to be effective in only a subpopulation of patients and demonstrate only transient activity. In looking ahead to a rapidly emerging toolbox of targeted therapeutics and advances in understanding the role of the host genome in predicting efficacy and toxicity of therapies, success will depend on the way we approach failure. Unfortunately, academia and funding agencies have become incredibly risk- and failure-averse. But if we are going to change the outcome for cancer patients, we need to convert our present incremental approach to a culture where we accept failure as a possible consequence of implementing high-risk, high-yield approaches.  

Video available here.

Tuesday, 25 January 2011, 4:00 p.m., McMurtry Auditorium, Duncan Hall - Afternoon Lecture

Deborah Harter, Rice University

"Art and the Poetics of Failure: The ruth About Fiction"

Both science and art are matters of experiment. And each is founded in acts of the imagination. But certainly the special project of the first is to take the measure of nature with the tools of analysis and mathematical structure while that of the second is to conceive and to construct images to represent, rather than to measure, a world whose dimensions we cannot help but invent. In the space of fiction and of paint there is a place for the "true" and the "real" but it lies in partial renderings and shaded outlines in evocations and counter-evocations of those lights and shapes and passing phrases the artist would have us imagine. With a kind of inverse poetics, art's "truest" texts often represent, as much as anything else, their own failure to capture the object of their vision.

Video available here.

Tuesday, 15 February, 2011, 4:00 p.m., McMurtry Auditorium, Duncan Hall - Afternoon Lecture

Paul Padley, Rice University

"Failure On An Epic Scale: The Excitement of Physics Yesterday and Today"

Throughout its history, physics has realized many opportunities for failure. In fact we will see this has been a force (pun intended) for progress and understanding. A discussion of examples will include some important failures with connections to Rice. Surveying the current situation, we will conclude that physics is now failing on an epic scale, making this one of the most exciting times in history to be a physicis.

Video available here.

THE BOCHNER LECTURE

Wednesday, 9 March, 2011, 7:00 p.m., McMurtry Auditorium, Duncan Hall - Evening Lecture

Richard Zare, Stanford University

"The Power of a 'Failed' Lecture Demonstration: Enhancing Learning from Unexpected Outcomes"

Although chemical lecture demonstrations are generally designed to yield predictable, well-defined outcomes illustrating well-known principles, frequently more can be learned when they do not go quite as planned or expected. The classical water electrolysis experiment can be used to illustrate this concept in which the initial experimentally observed volume ratio of hydrogen to oxygen can dramatically diverge from the expected value of 2.00 predicted from the law of combining proportions. Another example is measuring the rise of water in a water-filled pan containing a burning candle when the candle is covered by a beaker and the flame is extinguished. Presentations of these nonideal outcomes help students think more deeply about chemical issues as well as prepare students to understand what research is really like.

Video available here.

Tuesday, 12 April, 2011, 4:00 p.m., McMurtry Auditorium, Duncan Hall - Afternoon Lecture

Henry Petroski, Duke University

"Success and Failure: A Paradoxical Relationship"

Engineering is about making and doing things that have not been done before. To be successful, it is essential that engineers properly anticipate how things can fail, and design accordingly. Case studies of past failures thus provide invaluable information for the design of future successes. Conversely, designs based on the extrapolation of successful experience alone can lead to failure. This paradox will be explored in the context of historical case studies, including the design of ocean liners and also of suspension bridges, which from the 1850s through the 1930s evolved from John Roebling’s enormous successes—culminating in the Brooklyn Bridge—to structures that oscillated in the wind and, in the case of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, twisted itself apart and collapsed in 1940. Lessons learned from these cases and others can be generalized to apply across a broad spectrum of engineering structures and systems.  

Video available here.