Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

I was shocked Monday morning as I opened the Washington Post web site. bin Laden is dead, killed by the U.S. military. I scrolled around and looked at a few other web sites. I really didn’t believe the news for a while.

Then I looked around the web and listened to talk radio.

I was shocked by the celebrations. I guess they make sense. People are happy about the news. Nonetheless, I was shocked. I didn’t feel like celebrating.

Let’s review this:

We killed half a dozen more people.

I just don’t see the cause for celebration.

I am thankful that a person who enables others to kill innocent people will not do that any longer.

I don’t know any of the people who died on 9/11. If I did, perhaps I would feel differently. I do know people who were killed and seriously injured by prior attacks enabled by bin Laden. Still, I don’t feel like celebrating and I am shocked by the celebrations of others.

by Dwayne Phillips

There is something about physically leveling your height and moving close to another person that squelches arguments and improves communication.

First, a story. One of my sons was a teenager. He was arguing with me about something. He was quite argumentative as a teen. He was sitting in a chair, and I was standing across the room. Something I learned somewhere clicked in my head.

• I stopped arguing.
• I grabbed a chair.
• I set the chair next to the one he was using.
• I spoke to him in a un-arguing tone of voice.

Life became much better for everyone. I wish I could explain how all this works, but I can’t. There is something about physically (1) leveling your height and (2) moving close to the other person.

Yes, pull up a chair to the person who might be opposing you at a moment of disagreement. Their attitude may change; your attitude may change.

by Dwayne Phillips

Work with someone who wants to learn to read.

Would you like to change the world? Do this,

Work with someone who wants to learn to read.

Go to Barnes and Noble or Amazon or something online and order a complete set of the McGuffey Readers. Order two or three. Use these and nothing else and work with someone who wants to learn to read.

Age doesn’t matter. Well, the person should at least be two years old. It doesn’t matter if the person is 92. If they still want to learn how to read, work with them on that goal.

What is more important for a person to learn than to read? Yes, you have to understand at least one language first, but after that? If a person can read, they can teach themselves just about everything else.

by Dwayne Phillips

This post begins a new series (of undetermined length) about changing the world.

Sometimes, all it takes is three people in a crowded room who say, “let’s tell the truth.”

The scene is a familiar one, especially if you work in government as people in government sit in more meetings than anyone else. The room has a big table in the center, and people are seated in chairs around the table. Sometimes there are people in chairs lining the walls of the room. There are at least ten people in the room.

The group has reached concensus on some matter of importance. The leader of the meeting proclaims, “There, that is settled. That is what we will do.”

Most of the heads in the room nod in weak but noticeable agreement.

One person dares to protest and meekly states, “but if we do that, we won’t be telling the truth.”

The room goes silent. How dare a person make such a statement. Are they trying to kill their career? Are they suicidal? Now is the moment when either the status quo continues or the world changes.

A second person speaks, “I agree. I don’t think we should do the first idea. Instead, I think we should tell the truth.”

The room remains silent. People start to stare at their feet to avoid eye contact.

Then a third person speaks, “I also agree. The first idea isn’t right in that it doesn’t tell the whole truth. I think we should tell the truth.”

That settles the matter. Three people with meek voices have swayed the other eight or twelve people in the room. No one wants to go on record as advocating anything less than the truth.

The world has changed because one person, then a second, and then a third said, “let’s tell the truth instead.”

by Dwayne Phillips

The tooth fairy does not exist. No amount of wishing, hoping, dreaming, and whatever it is that children do when a baby tooth falls from their mouth, will change that fact. Sometimes – many times – adults at work wish there is a tooth fairy and we wish we can just jump into the work without first thinking.

Let’s begin with something that may dash the hopes, dreams, and wishes of children (and adults) everywhere:

The Tooth Fairy does not exist.

Sorry to begin a blog post with such ugly reality, but that’s the way it goes sometimes.

A recent event at work brought me crashing back to adulthood and reminded me of the absence of the tooth fairy.

We had a job to do. We knew that we needed to gather about a table, put all the evidence in front of us, study it, contemplate it, think through all of it, and then, and only then, begin working on it. We all gathered for five minutes on a telephone conference. One person said a few things that led the rest of us to believe that all would be easy, all would be well, and we wouldn’t have to gather and think so much. We could just jump into the work.

Well,

The Tooth Fairy does not exist.

Several 14-hour days later, we finished the work just before the deadline. Rats!

It is a rare occasion when we can just jump into the work. The norm is that thought – deep, strenuous thought – should precede work.

I love those rare occasions when we can just jump into the work and “get it done.” They are so much fun.

I hate those rare occasions when we can just jump into the work and “get it done.” They return the possibility that the tooth fairy does exist. That is poison, because as we all know

The Tooth Fairy does not exist.

By the way, have I mentioned,

The Tooth Fairy does not exist.

If I haven’t, let me state just one more time:

The Tooth Fairy does not exist.

Perhaps if I write this often enough, I will remember that:

The Tooth Fairy does not exist.

The next time a task rears its ugly head, perhaps, maybe, just maybe, I will remember that:

The Tooth Fairy does not exist.

and we will gather about a table, put all the evidence in front of us, study it, contemplate it, think through all of it, and then, and only then, begin working on it.

by Dwayne Phillips

Watch out for the coming college bubble where tuition at prestigious universities crashes. Maybe some of those universities will crash as well.

I read a couple of things this week about college. They seemed to be related (in my mind at least). The first item was on TechCrunch and it discussed the College Bubble. Consider this qoute:

A true bubble is when something is overvalued and intensely believed

Hmm. That does sound like college. I believe in learning. That used to mean that I believed in  college. I still believe in learning, but I am not sure that I believe in college these days. Consider the things that current colleges believe warrant degrees:

• Administration and Supervision PK
• Telecommunications
• African and African American Studies
• International Policy
• Applied Behavior Analysis

I could go on, but are you kidding me? How about we go back to degrees in

• Math
• Chemisty
• Physics
• English
• Art
• Psychology
• Pre-Med
• Pre-Law
• fill-in-the-blank Engineering

and how about lumping a lot of degrees and calling them

• Bachelor of Arts

College seems to have gone off the deep end. I prefer to go back to plain old education.

College Bubble? Yes, I think that bubble is about to burst. Why pay $40,000 a year so you can have a degree in Conflict Analysis and Resolution and then have a career in day care where the pay is just a little above that of a hamburger cooker at McDonald’s? I don’t get it.

Seth Godin discusses a similar topic:

Does a $40,000 a year education that comes with an elite degree deliver ten times the education of a cheaper but no less rigorous self-generated approach assembled from less famous institutions and free or inexpensive resources?

I can imagine that attending Duke, as just one example, is a lot of fun. I can also imagine that being around such a nice place with many other people seeking to learn can be a good education. I can also imagine many other environments where a person could learn more for much less money.

I worked for many years with many people who attended prestigious universities. They didn’t impress me with either their knowledge or their performance on the job. I was quite disappointed to learn about what prestigious universities do.

For the record,  I attended two “cow colleges” (a provincial college or university that lacks culture, sophistication, and tradition). Southeastern Louisiana University and Louisiana State University. The cost was low, hence the return on investment was high.

by Dwayne Phillips

I like to write. I am rarely paid for writing, but that doesn’t stop me.

There has been some chatter on the Internet recently about people churning out content for big web sites for zero pay. The post linked here is part of that chatter.

Guess what? A lot of people write for zero pay. They write just because…just because lots of reasons.

Some reasons other than money for writing (at least in my case):

1. There is nothing good on TV
2. I am bored with everything else
3. Making up stories is fun
4. Researching the real world is fun
5. I want to show how smart I am
6. I learn while writing
7. I meet interesting people
8. It builds my resume
9. It makes me a better writer at work (where I am paid)
10. It is good typing practice
11. I always wanted to see my name in the newspaper
12. I love the feel of the keyboard
13. I already have enough money

You may not understand any of the reasons in the list. If you read the list, you probably understand some of the reasons. That is because something about the blog title attracted your attention. If you don’t like writing, you probably saw the title of the post and went on to something else that interests you more.

For example, (we have to have a few “for examples” here) in the good old days of publishing paper books I wrote four or five books. I worked hard on all those books – about 400 hours per book (yes, I kept track of the time). (And don’t you wish I would stop putting side comments in parentheses.) For about 2,000 hours of work I have been paid about 20,000 dollars in royalties. Ten bucks an hour isn’t enough to pay the bills.

But I found one wonderful thing on every book-writing project – I had something interesting and challenging to do every evening when I came home from work. I had a pretty good job that had its own challenges and chances to learn, but my “hobby” of writing books was far more fascinating.

The good old days of publishing books on paper are probably gone. In 2008, I wrote one short story every week. I did this for some of the reasons in the list above. And along comes a place called Smashwords.com. I have put those 50 or so short stories up for sale on Smashwords. To date, I have made a whopping $3.17 on sales. Again, not enough to pay the bills. Still, one day I will be able to read my short stories on my iPad in iBooks or iWhatever it is called. Maybe one day I will happen across someone who is reading one of the stories that I had fun making up (reason #3 above).

by Dwayne Phillips

Knowledge multipliers are pieces of technology that allow for experiment and growth of knowledge. With each generation, they are more plentiful, powerful, and inexpensive.

1986 – I have finished three years of full-time graduate school. I earned an MS in EE and have completed all the course work towards a PhD. All I have to do is finish my experiments in computer vision and write a dissertation.

There were a few small hurdles in the way:

One, I have to return to work.

Two, I need a sufficiently powerful computer for my computer vision experiments.

I work around number one in the evenings and on weekends. I work around number two in early 1987. I buy a home computer for $3,000. It has an 80286 processor clocking at a leading-edge 10 MHz. The price tag was big for me, but something that I could manage. Four years of evenings and weekends later, I finished my degree on that same computer.

That computer was a knowledge multiplier. It enabled me to learn, experiment, learn, experiment, and turn the crank a bit on the computer vision knowledge base. Without it, I could not have completed my experiments. I would have been tied to the minicomputer at the lab at the college.

This story from my past came to mind recently when I saw this post. These college students built a self-balancing robot to enhance telepresence technology. They turned the crank a bit on the telepresence knowledge base. How could they do that? Simple, they had knowledge multipliers. Computers – powerful computers – are really cheap. So cheap that students can buy them. Telecommunications technology is cheap, really cheap. So cheap that a bunch of students can access knowledge bases in all parts of the world.

I see stories like this almost every week now. We live in an amazing age. There are knowledge multipliers all about us.

If I had some of the really cheap, really powerful knowledge multipliers available today when I was young… Well, I did have access for that access I am truly thankful.

by Dwayne Phillips

Much has changed in computing since the mid-1970s when I first took a computing class. What hasn’t changed much is that the keyboard and the display remain the most important parts of the computer to the vast majority of computer users.

In the mid-1970s, I walked into a computer class as a sophomore in college.

Lesson One: There are three parts to a computer – (1) processor (2) memory (3) input/output.

Not much has changed since then.

A Card-Punch Machine

In that class, and in the classes I took for the next several years, the input/output was a card-punch machine. I would type one line at a time – one line per card – and feed the deck of cards into a card reader. The lines of input would go to a computer that was somewhere else. It was slow, but it worked.

Fast forward to 1983. The computer industry seems to fast forward a lot these past 70 or 80 years. We have the first home computers or personal computers. We had 5 1/4 inch floppy disk drives, keyboards, and display screens.

A Kaypro II Computer

I bought a Kaypro computer. It ran an operating system known as CP/M (control program, microcomputer). Two big reasons why I bought this machine among all the choices:

1. It had a good keyboard
2. It had a remarkably good display of characters

I have to emphasize item 2 from above. Kaypro didn’t use a dot matrix display like most computers of the 1980s and early 1990s. Instead, the analog engineers at Kaypro used the underlying oscilloscope to draw the letters as lines. To this day, I do have that machine in the closet, it is one of the best displays for writers you can have.

And so, that keyboard and display bring me to the subject of this post. Given all the wonderful technology under the hood of computers, the most important thing for users is still the input/output.

Consider the iPhone. Touch and swipe your finger. That is a clever substitute for a keyboard. Look at the display – all photographs. That looks pretty nice.

Consider the iPad. It has a very nice display. It has a lousy virtual keyboard; at least it is lousy for my use – writing. I added a bluetooth keyboard. Still a bit rough, but much better.

The more things change, the more we like the power under the hood of these new computers. We like all that computing power in the cloud that brings all the data in the world to our eyes and ears. Great stuff, but you still have to type on a keyboard. Yes, voice input and image input is here in a way. Those things are not yet perfected, so we resort to the keyboard.

by Dwayne Phillips

Here are some thoughts from the 1934 classic “Becoming a Writer” by Dorothea Brande.

I recently read Ray Bradbury’s book on writing. In it, he referred to a book written by Dorothea Brande in 1934 titled “Becoming a Writer.” I bought a used copy ($5 with shipping) and finished reading it.

Here are some words from Brande.

On working toward effortless writing, two exercises.

First,

The best way to do this is to rise half an hour, or a full hour, earlier than you customarily rise. Just as soon as you can – and without talking, without reading the morning’s paper, without picking up the book you laid aside the night before – begin to write.

She advocates doing this every morning. Do not reread what you have already written. Not yet.

Second, (paraphrasing)

Pick a time each time when you will write for about 15 minutes (in addition to the morning exercise).  At that time, write. There are no excuses. Write as you write in the morning – anything at all.

Warning about the second exercise,

If you fail repeatedly at this exercise, give up writing. You resistance is actually greater than your desire to write, and you may as well find some other outlet for you energy early as late.

After doing this for several weeks, go back and read a bit of your writing. What did you write about in these seemingly haphazard writings? The answer shows your interests and where your energy lies. Now write about those things.

This is a nice book. I was a bit disappointed in that I expected more. Still, the advice and these couple of exercises are worthwhile. Especially if you think you want to write and are not sure.