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He's helping to lead the IBM team now at work on this revolutionary technology in the Cognitive Environments Laboratory. When Jeff describes this to me, he asks me if I remember the film Minority Report, the technologies for which were conjured a decade ago by fifteen scientific researchers during a three-day, Spielberg-assembled think tank.
Using the capabilities of IBM's pioneering Cognitive Environments Laboratory (CEL), Repsol and IBM researchers will work together to jointly develop and apply new prototype cognitive tools for real-world use cases in the oil and gas industry. Cognitive computing software agents and technologies will be designed to collaborate with human experts in more natural ways, learn through interaction, and enable individuals and teams to make better decisions by overcoming cognitive limitations posed by big data.
Scientists in the CEL will also be able to experiment with a combination of traditional and new interfaces based upon spoken dialog, gesture, robotics and advanced visualization and navigation techniques. Through these modalities, they will be able to learn and leverage sophisticated models of human characteristics, preferences and biases that may be present in the decision-making process.
Jeff, who was inducted into the IEEE two years ago (and whose children respectively dance and race the Rubik's Cube clock), possesses a mind that seems capable of the impossible. He has to dial his intellect down several notches so that he can communicate with ordinary people like me. He has spent many years at IBM doing various fascinating things—and many nights working until 3 AM or later (on concepts, on coding, on new ideas, on computer screens) to be ready for his team the next day.
If you watch this video, you'll see my brother beginning at minute 2:20 in a blue shirt at a long table, thinking. He has blue eyes, light hair, and a brain that is also seemingly unrelated to me.
Thanks to Donna, Jeff's wife, for sharing the article and video, and to my father who was on this news early today.
0 Comments on you know that super smart brother of mine? as of 10/30/2014 7:11:00 PM
In today's Philadelphia Inquirer I yearn toward dance, mourn my countless non-capabilities, and conclude, well — read on. The story begins like this, below, and can be found in its entirety here.
How I stood, how I sat, how I walked into a room and didn't possess it - these were concerns. Also: the untamed wilderness of my hair, but we would get to that. In addition: the way I hid behind my clothes and failed their easy angles. Most troubling, perhaps: my tendency to rush, my feverish impatience with myself, my heretofore undiagnosed problem with the art of being led.
So I thought I could dance.
So I imagined the ballroom instructors leaning in to say - first rumba or perhaps the second - "You've got a knack for this."
What knack? What had I done? Why had I not realized that dancing in the dark alone to Bruce Springsteen does not qualify anyone for the cha-cha? That grace is not necessarily an elevated pointer finger? That how they do it on TV is how they do it on TV? That just because you love to dance does not a dancer make you?
So many thanks to Avery Rome for making room for the piece, and to DanceSport Academy in Ardmore—and all my teachers—for making room for me. Thanks, too, to a certain Moira. She knows who she is.
3 Comments on reflecting on my ballroom dance "career" in today's Inquirer, last added: 10/10/2012
Fun article, Beth! Thanks for sharing your encouraging qualms. As you know, I very much enjoy your dance videos - and aspire to such grace of movement. But the reality is that I'm much more of a dancing in the dark w/ Bruce kind of girl. (Where I rule the floor.) :)
I write from time to time on this blog about the Glorious Miss M., who thrills us all at DanceSport Academy with her talent, her commitment, and her kindness. We've watched her grow up from this little girl, snapped by my camera nearly three years ago, to the young lady who joins us adults on Thursday evenings in the intermediate group classes—not to learn (she knows this stuff already), but to help us find our dancing ways. She gets a little look in her eye, as you can see. It's not mischief, exactly. It's, well, let's call it The Miss M. Sparkle Elixir.
Yesterday evening, while we sat on the couch together waiting for our lesson, Miss M. asked me about our time away in Beach Haven. I began to speak of dolphins and sun. "Oh, yes," she interrupted (however politely). "I read that on your blog." (How boring can one person be, I thought of myself at the time.) Miss M. then proceeded to explain how, every day when she comes home from school, she heads to the computer to find out what I blogged. She was smiling when she said it. There might have been some irony there. Still, just in case she's reading today, this one is for you, Miss M.
Miss M. is competing this weekend at the Philadelphia Festival DanceSport Championships. I'm sending her all of my love. If the judges know what's right and fair, she'll come home bedazzled with blue ribbons.
2 Comments on this one's for you, Little Miss M., last added: 4/21/2012
I've written about Jan and Lana so often on this blog that I don't need to introduce them (do I?). They are the dancing stars, the soon-to-be movie stars, the team that keeps me honest in a Norah Jones waltz, the instruction that burns but lasts.
Here they are, dancing at Philadelphia's Thirtieth Street Station.
Because that's how good they are.
1 Comments on Jan and Lana Dance Jive at 30th Street Station, last added: 3/1/2012
You can therefore imagine my distinct happiness when I learned that our son has chosen—the final course he will choose at a university he has loved—to take a ballroom dancing class. Just a little one-credit something to cap a remarkable four years.
The photo above is not of my son, but it is of a boy whom I adored back in the days when I was volunteering as a judge and photographer for Dancing Classrooms. A video montage from that experience (with words and music) can be found here.
1 Comments on you know how much I love to dance, last added: 11/17/2011
Why is it (why?) that most women who take up the ballroom dancing thing love everything about it—the dance, sure, but also the sparkle and get-up, the false lashes, the fake tans, the glitter cheeks (not those kind of cheeks), the form-fitting spandex, the low-plunging neck lines, the high-cutting thigh lines, the razzle, did I mention the shoes?, did I talk about the spotlight?—and I personally cannot summon enthusiasm for anything but the dancing itself.
About which I am plenty enthused.
Another way of putting this: I'm supposed to dance in a showcase on Sunday, this coming Sunday, and I still don't have anything to wear. So that there I sit, in a studio abuzz with talk about tailor-made dresses, hand-stoned dresses, new satin shoes, fine hair, sequined headbands, items that require tape measures and pins, thinking: I haven't even been to the mall (which is not, by the way, where the fine ballroom dresses are known to live).
I didn't grow up thinking about beauty the way most girls did. I grew up wondering how hard I could kick the ball, how fast I could run the race, how well I could rhyme my poems. I am, therefore, at a deficit. And perhaps am no woman after all.
To the mall I go. You can picture me there. And I don't want to hear a thing come Sunday about the ruthless wild country that is my hair. There's only so far I am willing to go and besides, my clients need me to stay right here, near the desk, on this side of invisible, where clothes don't matter one bit.
8 Comments on Perhaps I am not a woman after all, last added: 7/30/2011
Ha! I'm with you Beth. I just spent the afternoon trying on dresses for a wedding (it's tomorrow) and I was sulking and whining to myself the entire time. You would look fabulous in anything-- I'm sure of it. Best of luck at the showcase :-)
I've been a big Sharon Begley fan for years now, and so when I saw that she had written a feature Newsweek story titled "Can You Build a Better Brain?" (January 10 and 17, 2011) I flipped the pages and settled in.
After reviewing all the things that don't have any proven tie to enhanced brain intelligence (those vitamins, the Mediterranean diet, statins, ibuprofen), Begley begins to center in on things that are known to help—exercise, meditation, and complex videogames. You have to read the whole article to get the complete and utter gist, but I'm going to quote from the paragraph that made me happiest of all:
... taking up a new, cognitively demanding activity—ballroom dancing, a foreign language—is more likely to boost processing speed, strengthen synapses, and expand or create functioning networks.
Ballroom dancing—did you see that folks? It ain't just about the glitter and the gloves.
Speaking, however, of glitter and gloves, that gorgeous woman in the photograph here is our own Cristina, of DanceSport Academy, whose little Eva is turning two this month. If learning the rumba doesn't keep us young, this wondrous sprite of a child is bound to do the trick.
1 Comments on Brain training through ballroom dance, last added: 1/9/2011
Just now, coming home from a ballroom lesson with John (Where is the dance? I asked him; It's in the balance we create between each other, he said) I drove through sunlit rain. Half the sky clear and the other full of gray shout.
Magda, the champion dancer, talks about posture. She says, "Imagine that you have a coat, a heavy coat, and that you have filled its every pocket with stones. Now imagine that you are wearing that coat, that your shoulders bear its weight. There is no tension in your neck, no hunch around your ears, because the coat that you are wearing keeps your shoulders in their place and your arms proper in their sockets. You reach high, but always from an anchored place. Your neck is strong. Your head sits right."
She talks and I watch her move, I watch her glide across the room—this gorgeous creature. I think how easy it seems—standing straight, shoulders back, life in repose. I think of how, from the earliest days on frozen ponds and ice skating rinks, I had all the inner joy and all the speed and all the height, but I lacked posture. I lacked the courage to present myself to the world, to come out from behind myself and say, Here, at last, am I. That has carried forward. Writing, for example, is myself once removed. It is me, behind words, inside them.
Is it too late, at my age, to finally stand tall?
No. Because I want this. I want beauty.
2 Comments on Posturing for Beauty, last added: 10/16/2009
In about two weeks I'll be standing on a stage, hopefully blinded by the lights, dancing a tango in Act One and that much-feared Broadway number in Act Two—all as part of the DanceSport showcase. It's always about now in these scenarios that I ask myself, And what, Beth, were you thinking? When I wake from a dream (I mean to say nightmare) purely certain that there's an elephant turning a pirouette on my chest.
Graceful beasts, those elephants. And so heavy.
Every time I think about getting out there with those jumps and lifts, that impossible Quickstep, that prickly tele-spin, those many cortes, I remember my final ice skating competition, when all I wanted was to be perfect. By the time I took the ice however, I was so clutched and crunched with fear that when the music started my legs were ungreased tins. The rink seemed huge and the audience vast, but most of all I was aware of my parents in the stands—deeply cognizant of their generous investment (time and money) in my ice skating career. I needed, I thought, to skate for their sakes. I needed to be lovely.
I fell on the first jump. I skated tall after that. I brought speed and height into my jumps, kick into the footwork, patience and lean to the spread eagle. I lost, in the end, to my rival, Holly Archinal. But I had skated, I had, and that's what I hope for in two weeks—to find a way past the inevitable errors and to finish tall.
Probably in this case the title says it all, for this is Magda, a world champion ballroom dancer who comes to Dancesport a few days a week and gives to others what she knows. She does it without temper or stomp, without conceit. She dances for you and with you, so that you might align, however briefly, with the slip light of her grace. She raises her arm and her hands are liquid, and for a fraction of an instant you are liquid, too—seeing possibility, hearing song, finding new religion in the uninterrupted, the continuous. Choreography is made up of parts; Magda weaves the parts into a whole. Dance is made alive by the slow abbreviated by the fast; she shows you how.
And when she says, Put your hands on the small of my back so that you can see what I am saying about the spine, you are reminded of how weightless beauty is.
4 Comments on Where Beauty Runs Deep, last added: 9/10/2009
Every once in a while, you just want the truth. You need it. So that today, which began with a pre-dawn, sleep-deprived Zumba at the gym, advanced into corporate work, fell toward housework, slipped into a panic, and somehow spun toward a dance lesson, honesty was required.
"I feel as if I'm doing something wrong, and that no one will tell me what that is," I told Jean, during a quickstep lesson. "It's like everybody knows, except for me."
"Well," he answered, looking me straight in the eyes, not pausing, not beating around the bush, not acting as if I hadn't stepped forward with the question. "It's about posture. It's about confidence. It's about the way you plant your feet on the floor. When you think about it, you get it right. But when you don't, you fall back into your old way of dancing. You look as if you are looking for something. You don't stand perfectly straight."
And of course I wish that I did it all better. Of course I wish that I had dancerly wings. But today, this day, I was glad most of all that someone had not pushed me off, had simply said: I will tell you the truth.
7 Comments on Asking for the Truth, last added: 8/21/2009
Her kind of beauty I could live with. The wide open canvas of her eyes, the words she already holds to herself, the liberal adornments of pink: I am a girl, I am to be seen, I will not tell you everything. Earrings in a drawer somewhere, or hanging on a tree. The polishing of soul.
An hour ago, at the dance studio, I became too aware of mirrors, of me in mirrors, of life passing. I became too aware, and I stopped—unable, really, to keep on dancing, to make a pretense of it. I wanted more than I was just then. I wanted more time.
Home alone now, I remember this child. How she turned so freely, did not blink.
6 Comments on Reflected Out, last added: 6/27/2009
We have to will it of ouselves, you know, us shy sorts. Did you know I was shy? Sometimes people are surprised by this, but I am to a fault. That's why writing is so easy for me, the page is a mighty barrier,and mirrors, not such friends.
I am thinking this morning of the fractions we make, the contradictions we provoke, the black clouds we send up over our heads. I think of the comments we make in a moment of hurry or exhaustion, the tossed-off observations, the words we use to delineate one thing from the other, to set one thing to the side of another, at the awful expense of that other. These things echo; they reverberate. We don't see the ramifications coming, but they will come: you wait, they'll be there. There is nothing we can do to scrub the thing we might not have said, the hurt we should have never inflicted, from our record. We can apologize, and we do. But we can't retreat to the before.
Lately I have been taking dance lessons from a choreographer who, in so many ways, silences the negative. You doubt yourself, and he asks you not to. You hear yourself making some ironic observation, and it goes strictly unacknowledged. You ask him a question and you discover, in his answer, no manipulation, no deceit, no cunning. You make a mistake, and he does not shame you. The lesson isn't soft, the learning is relentless, the stakes keep getting higher—and yet: the negative doesn't enter in. Nothing is gained at the expense of something else. There is, quite simply, gain.
The best teachers teach us more about life than they do about anything else. They give us the chance to be slightly better people. Taking ballroom dance lessons is a self-indulgence of the highest order. But oh, I still have so much to learn. And oh, I am so desperate to get some part of this living right.
We are not taught to acknowledge the positives; only the negatives. When you're called into your boss's office, is it to receive accolades? Nope. Only to get your ass reamed. (Sorry for the verbiage.) I try so hard as a supervisor, to acknowledge people's contributions, but always feel like I could be doing more of it. It's great that you have found someone who understands that accentuating the positives is sooooo important.
I have been conscious lately of the words I speak. I always choose them carefully, but currently my anger towards certain people I have tried very hard to keep inside so as not to cause further damage. It's a difficult thing to do. We're human, I suppose.
I wish I could make letters really wide and open here like a hug. My wow would span the page. So much to take from this. So many lessons I need to act on now! And just how the heck did that instructor get so wise? w-0-w~
1- The detritus we leave behind is usually gathered, parcelled out and kept in a corner of our brain to be analysed (logically) when we are about to make the same mistake again. By then, I hope, we will have learned the lesson.
2- My drama instructor, when I was in uni, came from Boston. She knew from the word go that she was working with a group of higher education students who were studying English and therefore mistakes were prone to being made in rehearsals. She had a gigantic notepad and at the end of each practice she would say: 'Someone said this. The correct way of saying is thus.' That way she avoided shaming the already bashful actor. I was reminded of this experience by your very own tale. It's also a practice that I have brought to my own dance tuition. I hardly ever single out people for mistakes they are making, but try to put it as a general issue.
And the music is. And the music is how Iryna hears it, how she won’t let it down to the floor on the power of its own acquiesce. How she says the battering beat is my bones, it is the affectation of want over repose, and by the way, I will be late, and that will be song. Take it apart. Say it again. The music is how the one snow thread of Iryna’s snow dress snaps, how it melts, how it is always Jean’s, alone.
(I did not take this photograph of this gorgeous and talented couple; it was taken of them at a recent competition in Boston, where they captured the attention of the judges and the fans in major fashion, as they always do. They are on their way. You can see why.)
8 Comments on Jean and Iryna are Dancing: Beth Kephart Poem, last added: 6/1/2009
Your spine, your face, your hips are implicated, wrong. Your balance, meanwhile, is an obstruction to mine and cricked to a shim. You have snaggled you have shammed you have embargoed beauty. You have yelped the discontinuous, and why would you ever (answer this) heel the music into breaking its own heart?
It was your suspicion of tension that failed you. It was your wanting too much that forced the first elision. The second erupted from despair.
11 Comments on The Dance Lesson: Beth Kephart Poem, last added: 5/12/2009
This is a beautifully written poem that is heartbreaking as well... a remarkable achievement. However, I am embarrassed to admit that I do not understand the last two lines.
“It was your wanting too much that forced the first elision. The second erupted from despair.”
Oh, Marty. I love this question. I have often asked it of other poems.
In this poem, the speaker is a dance teacher. He is chastising the student for all she does wrong. He is saying, in the end, that she wanted too much, she was too impatient, and that precipitated his first elision—her omissions, her failures, her break. Her second failures (as a dancer, but of course this poem suggests so much more than dance) erupted from her despair that she would never be; she won't.
I have a soft spot for dancers in my heart. I think it is such a heavenly, beautiful art form. Thank you for this lovely, moving poem. It speaks much about the tension between desire to achieve and immediate (yet hopefully temporary)physical or time limitations. Your poetry speaks so well to me.
Hey, I should have come back here for the explanation first. I went looking up elision and what a cool word to use. I even figured it out. And before I even made it back here I wanted to give a good fast decisive foot to that instructor's arse. Elision! He needs to see her beauty!
I love your new photo. Gorgeous. There lies your beauty. Look at that arm!
And then Jean said, "Beth, you have become someone with whom I like to dance. You keep your own balance. You can turn. You can follow. You are gaining technique. Now I worry that the music holds you back. Let the music free you."
Why shouldn't the music free me, I wonder. It always has before.
I am afraid of...what?
4 Comments on Let the Music Free You, last added: 5/1/2009
Fear is interesting. Once you start to look at it, you can see it everywhere. So much of what we do, of what our society values, is grounded in fear. What if it wasn't?
Nothing. Fear, especially in art, is of ridicule, of exposing ourselves. Nothing can hold you back. When you go, you go. That's it. There's no turning back.
I can imagine myself being afraid of not getting the balance, the turns, the techniques and not even hearing the music. Now maybe it's the music's turn. Sounds like it's time to fly. I know you will.
House of Dance has a slightly modified cover in store for its release next March as a paperback; thank you, Carla Weise and Jill Santopolo.
In this trailer (the last of the three that I've been creating these past few weeks), we go through the streets of Ardmore and up into the Dancesport Academy studio, where it has taken an entire planet's worth of gifted dancers—Scott Lazarov, Jean Paulovich, John Villardo, John Larson, Jim Bunting, Cristina Rodrighes, Aideen O'Malley—and one very fine manager (the lovely Tirsa) to teach me a few things about the box step. This is the studio that inspired this novel, which was named one of the best of the year by Kirkus in 2008.
11 Comments on The House of Dance Trailer, last added: 4/21/2009
Thank you, B&BM (am I the only one who calls you that) and Q and LN. A professional videocamera holder I am not. But I've had fun making these.
Q — SO glad you like the new cover!!
Vivian said, on 4/18/2009 12:16:00 PM
Oh, I love the new cover. Amazing what a change of color will do to make things pop and look more sophisticated.
You are having too much fun with the videocamera. Nice reflection of the dancers!
Maya Ganesan said, on 4/18/2009 12:21:00 PM
I really love the new cover -- it's gorgeous. Amazing trailers.
Priya said, on 4/18/2009 10:27:00 PM
I like the new cover too. It's more dynamic and makes me want to read the book all over again!
Em said, on 4/18/2009 10:42:00 PM
A new cover, interesting. Is it the one on the side, red and black? Maybe you could do a post about why they changed the cover? I love to learn little insider things like that. :)
There are days when I show up at the dance studio for a lesson certain that I'm headed for disaster. My brain is locked, my limbs are ice, I can't distinguish left from right, and honest to goodness, I think to myself, Jean (vested with the responsibility of teaching me, poor thing) is going to kill me. I apologize in advance for the coming catastrophics, and then I beg for mercy. I mean, the guy and his gorgeous wife, Iryna, are on the cusp of huge ballroom dance fame. Can you imagine how much it hurts his head to return, with me, to the basics?
Yesterday Jean took one look at me and said the following words: "Let's not worry about teaching today. Let's just listen to the music and dance." A waltz was on. Jean (the world's greatest mimic) pantomimed a bird. And then my head was arced back and we were dancing. Two false starts, but the third time there it was—the glide and air that I go to dance to find, the float that I'm perpetually seeking.
"What are your goals in dance?" Jean had asked me two weeks before, and I should have said, This. This ageless, timeless, everness. This gift of release from myself.
Oh, well, I don't know about being a terrific dancer, dear Sherry. Perhaps a committed one. And a delightful student? We'll have to ask Jean. I bet he wishes he didn't have to talk at all—that he could just lead and I'd seamlessly follow. That's the goal. Sometimes I'm nearly there (for about thirty seconds). PJ — I am just me. Seeing me as I see me. (what a drag)
It's funny because as I get wiser in years, I've come to terms that living fully means taking risks, taking chances at all life has to offer. Yes, some may see it as "making a fool of oneself," and I think we all have the blushes of "youth" behind us on things we've done or perhaps decided not to do, for fear of embarrassment or how others would see us.
Maybe it's when we finally accept ourselves, we appreciate the chances to make fools of ourselves. (which I did today in the most public way)
It's only been in the last couple of years that I've realized the value of regularly putting oneself in discomfort of some sort...pushing the boundaries...facing one's fears...making a fool of oneself...however you describe it. It gives us a chance to remake ourselves and our perception of ourselves again and again. It grows new muscles, sharpens the vision, limbers the mind and pushes out the horizon.
I believe that's the secret of staying young in spirit.
Thanks for posting this video! As you spoke, I thought of Lewis Carroll's "Lobster Quadrille" (which I've set to music), and how much I try to take my daily living lessons from that poem:
What matters it how far we go?" his scaly friend replied. "There is another shore, you know, upon the other side. The further off from England the nearer is to France -- Then turn not pale, beloved snail, but come and join the dance.
Thanks for this reminder, Beth. I'm often too afraid (and shy and nervous) to do things that I don't understand or that I'm not good at. It's fun to remember that making a fool of yourself can be a good thing. I'm going dancing tonight and I'll keep that in mind. :)
Fun article, Beth! Thanks for sharing your encouraging qualms. As you know, I very much enjoy your dance videos - and aspire to such grace of movement. But the reality is that I'm much more of a dancing in the dark w/ Bruce kind of girl. (Where I rule the floor.) :)
Great news Beth!!! And what is this about a book on Berlin?? Will you be traveling here to Germany to get some inspiration???
JV
Great news Beth!! What is this about a book on Berlin? Will you be traveling here to Germany for some inspiration? Please keep me posted!
JV