AC_1965_Web

8 AN T I OC H CO L L E G E C L A S S O F 19 6 5 5 0 t h A N N I V E R S A R Y B O O K A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z B A L D W I N istrative computing, took place. I learned about wiring long-gone IBM machines, finding outliers in distri- butions of body measurements on a counter/sorter and processing the college course registration, antici- pating activities which I would be involved in for the rest of my work- ing life—statistics and computing. I spent a quarter at Psych Corp in New York assisting on a large com- mercial market survey for Michigan Gas. I had a six month co-op in Ann Arbor working on two projects for Bill Gamson (Class of ’55). One was analyzing data from an interview project studying fluoridation poli- tics in a set of New England commu- nities, the other developing a coding procedure for assessing the salience of peace issues on the first pages of the NewYork Times.After that most of my jobs were on campus, mostly TA’ing in Intro Sociology. My most memorable courses were introductory sociology taught by EverettWilson who mentored me my last four years at Antioch;George Geiger’s elementary logic; a level 2 philosophy course on Russell’s Logical Atomism; a math logic course which examined Gödel’s Theorem; and a course at Fels introducing me to Fortran programming. I discov- ered my interests in quantitative so- cial science and computing. My aca- demic courses were perhaps overly focused on social science and math and a bit skimpy in the physical sci- ences and humanities. I started graduate school in Sociology at Cornell where I became fascinated with the work of Piaget and transferred after a year into Harvard’s Ph.D. program in Human Development in the Department of Social Relations. There, I learned a lot of child development, followed my mathematical interests, and be- came very involved with using computers for data analysis as a re- search assistant and for my disserta- tion. I worked for John and Beatrice Whiting, psychological anthropolo- gists, who organized observational studies of children in different cul- tures. At first, I analyzed data from the Six Cultures Study. For their subsequent project I spent a year (1967/68) in western Kenya help- ing establish a sample community in a small Luo village 20 miles from where Obama’s father was born. Back in Cambridge, I organized and analyzed the data from their new sample communities. In an attempt to avoid studying for my comps, I became involved in a summer camp for retarded chil- dren in Freedom, New Hampshire. Camp Freedom was set up by two young Harvard faculty members for the purpose of training students in the use of behavioral techniques with these children. My role in the camp was akin to that of director of building and maintenance with bookkeeping thrown in. I coordi- nated the open and closing of camp and a lot of the construction and reconstruction of buildings. The construction guys became friends whom I kept in touch with for years. At the camp I developed handyman skills, which I have used extensively in the various houses I have owned over the years. Just a few months ago, I stepped down from the board of an organiza- tion which provides community res- idences for intellectually challenged adults, one of whom had been a camper. This organization was cre- ated in the 1970s as a spinoff of the camp and I remained associated with it for forty years. In the fall of 1972, I moved from Cambridge (Massachusetts) toOxford (Ohio) where I primarily taught Child Development, Exceptional Child and Psycholinguistics at Miami University.Teaching was interesting, challenging and hard work; I came to appreciate it in a way I had not previously. And through it I finally acquired depth of knowledge in de- velopmental psychology. I enjoyed working in a friendly and collabora- tive department and took advantage of opportunities to team teach and to sit in on seminars taught by oth- ers. I was part of a small group ex- ploring the uses of scaling and clus- tering in psychological research. My dissertation had used these tech- niques and while at Miami I created a large program which greatly sim- plified performing such analyses. (A few years later the major statistical packages included such procedures and made my program obsolescent.) I returned to Kenya in 1975, help- ing masters level education students at the University of Nairobi develop thesis projects, and revisited the Luo community where I had worked ear- lier. I continued to spend summers back in Boston,working at the camp and for theWhitings. I left Oxford, Ohio, in 1979, which proved to be a watershed year for me. The job at Miami marked the end of my traditional ac- ademic career. Since leaving Miami, I have had a variety of interesting and different jobs and careers all dealing with psychology and/or re- search methods and/or comput- ers.The first was at Brown Medical School as Research Director for the Family Therapy Research project run by a psychiatrist who had devel- oped the McMaster Model of Family Functioning, a pragmatic approach to family therapy. My task was to de- velop methods of assessing families in line with the approach.The most successful of these was the Family Assessment Device (FAD) which has now been translated into 25 lan- guages. From there I became a program- mer for three years,developing a sys- tem for the distribution department of a local newspaper. The system kept track of the customers who re- ceived the paper, the kids who deliv- ered to them and the trucks that dis- tributed papers to the delivery boys. It was a fascinating project, which, on the one hand, required figuring out how the distribution process