Tuesday, July 6, 2010
The Michigan Daily - michigandaily.com

15

The right chemistry

BELLA SHAH

E-MAIL BELLAAT BELLZ@UMICH.EDU.

-

Being able to successfully
work with a group of peo-
ple toward a common goal
is a necessary
skill in every-
thing from sports
to Math 115. The
ability to work
well with others
requires percep-
tion, diligence
and reliabil- LEXI
ity. to sports, it's 2~f RA
easy to measure
success in wins
and losses - you can live and die
by numbers and relish in the lack
of subjectivity. On the volleyball
team, we crunch numbers all the
time to obtain black-and-white
explanations for problems with
our play. Our "side out" percentage
was either above 60% or it wasn't.
Our execution, or lack thereof,
translates directly into a win or
loss, and the numbers clearly tell
us how well we played.
But there are some games where
numbers can't tell the whole story.
What has always sparked my curi-
osity are the improbable games
that, statistically, just don't make
sense. Stats can tell you who's win-
ning or which hitter is hot, but they
don't explain how team "chemis-
try" affects a game. Chemistry is
difficult to explain, incredibly easy
to feel and often hard to come by.
But there's little consensus on what
this abstract concept is and how it
helps so many teams, especially
the underdogs, win. There's even
less agreement on how it affects
the way non-athlete groups work
together. I'm no expert, but I have
my theories.
A necessary precursor to chem-
istry is trust, which is earned
throughtherepetitionof consistent
behavior. In volleyball, this might
be digging a tip. In class, it could
be doing your assigned problems.
Either way, you're performing to
a consistent standard, and your
teammates (or classmates) associ-
ate you with that task. You earn
expectations and fulfill them, and
this creates a dynamic and interac-
tive atmosphere. If I had to worry
about someone else performing
your job, it would distract me from
my own, causing the whole team's
performance to suffer. Instead,
I know where they're going to be
because they've demonstrated that
they'll always be there.
The goal of any group working
together is to produce. Constant
management is needed to con-
sistently cut down on error and
continue to pursue perfection.

This particular aspect of chemis-
try allows your team to maintain
focus, which is one of the crucial
tools needed to achieve your goals
- be it winning a game or complet-
ing homework.
Chemistry is the
foundation of a
group's success.
Effective leadership is another
fundamental component of chem-
istry. It guides those raw tools your
team worked so hard to cultivate
toward one collective vision. Being
a leader demands constant re-eval-
uation of goals and direction based
on the current situation. Where
management is focused on the
process, leadership is concerned
with making sure you're aiming
toward the right end result. War-
ren Bennis, known as the pioneer of
"leadership studies," identified this
difference between leadership and
management in saying, "Manage-
ment is doing things right. Leader-
ship is doing the right things."
In every successful team I have
been a part of, every member has
had one of these clearly defined
roles: managers, leaders and pro-
ducers. These are all essential to a
group's success, but each role has
different requirements. Be it the
volleyball team or a student orga-
nization, personnel may change
but there are always people spe-
cializing in each of these duties.
The leader makes sure the team is
focused and inspires them to stay
that way. The manager looks for
ways the group can better itself.
And producers get through the
legwork by concentrating on their
own individual responsibilities.
Being a good teammate means
looking at your team and figuring
out which of these roles it needs,
not which one you want to fill. If
you are newly joining the Olympic
team, your main focus should be
on your own efficiency and pro-
duction, since it's expected that
everyone else will already be per-
forming at a high level. If you join
the ranks of a student organiza-
tion that isn't performing, maybe
you lead and delegate manage-
ment. Success as a team relies on
each role functioning and balanc-
ing out the other two.
- Lexi Zimmerman can be
reached at lexizimm@umich.edu.

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We're not living in the Matrix

Besides the occasional col-
lege student too obsessed
with Facebook to spend
time on anything
else, the human
race isn't yet the j
slave of comput-
ers. Machines
aren't mining
people for elec-
tricity and feeding
them a cocktail NICHOLAS
of dead bodies as CLIFT
imagined by the
"Matrix" trilogy.
But they are revolutionizing the way
we perceive the universe.
On a fundamental level, progress
in modern science requires comput-
ers. You may remember (or not) that
in introductory science courses,
things are "ideal": balls are thrown
in rooms without air, gases are made
of particles with no mass, magnetic
fields are perfectly uniform and
football teams never lose. But when
things stop being ideal, when wind
and mass and randomness are taken
into account, things get hairy quite
quickly. Researchers in every dis-
cipline rely on computers to study
these hairier realms of reality.
But it's interesting to consider
whether the rise of computers in
science might herald the beginning
of the end of human intuition as
the driving force in science, as did
a recent episode of the WNYC-pro-
duced radio show Radiolab, titled
"Limits." Ph.D. students working
on Eureka, a computer at Cornell
University, set their computer to
watch a pendulum swing back and
forth. And then, after doing this for
24 hours ... boom! Their computer
program produced a simple, beauti-
ful equation: F = ma, Sir Isaac New-
ton's second law of motion and one
of the most important equations in
all of science. In one day, Eureka
found something that had eluded
the human race for millennia.
Something similar happened to
a biologist when he fed Eureka data
he had collected from cell behavior.

Unlike in the case of the pendulum,
though, the equation was like noth-
ing biologists had seen before. And
while the equation clearly worked,
the biologist was at a loss to under-
stand one crucial thing: why.
Computers are giving us extraor-
dinary power. But does that mean
that, in general, scientists like the
aforementioned biologist have a less
intuitive understanding of their sci-
ence? The answer I've come up with
is a resounding "no."
In fact, Sharon Glotzer told me
they do just the opposite. "(Com-
puters) can help give intuition," she
said. She's the Stuart W. Churchill
Professor of Chemical Engineering
with faculty appointments in four
other departments and Director of
Research Computing in the College
of Engineering. She felt computers
can help scientists see trends in data
(think of making a graph).
Now, I know what you might be
thinking: Eureka isn't like other
computers most scientists are using.
But Eureka is more normal than you
might think. Like other computers,
-it's just providing analysis based on
a computer algorithm written by
humans. All computers perform a
series of calculations that, Glotzer
confirmed, could be performed by
a billion well-coordinated eighth-
grade mathletes.
And that's really what computing
is all about. August Evrard, Arthur
F. Thurnau Professor of Physics,
uses computers extensively in his
work studying cosmology. He told
me that the crazy-cool thing about
Eureka, and all computation used
in modern scientific research, is
its ability to make sense of huge,
unfathomably large quantities
of data. That power is being har-
nessed by "almost any field you can
think of," Evrard informed me. The
ATLAS detector at the Large Had-
ron Collider in Switzerland, the
largest particle accelerator in the
world, generates 3,200 terabytes
of data every day. It doesn't matter
how decked out your abacus is -

you can't make sense of that with-
out powerful computers.
Computers simply
aren't replacing
human scientists.
If Mark Newman, Paul Dirac Col-
legiate Professor of Physics, could
do billions of mathematical calcula-
tions in his head every second, he
might not need to use computers.
But when you want to know how
fast a disease spreads, it doesn't mat-
ter how well you intuitively under-
stand that sneezing on other people
spreads infection. The only way to
know how soon everyone else will be
infected, he told me, is to ask a com-
putertocrunchthenumbers.There's
a reason most people don't just run
quick, computational simulations
in their head. "If the real world is
too complicated to understand," he
said, your computer model probably
would be as well.
But such models could always be
reduced to the underlying scientific
or mathematical principles govern-
ing them. Computers like Eureka
have an important, intriguing role to
play in science - a role I don't think
includes replacing human intuition.
Computers are still far from being
able to "think" for themselves.
Eureka's biologist didn't under-
stand why his equation worked,
but he'll have to figure that out in
order to build on the computer's
discovery - something unthinking
computers can't do for him. Science
just doesn't work without scientists
who understand their fields. And
for as long as the universe remains
fathomable to humans and comput-
ers remain unable to "think," I don't
see that changing.
- Nicholas Clift can be
reached at nclift@umich.edu.