Notes Section 3: Another Chance

Section Notes 3: Another Chance

Summary: Casey has explored many facets of Whisperers as communication interfaces for CumuLinker. She’s played with the ‘Life Patch’ that extends Whisperer electronics into art and self-expression. At a local environmentally-focused meetup, CumuLinker and Whisperers will steer the conversation toward relevant topics without inhibiting normal chitchat. And, she’s opted to add a BodyReader to expand her social contacts at this event.

Casey’s curiosity about CumuLinker/Whisperer technology has bridged her professional interests with her need for replenished retirement funds. She senses a non conventional computational world within Whisperers. This meetup offers an experiment for her hunches about a local murder case.

Casey reconnects with a Canadian snowbird she knew from a mid-life period at a glamorous East Coast educational graduate institution which she attended and where Gavin held research affiliation.

Whisperers rekindle emotions not fully extinguished by unfortunate turmoil of that period. Their sense of fading time re-generates romance with adjustments to their separate life styles.

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Keywords: software engineering; climate change; quantified self; aging; memoirs.

History: Massachusetts miracle; Wang Institute of Graduate Studies; Master of Software Engineering; DEC, Apollo, minicomputers; Doctor An Wang; Tracy Kidder, “Soul of a New Machine”.

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• CumuLinker is acting as a 3rd party who knows the living data of two people communicating through Whisperers. It can assemble tidbits of information that might interest the Whisperer wearers in each other’s ideas. Or, CumuLinker might find a good conversation starter for the topic of the meetup, e.g. climate change. Conversation researchers include Debra Tannen on gender and family and Sherry Turkle on technology and conversation and the “Mansplaining” pattern (Wikipedia). See later CALM (Conversation Adjusting Lower Moderation) model in Section6.
  
• *’Body Readers’ are drawn from the QuantifiedMe movement with “Quantified Self” goals (Wikipedia).
  
• The time period of Gavin meeting Casey fits the “Massachusetts Miracle” when companies like Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) (Wikipedia) , Apollo, Data General, Pr1ME, and Wang Labs thrived around the Route 128 outskirts of Boston. The minicomputer industry succumbed to the Internet and PCs, e.g. Wang Labs generations.
  
• The graduate institute was founded by Billionaire Doctor An Wang (Wikipedia) to provide professional education in software engineering for programmers and engineers, continuing at CMU Software Engineering Institute. alumna engineer Betty Shanahan’s retrospective on “The Soul of a New Machine” by Tracy Kidder describes the atmosphere of that period.
  
• Casey is intrigued with a personal growth course based on the BOOK “Saging and Aging” and Retired’ connecting on social network LinkedIn.
  
• Casey likes the author of Carolyn Heilbrun’s Book “Last Gift of Time” and her mystery series with Amanda Cross.
  
• Gavin follows environmental researcher Graeme Gibson and writer/activist Margaret Atwood.