Behavioral Modeling and Simulation

The National Research Council recently came out with a rather lengthy book on modeling individual through group level behaviors and cultural variables. This is a very big topic in the Government right now. One of their chapters was on "Games" and how they could contribute as a tool for social and organizational modeling. Specifically, they were looking at MMOGs. While I don't recommend the entire book for the casually-interested (the book is geared primarely for the Department of Defense Modeling and Simulation community), the chapter on games was interesting. The council considered the application of games in three distinct roles:

1. Games as an Interaction Medium
2. Games as a Set of Engaging and Immersive Models
3. Games as an Interactive Laboratory

Overall, there were some good points and there were some sketchy points at best (not to mention a lot of what I would call "subjective claims" that did not have cited references...not a good sign coming from a National Research Council).

One interesting "prediction" was that...

The biggest change coming in the next few years will be in the underlying models of human and organizational behavior, particularly with respect to the modeling, display, and input of human emotion into the interactive game.

They go on to say that games will add communication modalities such as visual display, auditory display, haptic display, and two-way emotional communication and display. Not to burst a portion of that bubble, but there are already several game projects that include these more advanced interfaces. Many are still in university and Government labs, but even back in 2001, there was/is a game called "The Journey to Wild Divine" that incorporates biofeedback.

IABTI Conference

My colleagues and I recently submitted a paper/presentation for the International Association of Bomb Technicians and Investigators (IABTI) Conference. This was their annual training and technology conference. We presented on some of the training programs we are working on, and we also gave a primer on trends in the learning field.

One of the more remarkable things was a simple question asked by my colleague. Presenting to a room of about 100 people, she asked who had heard of "Web 2.0". Guess how many people raised their hands? 2. I think we picked the right audience to give this presentation to :-)

My biggest realization is that sometimes it is imperative that we get out and brief these concepts to people who may not know about them instead of hyping ourselves up by continuing to brief ourselves in the learning community. I'm not saying that learning conferences are bad...far from it. It's just that sometimes we suffer from briefing ourselves to make us appear smart, rather than reach out to those that we intend to help.

Graduation...Finally!

Even though I completed all of the requirements for the dissertation back in October, I had to wait until this June to finally walk. Despite some hesitations about even wanting to fly down for the ceremonies, I was still urged to go, and I was definitely glad that I did. It brought some nice closure to the degree.

This first picture is actually me going up the stage to pick up a fake diploma...

Supercomputer (Games contribute...again)

The Government has unveiled the latest supercomputer that is billed as the world's fastest computer (read the article here). A team of scientists at LANL and IBM built the computer (named "Roadrunner") that is twice as fast as IBM's Blue Gene computer system (which happened to be 3 times faster than any other supercomputer in the world).

To put things in perspective, the article offers this comparison...

if every one of the 6 billion people on earth used a hand-held computer and
worked 24 hours a day it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner
computer can do in a single day.

Of intersting note is that the scientists also give a lot of credit to games for making this possible (game naysayers continue to be silenced). They took the basic chip design of Sony's playstation and advanced its capabilities. They even refer to it as a "very souped up Sony Playstation". This definitely has a lot of value in the ever increasing world of Modeling and Simulation. Well done...now we will just wait for 18 months, and we will have this computing power in our cell phones :-)

iPhone 2.0

Most folks have probably already seen the latest unveiling of the new iPhone (cheaper and faster). For those who haven't, you can read the article here. The new iPhone promises to address the #1 concern of the previous model (namely the speed of the network...currently locked down by AT&T). In addition, Jobs also rolled out a handful of new applications for the iPhone (from improved wireless computing to music making software).

Of particular note is that Jobs has a vision to compete with the market leading Blackberry in business use. While this could certainly be considered a BHAG (read Collins "Good to Great" if you don't know that that means), there is a lot of ground work that needs to be done to crack into that market. They've taken some steps with working with Microsoft applications, but many hurdles still await...I'm not exactly sure that the Gov't will be jumping on the iPhone bandwagon anytime soon.

Performance Improvement and ePerformance

Tony Karrer recently did a post on his blog regarding ePerformance. He also has a few good links to Learning Circuits articles on the topic, including this one that serves as a primer. This is a topic that I've written about several times on this blog, and I will continue to emphasize its importance on the community.


I was asked the other day what the real difference was between performance improvement and training, because after all "isn't the goal of training to improve performance?" I answered, 'yes'...however, not all performance can be improved with training. I started back at the basis of a needs analysis and explained that a needs analysis in the training field (i.e. a TNA) is conducted with the intervention already selected (i.e. training). A 'real' needs analysis aims to get at the core of the performance problem and recognizes that the intervention may be training or a process improvement or employee selection or a job aid or ...


I like how Tony defines ePerformance in the Learning Circuits article as a combination of eDevelopment (i.e. performance reviews, development plans, informal learning, etc.), eInteration (i.e. 1-to-1 email, online communities, discussion threads, etc.), and eSupport (tools, job aids, resources, knowledge bases, etc.). Blending Tony's points with what I wrote previously, the key to ePerformance is to look at key at quick interventions that are results-oriented.