Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips
This iPad continues to improve. Is it Apple or everyone else?
I am still using the iPad version 1. This thing continues to improve. For example, I am writing this blog post from the iPad. When it was new (how long ago was that?), I couldn’t write blog posts from the iPad. The software didn’t work for some reason, but now it does.
Another writing improvement, I can now create and write on Google Docs from the iPad. When it was new, I couldn’t do that either.
I don’t know who is making all these improvements. Is it the iPad’s browser? WordPress? Google? Who is making all these improvement? I don’t care who receives the credit. I am not paying anyone for any of these improvements. This is great.

by Dwayne Phillips
I prove to myself that I can write 1,000 words a day with one hour writing per day.
I’ve been conducting a writing experiment. I wanted to learn if I could write at a pace that would produce 300,000 words in a year. This pace means 50 weeks, of the 52 in the year, six days a week, 1,000 words a day. The sub-goal is to write the 1,000 words in one hour.
Well, I could do it.
This 300,000-word goal comes from writer Dean Wesley Smith. I couldn’t find the specific post of his, but here is the link to his blog. Here is a link to another blog that mentions the same topic.
I type fast enough to bang out about 1,200 words in an hour. I do more if I don’t have to punch lots of punctuation. Recently, however, I have been writing fiction with many conversations, and those conversations require punctuation marks everywhere.
I find that I can write one hour, proof read one hour, and then piddle around with ideas one hour. Three hours work in a day (something that Dean Wesley Smith discusses at length).
What is magical about 300,000 words. Well, as Smith explains, a novel is about 70,000 words these days. You can write four novels in a year at the 1,000 words a day pace. ePublishing makes four novels in a year possible. Traditional paper back book publishers wouldn’t allow a writer to write that many novels in the past. Smashwords and other iPublishing outlets are happy with this.
I don’t think I will write 1,000 words a day six days a week, but it is nice to know that I could do it.

by Dwayne Phillips

That’s hard to do.

Is it really? How “hard” is it? How much time will it take? How much learning will it take?

Often, “difficult” tasks are really “distasteful” tasks, i.e., tasks that I really don’t want to do.

by Dwayne Phillips

Today is Thanksgiving Day in America.

I am thankful that my three sons, all in their 20s, still talk to me. I am thankful that my oldest son married a young woman who thinks enough of me to let me spend time with their children, my grandchildren.

by Dwayne Phillips

Take care when you have opposite types of people in the room for a meeting. Be sure to have someone in the room with the primary interest of ensuring communication among the groups.

A few months ago, I sat in a meeting. On one side of the table were customers; on the other side were engineers. I sat at the end of the table. The customers described what they wanted. They looked at the engineers and frowned. The engineers gave the customers the impression that the engineers didn’t want to do the work.

I moved my chair a little to the customer’s side of the table to gain a little better view of the engineers. The customers talked a little more. I watched the engineer’s reaction. It didn’t look good. I knew the engineers, and I knew what they were doing:

The engineers were working on the solution to the customer’s desires.

The engineers’ expressions, however, looked painful. They looked like they didn’t want to hear anything more from the customers.

They looked like they didn’t want to do the work.

Notice the two highlighted statements. The engineers loved the challenge so much that they were already working on it in their minds. Their faces, however, led the customers to believe that the engineers didn’t want to do the work.

I learned a little here. Don’t let engineers meet with customers at this type of meeting. These engineers and these customers  had almost opposite personality types.

The engineers gave their look saying, “I am working hard on this problem already.”

The customers used that look when saying, “I don’t care for your situation.”

You see, these opposite types of people used the same look to say opposite things. These opposites sitting across the table from one another led to what could have been catastrophic miscommunication. It is fortunate that there were other people in the room who recognized what was happening. These other people acted as interpreters.

A little more learned here:

Have several people in the room who aren’t invested in either describing the situation or finding a solution.

Have people in the room who are invested in having a productive meeting with clear communication.

by Dwayne Phillips

Self-driving cars are almost here. They are safer than human drivers. They aren’t perfect, but they are better. Nevertheless, we might repeat our past and not employ less-than-perfect computer systems. Maybe, however, our younger generations may accept it this time.

Google has been working on self-driving cars. Others have as well. Those involved have done impressive things. There has also been work on road train cars. This is where one vehicle has a human driver in front of a line of vehicles. Computers in all the vehicles communicate so that the following vehicles are driven by computer.

I love this stuff. What I really like is that these ideas produce vehicle that are safer. There are fewer accidents with these things than with our traditional way of driving. There is no great secret as to why these computer-controlled or computer-following (or whatever noun and adjectives we use) cars are safer. They go slow and stay in their lane.

Patience is safer and makes the roadway safer and faster for everyone.

Okay, so let’s all jump into this computer-controlled driving thing. It is better than what we have now.

First, however, let’s go back in time.  In the 1980s, “expert systems” were all the rage. These were computer programs that used databases of information to diagnose situations and recommend courses of action. Some of these were aimed at the medical field. Given a patient’s symptoms, the computer programs performed better than human doctors.

The computer program didn’t suffer fatigue like the human, so it performed better.

And we didn’t use these better-performing programs.

Why not? They were not 100% correct. The software was 90% correct while the humans were 70% correct. Medical service providers did not want to employ something that they knew was not 100%. That left them open to lawsuits. Somehow, using less-accurate humans did not leave them open to lawsuits.

Now we have these computer-assisted cars that are safer than humans, but are not 1oo%. Will anyone employ a less-than-perfect system and leave themselves open to legal action? What happens when we have accidents and people die on the road? Just because we have fewer accidents won’t matter.

Or will it?

My hope is the young people of America. They grew up with less-than-perfect computer games and computer social networks and computer cameras and computer education and computer this and that and the other thing too. Of course the computer is not perfect. Everyone knows that, or at least everyone under a certain age knows and has lived that. They might accept better but not perfect from the computer systems in cars. I hope so.

by Dwayne Phillips

There are times when I ask if my situation was caused by one of two shortcomings. Neither answer is pleasing. Then I move on to ask why I am in such an unsatisfactory situation.

A couple decades ago, I heard a statement about explaining a bad situation. One paraphrase of the statement is:

They aren’t mean, they’re just stupid.

According to this Wikipedia article, this statement is called Hanlon’s Razor, which is:

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

Wikipedia explains that there are several sources of similar statements that go back to the 1700s. I have little doubt that if someone did further research they could find this statement in ancient times.

Whatever the original source, the thought explains much of human behavior and many of our bad situations. Someone did something, and now we are in a mess. Why? What caused the mess? Here are three questions that I have asked in my experience. If I dwelt on my past enough, I can find more, similar questions.

1. Was the person lying (no one would be so stupid, so they must be lying to cover their actions) or were they actually that stupid?
2. Was the person hiding information or are they incompetent when it comes to displaying information?
3. Did the person not know how to do something or did they simply not care to do it correctly?

I find these questions to be the title of this post – the Lesser Of Two Evil or LOTE. There are two evils here, which one is lesser? Is it not as bad to be working with a stupid person rather than a deceptive person? I can excuse stupidity as there are many things for which I am stupid. Hence, stupid is less evil than deception, yet it is still an “evil.”

I then find myself asking LOTE meta questions. Some of these meta questions are:

1. Why am I in a situation where I have to find the lesser of two evils?
2. Do I want to spend my life with people who are either stupid or lying?
3. Do I have another choice of where I can be?

Let’s narrow the circumstances to illuminate the situation and the meta questions. I work with college students who are writing papers. These are ignorant people. They are not stupid; they can learn, but there are important things they haven’t learned yet. Notice that ignorance is not mentioned in any of the variations of Hanlon’s Razor.

Working with ignorant people is not a LOTE situation. The LOTE situations are ones where the people involved should know what they are doing. Their resume, their circumstances, their position declares that they do know better or should know better or must know better. For some reason, however, they either don’t know better or they do know better and choose to do less.

Hence, I ask myself:

Do I want to spend my short life with people who are either plagued by one shortcoming or plagued by another shortcoming?

Will the world be better if I spend my short life with people who are plagued by neither shortcoming?

by Dwayne Phillips

Facebook puts a data center near the arctic circle. The natural cold air will cool the computers. Why is this news? Why is this hailed as a brilliant “green” action?

It was December of 1980. We had a small room with a dozen racks of heat-producing equipment that needed to be cooled. Outside, it was 20 degrees F in the middle of the afternoon and 10 degrees F at night.

And we had two window air conditioners consuming vast amounts of electricity pumping cool air on the hot equipment.

I thought this was sort of silly. Other people agreed, but we couldn’t rig the window air conditioners to suck the cold air from outside into the otherwise hot room. And we couldn’t open the windows for some reason.

Two years later, we were in another location with several dozen racks of heat-producing equipment. We had no air conditioners as some shipments of air conditioners had lost their way. That was a blessing. We had an excuse to open the doors and let the frigid winter air blow in to cool the equipment. We also had terrible problems with dust and dirt coming in with the frigid air, but that is another story for another day.

Over the years, I have lost count and memories of all the similar situations I have seen. We had massive air conditioners cooling computers, while next door we had massive heaters keeping the offices warm.

How about blowing the hot air from the computers into the cold offices?

That never worked for some reason.

Now, however, we are “going green.” Facebook, as one example, is opening a data center in Sweden near the arctic circle. They will open the windows and doors and block the dust to cool the computers. This is wonderful.

What took so long?

I don’t have an answer to that one. There is hot air and cold air sitting about all around us. Find ways to move the air to where you want it. You will save some money and electricity and all sorts of other things.

by Dwayne Phillips

All bureaucracies, in my experience, stop the flow of information at each level of the hierachy. About half the important information is stopped at each level. There is hope, but people at the top have to work hard at getting the information they are being denied.

The title of this post is not original to me. I have read about it here and there in the past. Here is a link to one such mention of it.

Definition: The information thermocline is what happens in multi-level bureaucracies. Information does not pass freely through layers. About half the useful information is stopped at every level in both directions. I have seen this information thermocline in every bureaucracy in my life.

The Metaphor: This metaphor comes from the thermocline that exists in bodies of water.

The Thermocline: (one definition)

The thermocline is the transition layer between the mixed layer at the surface and the deep water layer. The definitions of these layers are based on temperature.

Some things don’t move up and down through the thermocline. Light is one, sound is another, and various life forms are another.

Information in the Bureaucracy: Now to complete the metaphor, we consider the flow of information through a bureaucracy.

Information flows up and down one level in a bureaucratic hierarchy. For example, I can tell my boss anything I want. No one is stopping me.

Information doesn’t flow through the hierarchical layers of the bureaucracy. In my experience, each layer of bureaucracy has about 3dB of attenuation. This means that half of the necessary information that should flow through is stopped. For example, I tell my boss ten things that are important for my boss’s boss to know, but only five things make it to my boss’s boss. This also happens in with information flow in the downwards direction. For example, my boss’s boss tells my boss ten important things. My boss tells me five of those things.

Universal Application: I have seen the information thermocline at work in every bureaucracy I have had the displeasure to be in during my life. I spent 25-plus years in government. Yuck. I have also seen the information thermocline (not) work in private industry and in volunteer organizations as well.

A Reminder: If you have created an organization that has a hierarchy, you have created information thermoclines. You are not an exception.

A Remedy: There is some hope for bureaucracies. First, people at the top have to admit that they have a thermocline and are not receiving all the necessary information through the layers below them no matter how smart and caring and well-meaning the people who work for you.

Second, you have to poke your head down through the levels of bureaucracy to learn the information that is being stopped at each level. Don’t ask the managers at each level as you already know what they are passing to you. Ask the workers at each level what they have given to their bosses. Compare that to what is being passed to you and discuss the filtering of information, a.k.a., stopping of information that is occurring.

Third, do not pretend that you can tell people “I have an open door policy” and they will poke upwards through the levels. Forget all those movies you saw as a kid where a Private pokes his head into the General’s tent and all is well. Those were movies, not real life. In real life, those people are smashed by the bureaucracy.

by Dwayne Phillips

Several years ago, I saw a sign proclaiming “Cubicle Suite” outside an office door. Cubicles are cubicles – yuck. A suite is some place really nice. The two works next to one another are nonsensical.

What other words can we place next to one another and make no sense?

How about:

Short meeting

Concise memo

Constructive criticism

Desktop computer (they are all under the desk)

Slightly obese

Short sermon

Lean bureaucracy

Suggestions?