Harry Alan, retired, was trained in philosophy and spent his professional career in industry as an instructional systems designer (cognition, risk analysis, work protocols, learning) and computer systems test engineer (risk analysis, work protocols, measurement).

Since retiring in 2012, he's created busts of cultural icons (academics, writers, artists, composers) sold on www.Trentonculturalcastings.com. He is currently employed as the Outreach Development Coordinator and historical archivist at the old St. Michaels Episcopal Church in Trenton, NJ at which Washington captured the British cannons in the opening salvos of a battle that would reverse the tide of the American Revolution.

An academic 'outsider,' his works cover education, ethics, economics as well as hermeneutics of experience and the future of humanism. After a masters thesis on steppe law, his post-graduate work under ethicists Elizabeth Flower and Abraham Edel at the University of Pennsylvania moved from respect codes to logical issue of emotional representation, creating a draft method he called the 'laughter logic' or "Risiology." He has continued to develop this as a component of the Pacioli Postulate, worked out in 2015, and focus of all his present works onAcademia.edu.

Flower's challenge in 1977, finally addressed in the Postulate, was to demonstrate a 'criterion of adequacy' for representation. His 1977 answer to Flower was a hunch was it would be found in his father's ersatz solution to all riddles: Accounting. Nathaniel (Tan) Jackendoff was an economist who jokingly deferred any philosophical question to the conventions of Accounting, e.g. rules of thumb to get to the 'bottom line' through balancing everything out. What was, of course, partly tongue-in-cheek would become the Pacioli Postulate.

In the corporate world Harry had developed a methodology or video debriefing engineering tasks, presented at two consecutive International Conferences on Lifelong Learning ("Video Debriefing"(1982) and "Capturing Experience"(1983). For rapid video coding he developed a hand-held interface technology, and worked on a logic of event parsing & coding from 1984-2004. Creating a means of digitally coding nested meanings from pre-defined work events led to a generalized "grammar of events" for the massively-nested emotional meanings of experience, the problem the Risiology had been developed to handle. Considering emotions as event-parsers giving functional assignments to narrative, time, and expectations/promises provided the connection to the monetary obligations in accounting. A time-analysis of the "accounting period" suggested the solution to Flower's representation problem, which is still the central focus of his work.

In 2009-2011 he published a collection of philosophical essays (Captions to the Cartoons we Live. Vols. 1 & 2) under the pseudonym H.Alan Tansson.