Personal Sketch Joseph C. Hager, Ph.D. Background  The Western Reserve was a claim on part of the Northwest Territory by Connecticut, originally as a British colony and later as an American State, which used it to provide land benefits to its soldiers of the Revolution and its citizens whose homes were burned by the British. This area, called New Connecticut by the pioneers, is now the northern part of the state of Ohio. In the late eighteenth century a series of savage battles extinguished both the claims of the Indians and the threats of the British to settlement in Ohio, allowing Connecticut Yankees, Protestants whose ancestors years before had escaped discrimination by the English establishment, to settle more safely on their claims. Subsequently, vast population shifts from Eastern states and new immigration, especially by Irish fleeing famine and their British oppressors, swelled the population and made Ohio one of the most powerful and influential states by the middle of the nineteenth century. Ohio Yankees and many other Ohioans condemned slavery and supported escaped black slaves as the underground railroad moved them to safety in rural northern areas. Huge numbers of Ohioans, including Generals Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan, fought in the War of the Rebellion (Civil War) to preserve and extend the promise of the Revolution, and won victory for the Union in campaigns that killed, disfigured, and dismembered hundreds of thousands of Americans. Afterwards, additional immigrants, particularly ethnic Germans fleeing oppression and war, pushed Ohio's population up as they took advantage of the many industrial and agricultural opportunities, especially in the favorable land of the Western Reserve. Grandparents' House and Barn c. 1965 Birth and Locale These unique and fateful events ultimately led to my birth in 1948 as a product of the Western Reserve, the third Joseph Carl, after my father and grandfather, the first of my parents's six offspring. Therein lies a remarkable tale for another text in another time, a story that remained unknown to me until late in life. As a child, I lived in a small, red concrete block building on the edge of my grandfather's farm in the rural township of LeRoy, near streams that cut deep gullies through the layers of sticky clay and broken shale that were once the bed of Lake Erie, long before glaciers carved its current features. Large hickory forests, with scattered maples, buckeyes, elm, and firs, quilted by expanses of fields and pastures cleared in the early 1800s by New England and Manx pioneers provided endless exploration and varied firing ranges for developing my marksmanship. My home was near the Brakeman Church where the graves of early Ohio pioneers can be found today. Childhood Family House c. 1950 Swimming Hole in Hell Hollow c. 1960 Childhood I wandered the woods, climbed in the gullies, followed the creeks, and wondered from where I had come and to where life might lead. My grandfather taught me to shovel the stalls of his pigs, horses, sheep, and cows, and wheelbarrow the manure to a huge pile by the barn. Later, we loaded the steaming compost into a wagon, and scattered it on the newly disked fields of stubborn clay. I rode the horses, herded the cows, and clipped and dipped the sheep. I whacked off the heads of my father's chickens with a rusty hatchet, plucked their feathers, and ate the meals my mother made from them. My father, my grandfather, and I gathered the field corn and soybeans and filled the silo; we bailed the hay and clover, pulled the blacksnakes from the bails, loaded the wagon, and filled the loft. My daily chores included hauling and burning the garbage and watering my father's chickens, for an allowance of 10 cents a week, later raised to 25. Sometimes, I milked my mother's cow and churned the cream to butter. It was easy to understand how these activities sustained our lives. Leroy Elementary School c. 1955 Public Schooling Early every school day, a big yellow bus picked me up for a long drive through the backwoods of the township, taking on other students for delivery to the small brick elementary school building. LeRoy School had a large field for team games, snowball fights, and general horsing around, a half-dozen playground swings, a merry-go-round, a flying swing, and teeter-totters. There were only two boys within walking distance of my house, so even the small number of classmates at school vastly increased my circle of friends, and Dennis, Dianne, Gary, Sue Ann, John, Marianne, Sharon, Emily, Bob, Janice, and a few others would progress with me though the first to twelveth grades, providing a little appreciated sense of continuity. The number of classmates expanded again as I graduated to junior high, then to Riverside High School in Painesville, Ohio. The high school years were among my most difficult and least satisfying, with problems managing my activities and focussing on my studies. My classmates repeatedly voted me a member of student council, and I was president of a very active Key Club, a perennial member of the county Scholastic Society, and finally a member of the National Honor Society. These achievements were, at the time, unsatisfying and lacking in purpose and direction. The saving counsel, acute insight, and patient guidance of teachers like Ray Dawson and Richard Gardiner rescued my high school years from total disaster. UC Berkeley Campanile Higher Education In 1966, I left Ohio to pursue a biochemistry curriculum at the University of California, Berkeley, but graduated instead with a degree in sociology in 1969. Many other tumultuous events beyond this switch of lesson plan occurred during these three years as youthful conceptions confronted a wider reality. Turning against the Vietnam War, I resigned a full scholarship with stipend from the U.S. Army, and joined the ranks of the war protestors. Having lost my income, I dropped out of my sophomore year, and to support myself and earn tuition, worked in various odd jobs, eventually becoming an engineering aide on the molecular biology project of Nobel laureate Donald Glaser, where I learned FORTRAN programming on a PDP 10. Encounters with the disparate elements of Berkeley, including students and faculty, communists and socialists, criminals and police, hippies and gurus, provided material for a lifetime of reflection. Finding a true and lasting interest, I avidly read many obscure books in sociology and psychology, and specialized in reading the works of Freud and Piaget and related authors. I found that the mere attempt to teach my instructors something in my own work easily allowed me to make the Dean's List regularly. Prof. Louis Breger encouraged me to study psychology and helped me to enroll in a psychological research program at San Francisco State College from 1973 through 1974. Moving from Berkeley to San Francisco in 1973, I lived briefly in the Haight, Castro, and Eureka Valley before finally renting a flat in the Potrero District where I lived for 20 years. While at San Francisco State, I met the psychologist Paul Ekman at a guest lecture, and eventually became his student, beginning a doctoral program in 1975 at the University of California, San Francisco. That year, the Summer Institute for the Study of Evolution at the University of Minnesota chose me as a student, and excellent teachers and other students clarified the importance of evolution for behavior.  While at UCSF, I met many interesting psychologists, including Silvan Tomkins, who had long before won my admiration for his work in personality and emotion. I worked on several research projects and qualified in the areas of facial expression, non-verbal communication, emotion, and ethology of expression. My dissertation, finished in 1983, focussed on the asymmetry of facial movements.   Early Career By the time my committee signed my disseration, I was so fed up with academia that instead of applying for a position at a university, I started a business called Research Nexus, which provided personal computer programming and facial measurement services. Interesting jobs in this capacity included programming Berkeley professor Arthur Jensen's reaction time apparatus, and my first SBIR grant as principal investigator studying child abuse. As nothing had prepared me for an entrepenurial career, it was tough going, and to help make ends meet, I worked in UCSF's Computer Center. My first job was building and selling personal computers, but by the late 1980's, I became manager of campus local area network operations. After resigning in a dispute in 1991, Paul Ekman hired me, in a timely action, to manage his National Science Foundation research project for recognizing facial expressions using computers. Computation and psychology, two main threads of my endeavors, became inextricably bound thereafter. Business Efforts In 1994, I started a new corporation with a partner in Utah, and in 1996, moved from San Francisco to Salt Lake City. Network Information Research Corporation provided Internet programming services, but did not obtain adequate funding or customers and failed with the dot.com fallout of 2000-1. My online business A Human Face sells materials related to facial expression. Its Web site -- DataFace -- contains information about the human face, facial expression and emotion. In late 2009, A Human Face moved to Douglas, Arizona. I read casual email at JosephCHager@gmail.com This sign for the Utah corporation was a product of my woodshop, where I usually make furniture. "Free" Products I provide some of my creations online and free to view or download. DataFace DataFace is a web site where anyone can learn the scientific basics of the face and facial expression, as well as its mythology and folklore. Some previously published technical articles by myself are posted here, and the site also has research tools for scientists. Pioneer Sketches of Madison Township, Lake County, Ohio Pioneer Sketches is a collection of essays by the pioneers themselves about their settlement of a township in the Connecticut Western Reserve. I edited the old, handwritten manuscripts to provide a modern presentation and added an introductory chapter. You can download (lengthy) this free eBook (PDF format, 10.9MB). Comments on Philosophy Are the ancient and/or legendary philosophers relevant to today's psychology? I provide my comments on some of the great thinkers' works on my page at Amazon.com. Genealogical Tailings Long hours pouring through old records mined a lot of data useless to me but perhaps valuable to others. If your surname is Hager or Welch, and you are looking for your ancestors, this site may be useful for you. Data on the Heger/Hager families of Cleveland, Ohio, and the Walsh/Welch families of Ontario county, New York, and county Mayo, Ireland, are included. If so, take a look at this genealogical tailings heap. Short biographies of my ancestors are also available (see my Ancestry page). Philosophy Politically, liberty is the foremost consideration. The Revolution created a blueprint for implementing individual freedom that even today challenges limitations of other so-called democracies. The primary domestic function of government is to facilitate a level playing field for all its citizens to optimize liberty and the opportunity to achieve personal goals. The government should not be a mechanism for advising people about how to live or for subsidizing authorized lifestyles. Economically, free markets are the most efficient way to distribute goods, but do not of their own dynamics result in equitable distributions and are vulnerable to abusive exploitation, which makes limited monitoring and regulation of economic entities by government necessary. Such well-intentioned regulation can be hijacked by interest groups that give themselves competitive advantages. Balancing the tensions between freedom and other desireable goals, such as equality, and between economic efficiency versus fair distribution of assets, provides the bulk of discussion about justice in American society. In these efforts, reform is a necessary practice and a way to keep the Revolution alive and re-invigorate its ideals. Politicians give at least lip service today to reform of institutions such as the military, social services, health care, and public education, but far more extensive efforts in these areas and others are needed to sustain long term political health. The institutions in greatest need of reform include the college and university system, particularly in regard to tenure, funding, admissions, and administration; the justice system particularly in regard to jury recruitment, the penal system, advocacy litigation, and adversary procedures; and law enforcement, particularly in regard to citizen participation, oversight, and self-interested property forfeiture. The ability of people to choose correct behaviors depends largely upon their own internal system of regulation, not upon membership in religious organizations, professed piety, or external social controls. Few people lack the substance to formulate just and fair behaviors, but many people are swayed to injustice by corrupt institutions. For the former, imprisonment is required; for the latter, participation in the reform of the offending institutions is sufficient. For example, the increased frequency of cheating, theft of intellecual property, and other abuses in academic institutions reflects corruption at the core of the university system. Only a complete overhaul of these institutions and a purge of the instigators and indulgers of corruption can return the enterprise of higher education to its proper functioning. Unfortunately, such reform will not occur until universities suffer severe economic setbacks, a growing contingency. Our aesthetic appreciation is pre-programmed by biological factors to a greater extent than supposed by many. The resonance of external objects to structures shaped in our brains underlies perceptions of beauty. Since brains mature, environmental factors shape the qualities we appreciate. One responsibility of cultural leaders is to enhance and expand exposure to higher cultural values, but unfortunately, powerful social factors in American society pander to immature proclivities, coarsen experience, and truncate the aesthetic appreciation of most citizens. I accept the basic scientific view of the ontology of the universe, but consider many of its implications for other metaphysical issues, such as free will, to be tenuous because so much critical knowledge is missing. The concept of soul is probably misleading, but the idea that the functions of mind can be reduced to mechanical, physical, or physiological processes is probably equally misleading. Scientists will continue to document the correspondence between nervous processes and psychological functions, but this information is simply irrelevant to the argument about physicalism. My message statement contains more about my philosophy and its practical implications. Copyright © 2003 Joseph C. Hager