Member of the Week: Sandy Ressler

I run a program called “Complex Systems” within the Information Technology Lab. It’s really a pretty basic research type of program looking at issues such as how to make the Internet run better and trying to understand how to predict the behavior of very large scale systems like the Internet. My background is really computer graphics and this is a field that’s quite foreign to me but it’s been fun getting to work with lots of wacky mathematicians and networking people who I didn’t know beforehand.

I used to work on some 3D graphics standards, one in particular called VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language) which can be used to create virtual environments, but was meant to be a way of integrating 3D graphics with web browsers. I assume you mean technologies most typified by “Second Life” and There.com and those types of environments. Actually we did buy a Second Life island internally a few years ago to do some experiments with trying to take some projects I used to work on and create a “demo” space where people could come to get explanations of them. We never had the resources to put it together fully but it was an interesting experiment (No there is nothing public you can see 😉 The public affairs people at NIST are very interested in doing something with those kinds of environments but it’s a matter of resources and the time to put the thing together in a high quality way. The public affairs people are fanatics about putting out accurate information.

It doesn’t entail anything it’s just public domain work. One set of data I particularly enjoyed dealing was a collection of data I call “AnthroKids”. It’s available at: http://ovrt.nist.gov/projects/anthrokids/ At the time I was (over 10 years ago) I was doing work with the Consumer Product Safety Commission and was just getting into visualizations of anthropometry (the measurement of humans). I learned that when the CPSC issued a recall for something like a baby crib, the authoritative data they used came from this physical book which contained the results of a anthropometric survey conducted in 1975 & 1977. It blew my mind that the data wasn’t really data it was literally a physical book, there was no data base! I happened to have some spare money in the budget for a project I was running so I paid someone to literally type the numbers in. (typing was much more accurate then OCR). This was pretty early in the days of the web I think around 1997ish so I created a web site to “house” the data and it’s still there. As far as papers and general research stuff there is a somewhat out of date collection at:

http://ovrt.nist.gov/people/sressler/sressler.html which I like because in the picture there I still have a decent amount of hair 😉

4. I read your thought provoking blog post: I work for the Government and I Am Not The Enemy <a href=”https://www.govloop.com/profiles/blogs/i-work-for-the-government-and?xg_source=activity“>https://www.govloop.com/profiles/blogs/i-work-for-the-government-and?xg_source=activity</a>;

I was just responding to my own perception of the country getting hyper-partisan. Public employees have always been a great whipping post but with a few recent incidents some real whackos have cross the line into violence and that concerns me. The concern isn’t so much for those isolated crazies that actually perform the violence it’s when I hear one or another talking head on TV saying something like: “That crazy guy was nuts to crash his plane into that building, no excuse for something like that…BUT I can understand his frustration” It’s the BUT part that concerns me, those are tacit justifications and subtle ways of giving the guy a pass.