The Cave Man
It's fitting that we empower ourselves through knowledge.
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The name for this Web site (The Cave) is a paintings-on-the-wall symbol for the representations of simulation. It is based on Plato's essay on the unreality of everyday experience (Allegory of the Cave). I take Plato to mean that everyday experience is merely a representation of the real world of ideas, hence only an approximation.
The Cave itself has evolved into a center for the development of personalized skills diagnostic simulations in the form of computer games, containing tutorials and a supporting search engine. It deals with the scientific principles and mechanisms of skills and the art of matching or improving on the science. Tennis and the stock market are the main applications.
I see the critical dimension in learning tennis to be understanding trajectory dynamics and learning to discriminate between finely tuned racket conditions to produce trajectories. The games are meant to refine your tennis perception. The same idea applies to the stock market, where prices define the trajectories. The term 'strike price' is even used to refer to executing a trade. In tennis I focus on the trigger action of hitting the ball. And in the markets I focus on the price trajectories of the gold-producing stocks.
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Simulations for Skills Training
In Simulations for Skills Training I introduce the subject of computer-based simulations and develop a general procedure for building them to study and train a broad range of skills. The following is a comment on the book by Book News, Inc.
[The] book introduces principles guiding the creation and use of interactive, computer-based representations of real environments as learning vehicles. Treatment is qualitative, and attempts to link mathematics with real life problems. Early chapters examine the nature and utility of computer-based simulations, and later chapters concentrate on details of modeling the real-world scenario. Includes chapter introductions and exercises. Written primarily for educators and classroom teachers. Others who might benefit include animators, computer analysts, planners, managers, programmers, and trainers. Assumes familiarity with personal computers.
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The ideas for this Web site have their beginnings dating back to my research project for the Ph.D. at Rhodes University, in South Africa. Rootstock also goes back to my years as a staff engineer in aerospace (one of hundreds helping with the development, study, and/or training of a variety of man-machine systems) and before that to university studies in physics, mathematics, and philosophy.
For my doctoral project I constructed a computer-based simulation to study the tennis athlete’s visual-motor processes involved in tracking and intercepting a ball hit by the opponent. The work naturally implicated visual perception and took into account both the objective world of the player (the court, players, etc.) and his personal experience of it, as I believe any study of skills should do to make any sense. (We will see in more detail further on that skills receive their definition from and are always performed in some perceived social context, which involves both what the player sees and how he or she sees it. Performing the skills out of context makes no sense.) It is perception that provides the guidance needed to produce effective action (skills), and this is especially true in tracking and interception. Man is indeed a perceptual, idea-producing creature.
I consider perception to be an investigative tool. I assume that the better your ideas of the world (here, the ball in its trajectory at the tennis court) the closer you get to its objective nature and the more effective the operating skills become. And the more you learn, the more capably you can read the objective world. The thesis was the forerunner for my current work, which continues the effort. But I also deal with the study and training for the hitting phase of the overall track, intercept, and return sequence. Click here for details.
The work to date falls under either of the following categories: Physical Education, Human Movement Studies, Tennis Science, Sport Science, or Skills Science -- take your pick. This is an embryonic field and the terminology is still fluid.
My interest in studying at Rhodes began on a holiday trip during my tenure as a Peace Corps volunteer in Swaziland, a small country on the northeast border of the Republic of South Africa, in southern Africa. It was at the Kimberley Diamond Mine in South Africa that I first learned of the research facilities at Rhodes. As it happened, I was standing next to the Registrar of the university, leaning tentatively on a seemingly precarious wooden guard rail, looking down into the gigantic man-made hole in the ground that defined the mine. (It was so deep the miners near the bottom of the hole looked to be as small as insects -- the obvious effects of perception at a distance). Of course we began to palaver, and over tea (what else!) a short time later, we discussed some work I’d been doing on simulated eye implants, an impossibly complex project.
That having been said, the registrar invited me to apply for a Ph.D. research program at Rhodes, assuring me that I would be accepted as a candidate, despite my advanced age. When my stint in the Peace Corps ended I did in fact apply. And soon thereafter began my work officially -- one of two American students on campus (at Grahamstown, a typical college burgh in the southeast section of the country, a stone’s throw inland from Port Elisabeth on the south coast).
(I should note, in this connection, that Dr. Mark Hamayun -- a doctor of opthalmology, with a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering -- recently headed up a project to implant an intraocular retinal prosthesis in the retina where the photoreceptor rods and cones are, thereby filling the role of the replaced cells. The implant is a cell substitute and in its present size and form is 4mm x 5mm with 16 electrodes in a 4 x 4 array. It transmits electrical impulses to a blind patient's neural paths, which happen to function properly despite the blindness, and which transmit signals to the brain, allowing for sight. The research is being conducted at the Intraocular Retinal Prosthesis Lab at Johns Hopkins.)
I was actually late getting to the campus, because I decided at the last minute (without telling anyone) to take a freighter to Cape Town, which is located at the southern point of the African continent. The city is as close as you can walk to Antarctica without getting your feet wet and is a direct recipient of its cold winter winds. (I know because I stayed there for a year after getting my degree.) Anyway, I parked my luggage in a breakfast-lunch-and-dinner pension on Main Street overlooking the merging Indian and Atlantic oceans and settled in for a get-acquainted visit of this fabulous coastal town, before finally making tracks for Grahamstown. Fortunately, the psychology professor (and Department Head) at Rhodes was kind enough to keep an office open for me in the department, even though he had no idea why I hadn’t yet arrived. (I had of course paid my tuition; else I surely would have been out on my ear.) But I did finally arrive and the work finally did begin, and it continues to this day.
I have BS and MS degrees in physics from Wayne University, in Detroit, and studied at the University of Michigan, University of Illinois, and UCLA. I taught physics, logic and math as a graduate teaching assistant, and taught math/stats in Swaziland, Africa, as a Peace Corps volunteer. As a staff engineer in aerospace I helped develop computer-based applications for civilian and military arenas and/or for training personnel in those environments. One project involved training the SAGE system, an example of group training.
I’ve participated in sports ranging from ice hockey to handball, football to tennis, and have been active non-professionally in television, both in front of, and behind the camera. I've also had a long-time interest in writing (see my interview with Amazon.com) and in the stock market, especially the gold stocks. I lived in Africa for a total of about five years, traveled and camped extensively on the continent, and shot a lot of film … but no animals.
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