Page 24 - 2016Fall

Grace A. Clark
Postal:
Grace Clark Signal Sciences 532 Alden Lane Livermore, California 94550 USA
Email:
GCSS_Grace@comcast.net
Smart People Behaving Foolishly: Lessons from a Career in Scientific Research
Most management decisions involve politics, so they are often based more on fear and ego than principle. The biggest fear is “looking bad.”
Introduction
The focus of this article is on things I wish someone had told me when I was a young person embarking on a career in scientific research. My specialty is statisti- cal signal processing for applications in acoustics, electromagnetics, and particle physics. This includes underwater acoustics, ultrasonic nondestructive testing, bioacoustics, and speech processing. However, although most of the ideas in this article are relevant to science and engineering, they are also relevant to life in gen- eral. The lessons I have learned have been valuable to me, but it would have been wonderful if I had not had to learn them via the “school of hard knocks.” By shar- ing lessons here, my hope is that at least a few people might be saved the trouble of learning them the hard way.
As humans, we are all susceptible to some level of poor judgment at one time or another. Murphy’s Law is alive and well in scientific and engineering systems. Over my career, I have served in various positions, including electronics techni- cian, staff scientist, principal investigator, technology leader, program leader, and director of research. At every level, I have made my share of foolish mistakes and I have observed countless brilliant colleagues behaving in ways that are decidedly not brilliant. I call this “smart people behaving foolishly.”
Aside from sociopathic ethical breaches, I believe the cause of smart people behav- ing foolishly is the general frailty of human nature, especially the ego. We become overwhelmed by excessive demands, and we make too many decisions based on fear rather than principle. We live in a society obsessed with finding fault and as- signing blame, yet everybody wants to avoid “looking bad.” In addition, schools simply cannot teach us all the practical lessons that we will need in our careers.
In this article, I take a playful look at the practical “technical folklore” that is nec- essary for real-world laboratory work but is rarely found in textbooks or journals. I emphasize the assumptions, limitations, and trade-offs associated with various signal-processing algorithms and provide “rules of thumb” for use in the labora- tory.
My goal is to explore the effects of human nature on projects in Science, Technol- ogy, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) and demonstrate the concepts with “horror stories” from actual real-world projects. In doing so, I use quotes from others as well as my own “Clark’s Laws” to have some fun with the nasty problems that keep many of us up at night.
22 | Acoustics Today | Fall 2016 | volume 12, issue 3 ©2016 Acoustical Society of America. All rights reserved.