Here is the holiday 2009...
There are four out of the six of us sitting at the table. Simultaneously, three of us have laptops open and wirelessly connected (you may hear complaints from time to time about AT&T, but from where I sit, load testing the equipment every holiday, UVerse is REALLY good, the kind of good that generates mentions in blogs...), and the fourth is playing her Nintendo DS, plus I have the Blackberry handy to do e-mail monitoring and Facebook updates and the like. Two of us are blogging and one is surfing YouTube. With the advances in telecommunications technology, for all the good we could be doing, we can forget about free radicals - it's the free electrons that are doing the most damage.
I'm all for technology, but there are times when it is a bad thing. The tempo of the work world is such that what is acceptable today is not tomorrow. If we hear back from a company within a day, we can't accept that it will take more than one to answer something complicated. Then later on, if that company takes more than half a day to respond, we become very upset and complain, forgetting that an expectation of 100% improvement in our performance every few months is something we'd never tolerate personally. The purpose of technology was never to replace the worker, just to make them more productive, but it seems as if the most common use of technology is to give us something to gripe about in relationship to how things function.
Take a look at Facebook - it has gone from a social application to one where there is a large number of people filling it with stress and drama and all the things we created 'online' to try to escape. I think we bring the drama online with us because we can't separate the two worlds anymore, since we're seemingly on-call. (As a side note, my friend Steve hit on an idea that has been kind of fun - he refuses to post drama on Facebook, instead staying solidly within the bounds of humor, fun and happiness, all of which are great to see when you go to a place designed to be an island away from it all. Kudos Stevo!)
Technology can be pervasive if we allow it to be. What we all need to remember is that we are first and foremost human, and with that comes a list of limitations that shouldn't be ignored. I'm one to talk, of course, since I'm on vacation today, yet have been keeping tabs on e-mails still. That's the point, though. 5 years ago, it was anathema to expect anything to happen during the last week of the year. No one called about anything, no one got itchy demanding action on anything, etc. They knew it was a week that was traditionally a slower one, and if they were even at work, would not entertain the thought that things would keep the same pace as beforehand. Today that is not the case at all, and slowness in response due to being away from the office carries with it a smaller and smaller sense of acceptability. We are wired into the systems, and as IT workers we must somehow enjoy the invisible umbilical cord that wires us in 24/7, right?
The point is that we have for years done something called overclocking the computer equipment, where you actually get more performance out of a chip than it was designed to give. Now we are overclocking the workers, and the problem with that is that the same thing will happen to them that happens to an overclocked computer chip. In is a simple fact of physics that the more electrical activity there is, the more heat is generated - energy is transferred as heat. The more heat there is, the greater the chance of burning out the component. For example, a modern motherboard will partially melt down in under a second if it is turned on without the attending heat protection (heatsink, cooling, etc.). When that happens to a chip we replace it, but when it happens to a person, how do you adjust?
IT is like a drug in that it gets under your skin, especially if you like to solve puzzles. There is always a missing piece, an improvement, something else to get done. There is no shortage to the work, just a shortage of the time, especially the personal time.
So as I wind this up, I'm going to turn off the laptop, put aside the Crackberry, and play a game with my kids. I'm going to ignore messages requesting assistance with things that happen at the end of NEXT month that are somehow so urgent as to demand attention during the last day of THIS month/year. This post contains more words than I've exchanged with at least one of the kids, and they've been up since 7:30, so it's time to make up for that. Happy New Year, all, and if your IT professional is working today, be a mensch and give them some M&M's as a way of thanking them that they make it possible for you to be online splitting your time between shopping the after-Christmas deals and reading my drivel.
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Thursday, December 31, 2009
Friday, June 05, 2009
The Story of the Throttle and the Funnel
Once upon a time there were two friends, the throttle and the funnel. They both were similar in appearance, in shape and in many other ways. They played in the same yard together, and many people assumed that they were as alike as possible.
As sometimes happens with the childhood friendships we all encounter, the relationship cooled a bit the older the two got. They were still cordial, but one could no longer call them friends, as true blue as they had been. Indeed it was a split of interesting proportions, for their behaviors began to grow to be thoroughly different in intent, though similar in performance. The funnel studied diligently in school, constantly working toward applying his knowledge in just the right way. He grew to develop very fine skills in the use of and manipulation of his knowledge, and because quite successful in his pursuits.
The throttle was a very different sort. He grew to be power hungry, using his skills and knowledge to force other to do things as he wished them to be done. If there was something that he did not know or could not do, he tried to outlaw it, and if he couldn't do that, tried to discredit it as thoroughly as he could. He tended to be lazy, resting on his position until he physically couldn't, then working only hard enough to develop a little bit more, then that new knowledge once again went into the power control syndrome he suffered from.
One day someone decided that perhaps these two former friends could be co-workers in a more friendly setting, so they were both recruited for a project. One fine morning the funnel showed up and began his work. The project was a great and powerful one, into which a lot of power was invested, and funnel's skills at taking in large amounts of power and refining it until only the best was actually released to do the work came in handy.
Throttle was a different story, though. He grudgingly agreed to come to work, and on the way in he spent an inordinate amount of time talking to anyone who would listen about how ancient the funnel's ways were. He even suggested that the funnel was not necessary, pointing out that he could do basically the same type of thing at the beginning of the work. When he arrived, he installed himself at the very head of the operation, only beginning one thing at a time and passing through only those things for completion which he could do himself.
The project was a disaster. There was a great power capability in the tool, and the funnel could refine the output so that it was precisely what was needed, but the problem came in on the throttle's end of things. Throttle only let in one thing at a time, and then only the things he understood, so that there was a great amount of potential lost even before work began.
Two similar creatures, with dissimilar functions - how did this come about? The answer to that question is the answer to a lot of what ails us in the IT world today. When one tries to limit things entering a system instead of refining what comes out, they limit the flow available to be used within that system, which by definition restricts the output. Throttle was so focused on understanding and ordering everything along the lines of what he could do that the potential and performance were lost. Try as he might, funnel could only apply his skills to the small trickle of information. Funnel was too busy working to be able to reply to the Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) put forth by throttle to explain the problems in the system, much to his detriment.
This little tale originally grew from an issue that I'm currently helping sort out with a search done in DB2. There is a user interface that appears to be limiting the power of the search capabilities of DB2, and hampering the results being given as the result. I know the problem is not in the capability of DB2, nor in the capability of the displayed results from the search, so it must lie somewhere in the work being passed through the 'throttle' into DB2.
The interesting is that this also brought to mind several situations we encounter as system architects, designers, developers and deployment managers. One 'biggie' is the whole fallacy 'the mainframe is dead, ancient, bad, [fill in the blank]'. It isn't, and now that we have clearly seen that installing a hundred little boxes carries an environmental and financial cost that isn't good, suddenly putting all those little systems back into a larger one, generally through virtualization, is now a good thing to do. If you know anything about the architecture of a mainframe versus that of a PC (x86 or other distributed server architectures) you know why the mainframe has gotten a bad rap. Instead of having throttle sitting there processing one command from the keyboard, then one from the mouse, then one from the graphics card, then one from the disk drive, then one from the network drive, etc., there are separate processors for those inputs and the subsequent outputs so that much processing happens at the same time.
That architecture can't do everything, because there is a need for the user interface, which mainframes are not good at. The funnel of information from the mainframe to the PC for display is thus the best way to handle large amounts of information. After all, though we place a high value on the eye-pleasing designs and displays, we pay a heavy price sometimes just to get the most rudimentary information when we try to shoehorn all that processing into a PC infrastructure. The 'round-robin' processing and different programming methods used on the platform are the throttles at the start of the process. I've seen too many 'workarounds' just to try to get the most rudimentary things done on the distributed platform to feel differently. Think of it this way - the headlights on a Nextel Cup car are decals. The whole car is a beastly machine, and when you get to the display, it's just that. Forcing all systems to go to a PC is like taking the dirty old engines out of those cars and putting in little electric motors that put out nice little LED displays.
There was one other thing that came to mind, though, affecting every professional. If you take a systems-centric view of your work, often you will find the job of a professional is to serve as a funnel, but there is a throttle installed in front of you serving to limit your efficacy. When you see one of those, the story this started with becomes a little too true. The throttles will insist they serve as the conduit of information, and will pace that information through whatever processes have to occur, and in some cases that is necessary from a legal standpoint, but I'd venture an educated guess that most of it is driven by the need to wield positional power in a realm where subordinates possess a greater depth of knowledge. Insecurity often brings out the worst in others, and thus is born the throttle.
I have seen this at work in design specifications, as well as other places. I saw more than 100 hours shot once because of a reluctance to ask subordinates for information. I once worked for someone who ignored the recommendations of an entire staff in favor of a project they wanted to do, and when the project stalled tasked the same people who warned it would fail with fixing it. We all see it every time the comment is made that feedback is welcomed, and then notice it really isn't. These are all throttles to performance.
The desire to appear to know as much as multiple people is a fatal and sometimes expensive personality flaw. The throttles of the world need to follow the maxim of, "Hire well, trust well, and perform well." (I just made that phrase up, but the concept of hiring the best then letting them do the job for which they were hired has been a cornerstone of real success for eons.]
That said, here are suggestions for life as a funnel:
1) READ!!! When you attend classes toward a degree, you and everyone else read the same books, and take the same tests. Your knowledge is virtually identical when you graduate. Your competitive advantage comes with what you do once the schooling is done. You learn to analyze and synthesize, and develop your funnel characteristics, but if you stop learning, what began life as a funnel will eventually become a throttle.
2) Go forth and work boldly (apologies to Martin Luther)!!! Doing just the bare minimum will yield you the bare minimums. It isn't a salary or benefits issue, it is a self-worth issue. One of the reasons slackers (we are all slackers from time to time, McFly) get defensive is that they know inside that they aren't giving it their best. As hackneyed as it may sound, doing your best is the only way to win, regardless of the stakes.
3) When you think outside the box, make sure you're not getting out of the box and staying in the box factory, which is nothing more than a larger box!!! A lot of ideas are the result of a compromise between the status quo and the original idea. Your idea not only has to be larger than normal to provide decent progress in the scheme of things, it needs to be really large to pared down and still retain revolutionary status.
On the opposing side, here's how to be a throttle:
1) Become convinced you are highly-intelligent and need no more learning in order to be useful. The worst thing in the world is someone who willingly works under the title 'expert', because with it comes a high degree of hubris. The second-worst thing in the world is someone with so much self-inflicted hubris that they can't entertain the notion that they are fallible. That's what will get you hurt. As a side note, if your son ever asks you if you turned the power off, go check don't just assume you flipped the correct breaker.
2) Start thinking of people in terms of blocks of time. In a couple decades in the work world, I have observed two very different approaches, one too rare and the other too common. The too common one is the commoditization of the work time. The world seems to be filled with people whose sole performance ability is the ability to be ten minutes early for work each and every day. Bluntly, if your claim to fame is that you're always in at 8 and out at 5, you really haven't accomplished anything. I staunchly stand up against this sort of time measurement because it takes from the trust relationship between an employer and an employee without giving productivity or connectivity. This is especially true in an environment where you are on-call and/or working on the weekends. If you watch the clock at 8, your employees will do likewise at 5.
3) Be "agin' it" without having skin in the game. Part of being a funnel is taking in information and analyzing it to synthesize an opinion. If your opinion begins with the words, "Oprah says," or anyone says for that matter, then you have probably not studied and learned sufficiently to form a reasoned opinion. To illustrate: a joke played on my wife. My son and I were in the store and saw a bag of Chihuahua cheese. We bought it and set out to convince my wife it was made from the milk of the little dog, hence the name (it is really a region of Mexico, but if you're married, you know the value of a good 'goat-getting' of a spouse). She didn't believe it and then went to the internet to look it up. If she had followed normal behavior the joke would have worked, because the first hit she got was one of the social dictionaries and someone had jokingly put that it was made from the milk of the dog. She doesn't single-source anything though, and the gig was up as soon as she did more digging. How many times have we believed something presented third person, or something we read from one source on the internet, thus throttling our thought processes and available information before it got to the critical stage?
Please funnel me your reactions to this. It's a bit long, but sometimes you have more to say than a tweet could hold.
Once upon a time there were two friends, the throttle and the funnel. They both were similar in appearance, in shape and in many other ways. They played in the same yard together, and many people assumed that they were as alike as possible.
As sometimes happens with the childhood friendships we all encounter, the relationship cooled a bit the older the two got. They were still cordial, but one could no longer call them friends, as true blue as they had been. Indeed it was a split of interesting proportions, for their behaviors began to grow to be thoroughly different in intent, though similar in performance. The funnel studied diligently in school, constantly working toward applying his knowledge in just the right way. He grew to develop very fine skills in the use of and manipulation of his knowledge, and because quite successful in his pursuits.
The throttle was a very different sort. He grew to be power hungry, using his skills and knowledge to force other to do things as he wished them to be done. If there was something that he did not know or could not do, he tried to outlaw it, and if he couldn't do that, tried to discredit it as thoroughly as he could. He tended to be lazy, resting on his position until he physically couldn't, then working only hard enough to develop a little bit more, then that new knowledge once again went into the power control syndrome he suffered from.
One day someone decided that perhaps these two former friends could be co-workers in a more friendly setting, so they were both recruited for a project. One fine morning the funnel showed up and began his work. The project was a great and powerful one, into which a lot of power was invested, and funnel's skills at taking in large amounts of power and refining it until only the best was actually released to do the work came in handy.
Throttle was a different story, though. He grudgingly agreed to come to work, and on the way in he spent an inordinate amount of time talking to anyone who would listen about how ancient the funnel's ways were. He even suggested that the funnel was not necessary, pointing out that he could do basically the same type of thing at the beginning of the work. When he arrived, he installed himself at the very head of the operation, only beginning one thing at a time and passing through only those things for completion which he could do himself.
The project was a disaster. There was a great power capability in the tool, and the funnel could refine the output so that it was precisely what was needed, but the problem came in on the throttle's end of things. Throttle only let in one thing at a time, and then only the things he understood, so that there was a great amount of potential lost even before work began.
Two similar creatures, with dissimilar functions - how did this come about? The answer to that question is the answer to a lot of what ails us in the IT world today. When one tries to limit things entering a system instead of refining what comes out, they limit the flow available to be used within that system, which by definition restricts the output. Throttle was so focused on understanding and ordering everything along the lines of what he could do that the potential and performance were lost. Try as he might, funnel could only apply his skills to the small trickle of information. Funnel was too busy working to be able to reply to the Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) put forth by throttle to explain the problems in the system, much to his detriment.
This little tale originally grew from an issue that I'm currently helping sort out with a search done in DB2. There is a user interface that appears to be limiting the power of the search capabilities of DB2, and hampering the results being given as the result. I know the problem is not in the capability of DB2, nor in the capability of the displayed results from the search, so it must lie somewhere in the work being passed through the 'throttle' into DB2.
The interesting is that this also brought to mind several situations we encounter as system architects, designers, developers and deployment managers. One 'biggie' is the whole fallacy 'the mainframe is dead, ancient, bad, [fill in the blank]'. It isn't, and now that we have clearly seen that installing a hundred little boxes carries an environmental and financial cost that isn't good, suddenly putting all those little systems back into a larger one, generally through virtualization, is now a good thing to do. If you know anything about the architecture of a mainframe versus that of a PC (x86 or other distributed server architectures) you know why the mainframe has gotten a bad rap. Instead of having throttle sitting there processing one command from the keyboard, then one from the mouse, then one from the graphics card, then one from the disk drive, then one from the network drive, etc., there are separate processors for those inputs and the subsequent outputs so that much processing happens at the same time.
That architecture can't do everything, because there is a need for the user interface, which mainframes are not good at. The funnel of information from the mainframe to the PC for display is thus the best way to handle large amounts of information. After all, though we place a high value on the eye-pleasing designs and displays, we pay a heavy price sometimes just to get the most rudimentary information when we try to shoehorn all that processing into a PC infrastructure. The 'round-robin' processing and different programming methods used on the platform are the throttles at the start of the process. I've seen too many 'workarounds' just to try to get the most rudimentary things done on the distributed platform to feel differently. Think of it this way - the headlights on a Nextel Cup car are decals. The whole car is a beastly machine, and when you get to the display, it's just that. Forcing all systems to go to a PC is like taking the dirty old engines out of those cars and putting in little electric motors that put out nice little LED displays.
There was one other thing that came to mind, though, affecting every professional. If you take a systems-centric view of your work, often you will find the job of a professional is to serve as a funnel, but there is a throttle installed in front of you serving to limit your efficacy. When you see one of those, the story this started with becomes a little too true. The throttles will insist they serve as the conduit of information, and will pace that information through whatever processes have to occur, and in some cases that is necessary from a legal standpoint, but I'd venture an educated guess that most of it is driven by the need to wield positional power in a realm where subordinates possess a greater depth of knowledge. Insecurity often brings out the worst in others, and thus is born the throttle.
I have seen this at work in design specifications, as well as other places. I saw more than 100 hours shot once because of a reluctance to ask subordinates for information. I once worked for someone who ignored the recommendations of an entire staff in favor of a project they wanted to do, and when the project stalled tasked the same people who warned it would fail with fixing it. We all see it every time the comment is made that feedback is welcomed, and then notice it really isn't. These are all throttles to performance.
The desire to appear to know as much as multiple people is a fatal and sometimes expensive personality flaw. The throttles of the world need to follow the maxim of, "Hire well, trust well, and perform well." (I just made that phrase up, but the concept of hiring the best then letting them do the job for which they were hired has been a cornerstone of real success for eons.]
That said, here are suggestions for life as a funnel:
1) READ!!! When you attend classes toward a degree, you and everyone else read the same books, and take the same tests. Your knowledge is virtually identical when you graduate. Your competitive advantage comes with what you do once the schooling is done. You learn to analyze and synthesize, and develop your funnel characteristics, but if you stop learning, what began life as a funnel will eventually become a throttle.
2) Go forth and work boldly (apologies to Martin Luther)!!! Doing just the bare minimum will yield you the bare minimums. It isn't a salary or benefits issue, it is a self-worth issue. One of the reasons slackers (we are all slackers from time to time, McFly) get defensive is that they know inside that they aren't giving it their best. As hackneyed as it may sound, doing your best is the only way to win, regardless of the stakes.
3) When you think outside the box, make sure you're not getting out of the box and staying in the box factory, which is nothing more than a larger box!!! A lot of ideas are the result of a compromise between the status quo and the original idea. Your idea not only has to be larger than normal to provide decent progress in the scheme of things, it needs to be really large to pared down and still retain revolutionary status.
On the opposing side, here's how to be a throttle:
1) Become convinced you are highly-intelligent and need no more learning in order to be useful. The worst thing in the world is someone who willingly works under the title 'expert', because with it comes a high degree of hubris. The second-worst thing in the world is someone with so much self-inflicted hubris that they can't entertain the notion that they are fallible. That's what will get you hurt. As a side note, if your son ever asks you if you turned the power off, go check don't just assume you flipped the correct breaker.
2) Start thinking of people in terms of blocks of time. In a couple decades in the work world, I have observed two very different approaches, one too rare and the other too common. The too common one is the commoditization of the work time. The world seems to be filled with people whose sole performance ability is the ability to be ten minutes early for work each and every day. Bluntly, if your claim to fame is that you're always in at 8 and out at 5, you really haven't accomplished anything. I staunchly stand up against this sort of time measurement because it takes from the trust relationship between an employer and an employee without giving productivity or connectivity. This is especially true in an environment where you are on-call and/or working on the weekends. If you watch the clock at 8, your employees will do likewise at 5.
3) Be "agin' it" without having skin in the game. Part of being a funnel is taking in information and analyzing it to synthesize an opinion. If your opinion begins with the words, "Oprah says," or anyone says for that matter, then you have probably not studied and learned sufficiently to form a reasoned opinion. To illustrate: a joke played on my wife. My son and I were in the store and saw a bag of Chihuahua cheese. We bought it and set out to convince my wife it was made from the milk of the little dog, hence the name (it is really a region of Mexico, but if you're married, you know the value of a good 'goat-getting' of a spouse). She didn't believe it and then went to the internet to look it up. If she had followed normal behavior the joke would have worked, because the first hit she got was one of the social dictionaries and someone had jokingly put that it was made from the milk of the dog. She doesn't single-source anything though, and the gig was up as soon as she did more digging. How many times have we believed something presented third person, or something we read from one source on the internet, thus throttling our thought processes and available information before it got to the critical stage?
Please funnel me your reactions to this. It's a bit long, but sometimes you have more to say than a tweet could hold.
Wednesday, March 04, 2009
Interesting tech
This is the use of an interesting feature that has some interesting implications. I'm e-mailing this so that it automatically posts. I haven't used it before, but the ifs does remind me of a favorite word puzzle I read years ago.
Suppose an alien comes to earth and wants to take the total accumulation of data from Earth back home to their planet. Instead of a mega hard drive, though, the alien carefully makes a measured mark on a steel rod. The data has been reduced to a measurement that, when calculated as a percentage of the length of the whole, will return a decimal that will represent the entire set of data, which can then be absorbed into the visitor's digital systems.
Aside from it bemopsainle to physically mark Something that accurately, the idea is a pretty good one. It is something akin to how we make systems that don't play well together function as parts of an overall system. It boggles the mind what information you can communicate by the presence of a file, or its name, and the number of automated understandings that are possible really have not been explored fully.
So here's to our intrepid alien - or his terrestrial cousins searching out better and more efficient ways to use information. Send...
Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T
Friday, February 27, 2009
Eine Kleine Nacktmusik - Why Education Matters
For those non-German speakers, the play on words in the title is an attempt to illustrate a growing issue. "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik" is a musical piece and translates to 'a little bit of evening music'. Substituting a 'k' for the 'h' changes the meaning to something like 'a little bit of naked music'. Without getting into the connotations and extrapolations (would that qualify as whispering sweet nothings to a mathematician?), one letter makes a great deal of difference.
I'm reading a book called "What Were They Thinking?" by Jeffrey Pfeffer. It is a great collection of evidence supporting a refusal to follow the status quo when it comes to quality of work, but there is a great deal of other evidence that is also of concern. It has to do with the competitive advantage of the United States, and in about every instance of comparison, it is evident there is some work to be done if we are to regain our advantage.
This is not overtly a topic for the IT or other industries until you dig down deeper to get at the core of the problem. I’ll return in my next post to matters of a more technical nature. For now…
Lack of competitiveness comes from many sources, but mostly from the general knowledgebase and literacy of the populace, however literacy is currently defined. We read in our own press about dwindling job prospects and economic disaster, and we translate that into a need to work longer and more diligently, regardless of the law of diminishing returns that comes from atrophy and fatigue. The simple fact of the matter is that we have become divided into a society where there is a chasm of literacy, and those who have placed a high value on it are struggling to pull those who haven't along into an economic landscape that is based on... information.
By definition, information must be useful in order to convey meaning, which is where its value comes from. Otherwise we call it noise, extraneous data, or something else denoting the need to ignore it. To be able to discern the value of information, it must be able to be understood, read, transmitted and applied, all skills derived from literacy and prevented by the lack thereof. Whether we like to admit it or not, literacy is a by-product of education - the sole by-product, as it turns out, because when you have learned something, you are more literate. This is not education as an institution, but as a concept.
No matter what the issue being addressed when looking at the deficits in ability and competitiveness, we have to come to grips with the realization that our sole advantage will come from the informational product we provide. Based on the observations I have made from my very own teens (want a challenge? I highly recommend dealing with teens, preferably three of them at a time - you'll learn, they'll see an older person lose their mind ... it's fun for the whole family), as well as their friends and classmates, I offer the following to try to restore our competitiveness. Note that it is too late to restore it within the next decade - these trends will take a while to reverse, and any politician or other person who comes to you with an immediate fix will have one hand in your wallet and the other behind their back with fingers crossed.
Here are the four unpleasant truths about restoring our educational fundamentals, and thus our general competitiveness as an economic power, and thus our specializations of excellence:
1) Reading matters, evaluation counts.
Kids will not read of their own volition, unless they happen to like it, or they find a topic that excites them, but that is a poor excuse to give up on them learning how. When I look at the textbooks my children use in school, I am astounded any of the students can possibly get anything less than an A in their classes. The words students used to be required to read through and learn how to discern value in are now highlighted, underlined, italicized and, in some cases, boldfaced. The problem with this is that information is not presented that way in real life. When these children grow up, they will not receive a contract that has the same treatment, so since they will wind up thinking information that is not clearly pointed out to them is not important, they will sign away many things that a careful examination would have prevented. Children need to once again be taught critical analysis of the written word.
2) OMG!! git rid of l33tsp33k b4 itz 2L8.
Compression belongs in processors, not in native data. Some educators have placed a white flag high in the air and come to the conclusion it is okay that kids are shortening things into almost nonsensical collections of letters and numbers because it means they are at least composing and producing something. To be somewhat vulgar, the same description belongs to flatulent livestock!
Laziness in composition is a problem compounded when the same people who began using a non-standard form of communication begin to try to communicate with the world around them. The international language of business is English, but it is standard English, not a hybrid. An example, telling on myself, is that I used an IT-specific, Americanized acronym in a professional presentation. Immediately a barrier to understanding developed between me and a colleague from the Asia-Pacific rim. I had to go back and clarify what I meant, and it had nothing to do with his ability to understand or speak English (he was very adept) and everything to do with my unintentional use of information that was not clear.
Before continuing on with presenting a concept that was professionally-important I had to correct an unintentional use of jargon - how much worse would it have been had I intentionally jargonized throughout the presentation? At a conference, he would have just dismissed my ideas. In the business world, he would have gone elsewhere, and done it in a way that would render my jargon-mongering self unemployed. This is not hyperbole, it will happen, so we need to teach kids how to communicate clearly.
3) Sports are nice, band is nice, choir is nice and art is nice. Communication, computation and critical thinking are key.
Our local school system allows students to participate in sports and other extra-curricular activities while still carrying a D average in their grades. They are in effect surrendering their futures all in the name of ‘fun’. There are exceptions to every rule, and there are some students with true inabilities to gain full benefit from education, but the vast majority would do better if they had to do better in order to play what they want to play. Saying that sports or any other activity is the only way to keep some kids in school is a farce, because if they are not learning anything, and the only thing they do is play, why is it important for them to be there? Our society has dropped its respect for learning and replaced it with a back-biting competitiveness that turns us against one another inwardly. That’s not competition, that’s cannibalism!
I played sports, was involved in band in school, and I know all about the positive benefits they provide. I also know that the only vocation that awaits someone with the typical high school band practice schedule but abhorrently below average grades involves a subway station and a hat on the ground! If we are to be a competitive nation, we desperately need to raise the level of what average is considered to be, so that what was average becomes below average and thus the standard is raised.
Let kids play sports and do the extra-curricular activities, but if we want to compete globally, those have to be extraneous, not seen as rights. Extra-curricular means outside the curriculum, and we need to act on that knowledge. When we bring them inside the school building and the school day, we take the extra out of extra–curricular. I’m glad my son receives an “A” in P.E., I’d much rather see it on the line that begins “Algebra”.
We like to sometimes pretend we feel differently about this, mostly because it’s our own children who aren’t the Rhodes scholars (“Dad, this Rhodes scholar thing, - why would anyone want to study roads?” The sound of a palm meeting a forehead…), but rare is the person who would allow a surgeon to operate on them who received a “D” in Anatomy but an “A” in gym. It’s tempting to point to that as an extreme example, but when the commerce of our economy is built upon information, those who work with information are the new doctors. The patient is the economy instead of a physical body, but a poor practitioner causes harm to their patient in whatever field you examine.
I saw this at work in Europe where there were no school sports, just clubs a student could join that met after school, but for whom no excuse or allowance was made in the school. There were orchestras and other groups, but they all took place when school was done. The same is true in the same Asia-Pacific region that is now beating us in the global competition to thrive. I wouldn’t trade the spirit of freedom and ingenuity for a poorly-executed copy of another educational system, but we as a nation will suffer the longer we refuse to acknowledge that we are soft at the core. Borrowing an understanding which then leads to a solution is not the same as stealing an idea.
4) It is not the school's fault!
It seems each year as my wife and I talk to our kids' teachers, hand them our full contact information and tell them that if there are any problems in the classroom or in any other way with them to let us know and the problems will be addressed immediately, they are continually surprised that parents would feel that their children’s job is to learn well and not be disruptive. The stories about how they are accused of singling out children, picking on children, etc. abound. I'll be the first to say, from personal experience that there are some teachers who act in this manner. There are very few. I will also point out that there are some managers in real life who do this to their employees. Again, very few. The life skill that leads to competitive advantage is learning how to deal with adversity. If a competitor acts in a very unfriendly manner, our response cannot be to get sour grapes, discontinue efforts and poor-mouth throughout the space. We have to excel, even during adversity.
I'd be willing to bet that the vast majority of parents who get upset continually at those who teach their children either suffered a great deal of frustration when they went through school, or suffer under the illusion they could not possibly have children who are anything less than perfect. The brutal truth is that children are flawed, and they do the wrong thing sometimes, sometimes more often than they do the right thing. As adults, we need to teach them to work within systems rather than stand proudly outside while our advantages are stripped away by some misguided sense of pride. Pride comes from being competitively fit, not from tilting against windmills.
Believe it or not, parents have far more to do with their children’s education than do the teachers. If children don’t bring their books home to study, it is their fault, and thusly the parent’s fault for not insisting on it. If a child rebels and refuses to bring their materials home (HOMEwork, which most have given up on and many classes don’t assign anymore, as well as textbooks and notes) it is not up to the teachers to provide reminders to them, but up to the parents to provide incentives and deterrents as the case may demand. Parenting is difficult, education is difficult, life is difficult, ad nauseum. If everything is easy you are either doing the wrong thing, or you are doing the right thing the wrong way. It is the occasional struggle that produces the backbone we need to compete.
This is a simplistic approach, but it is one that has to begin. It is not thoroughly fair and respectful to every single group, sub-group or other division of society in every aspect, but it is necessary to restore us to the point where we should be. There will be people who are angry about the perceived injustices within a traditional educational system, and they will have a point. Here’s the bottom line, though: we cannot have both true competitive advantage and a life of ease. When my kids come home to tell me that they “know” their teacher doesn’t like them, I tell them the same thing I’d tell them if they were talking about their boss: deal with it and make sure you do what you are supposed to do.
When they complain because they happened to have homework, I remind them that adults sometimes have to work past 5:00, so it’s good practice. They are beginning to ‘get it’. This is still the land of opportunity, and still the greatest place to be. Their opportunities are effective when they are, and I hope to get the message through to others so we can rise to this occasion.
For those non-German speakers, the play on words in the title is an attempt to illustrate a growing issue. "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik" is a musical piece and translates to 'a little bit of evening music'. Substituting a 'k' for the 'h' changes the meaning to something like 'a little bit of naked music'. Without getting into the connotations and extrapolations (would that qualify as whispering sweet nothings to a mathematician?), one letter makes a great deal of difference.
I'm reading a book called "What Were They Thinking?" by Jeffrey Pfeffer. It is a great collection of evidence supporting a refusal to follow the status quo when it comes to quality of work, but there is a great deal of other evidence that is also of concern. It has to do with the competitive advantage of the United States, and in about every instance of comparison, it is evident there is some work to be done if we are to regain our advantage.
This is not overtly a topic for the IT or other industries until you dig down deeper to get at the core of the problem. I’ll return in my next post to matters of a more technical nature. For now…
Lack of competitiveness comes from many sources, but mostly from the general knowledgebase and literacy of the populace, however literacy is currently defined. We read in our own press about dwindling job prospects and economic disaster, and we translate that into a need to work longer and more diligently, regardless of the law of diminishing returns that comes from atrophy and fatigue. The simple fact of the matter is that we have become divided into a society where there is a chasm of literacy, and those who have placed a high value on it are struggling to pull those who haven't along into an economic landscape that is based on... information.
By definition, information must be useful in order to convey meaning, which is where its value comes from. Otherwise we call it noise, extraneous data, or something else denoting the need to ignore it. To be able to discern the value of information, it must be able to be understood, read, transmitted and applied, all skills derived from literacy and prevented by the lack thereof. Whether we like to admit it or not, literacy is a by-product of education - the sole by-product, as it turns out, because when you have learned something, you are more literate. This is not education as an institution, but as a concept.
No matter what the issue being addressed when looking at the deficits in ability and competitiveness, we have to come to grips with the realization that our sole advantage will come from the informational product we provide. Based on the observations I have made from my very own teens (want a challenge? I highly recommend dealing with teens, preferably three of them at a time - you'll learn, they'll see an older person lose their mind ... it's fun for the whole family), as well as their friends and classmates, I offer the following to try to restore our competitiveness. Note that it is too late to restore it within the next decade - these trends will take a while to reverse, and any politician or other person who comes to you with an immediate fix will have one hand in your wallet and the other behind their back with fingers crossed.
Here are the four unpleasant truths about restoring our educational fundamentals, and thus our general competitiveness as an economic power, and thus our specializations of excellence:
1) Reading matters, evaluation counts.
Kids will not read of their own volition, unless they happen to like it, or they find a topic that excites them, but that is a poor excuse to give up on them learning how. When I look at the textbooks my children use in school, I am astounded any of the students can possibly get anything less than an A in their classes. The words students used to be required to read through and learn how to discern value in are now highlighted, underlined, italicized and, in some cases, boldfaced. The problem with this is that information is not presented that way in real life. When these children grow up, they will not receive a contract that has the same treatment, so since they will wind up thinking information that is not clearly pointed out to them is not important, they will sign away many things that a careful examination would have prevented. Children need to once again be taught critical analysis of the written word.
2) OMG!! git rid of l33tsp33k b4 itz 2L8.
Compression belongs in processors, not in native data. Some educators have placed a white flag high in the air and come to the conclusion it is okay that kids are shortening things into almost nonsensical collections of letters and numbers because it means they are at least composing and producing something. To be somewhat vulgar, the same description belongs to flatulent livestock!
Laziness in composition is a problem compounded when the same people who began using a non-standard form of communication begin to try to communicate with the world around them. The international language of business is English, but it is standard English, not a hybrid. An example, telling on myself, is that I used an IT-specific, Americanized acronym in a professional presentation. Immediately a barrier to understanding developed between me and a colleague from the Asia-Pacific rim. I had to go back and clarify what I meant, and it had nothing to do with his ability to understand or speak English (he was very adept) and everything to do with my unintentional use of information that was not clear.
Before continuing on with presenting a concept that was professionally-important I had to correct an unintentional use of jargon - how much worse would it have been had I intentionally jargonized throughout the presentation? At a conference, he would have just dismissed my ideas. In the business world, he would have gone elsewhere, and done it in a way that would render my jargon-mongering self unemployed. This is not hyperbole, it will happen, so we need to teach kids how to communicate clearly.
3) Sports are nice, band is nice, choir is nice and art is nice. Communication, computation and critical thinking are key.
Our local school system allows students to participate in sports and other extra-curricular activities while still carrying a D average in their grades. They are in effect surrendering their futures all in the name of ‘fun’. There are exceptions to every rule, and there are some students with true inabilities to gain full benefit from education, but the vast majority would do better if they had to do better in order to play what they want to play. Saying that sports or any other activity is the only way to keep some kids in school is a farce, because if they are not learning anything, and the only thing they do is play, why is it important for them to be there? Our society has dropped its respect for learning and replaced it with a back-biting competitiveness that turns us against one another inwardly. That’s not competition, that’s cannibalism!
I played sports, was involved in band in school, and I know all about the positive benefits they provide. I also know that the only vocation that awaits someone with the typical high school band practice schedule but abhorrently below average grades involves a subway station and a hat on the ground! If we are to be a competitive nation, we desperately need to raise the level of what average is considered to be, so that what was average becomes below average and thus the standard is raised.
Let kids play sports and do the extra-curricular activities, but if we want to compete globally, those have to be extraneous, not seen as rights. Extra-curricular means outside the curriculum, and we need to act on that knowledge. When we bring them inside the school building and the school day, we take the extra out of extra–curricular. I’m glad my son receives an “A” in P.E., I’d much rather see it on the line that begins “Algebra”.
We like to sometimes pretend we feel differently about this, mostly because it’s our own children who aren’t the Rhodes scholars (“Dad, this Rhodes scholar thing, - why would anyone want to study roads?” The sound of a palm meeting a forehead…), but rare is the person who would allow a surgeon to operate on them who received a “D” in Anatomy but an “A” in gym. It’s tempting to point to that as an extreme example, but when the commerce of our economy is built upon information, those who work with information are the new doctors. The patient is the economy instead of a physical body, but a poor practitioner causes harm to their patient in whatever field you examine.
I saw this at work in Europe where there were no school sports, just clubs a student could join that met after school, but for whom no excuse or allowance was made in the school. There were orchestras and other groups, but they all took place when school was done. The same is true in the same Asia-Pacific region that is now beating us in the global competition to thrive. I wouldn’t trade the spirit of freedom and ingenuity for a poorly-executed copy of another educational system, but we as a nation will suffer the longer we refuse to acknowledge that we are soft at the core. Borrowing an understanding which then leads to a solution is not the same as stealing an idea.
4) It is not the school's fault!
It seems each year as my wife and I talk to our kids' teachers, hand them our full contact information and tell them that if there are any problems in the classroom or in any other way with them to let us know and the problems will be addressed immediately, they are continually surprised that parents would feel that their children’s job is to learn well and not be disruptive. The stories about how they are accused of singling out children, picking on children, etc. abound. I'll be the first to say, from personal experience that there are some teachers who act in this manner. There are very few. I will also point out that there are some managers in real life who do this to their employees. Again, very few. The life skill that leads to competitive advantage is learning how to deal with adversity. If a competitor acts in a very unfriendly manner, our response cannot be to get sour grapes, discontinue efforts and poor-mouth throughout the space. We have to excel, even during adversity.
I'd be willing to bet that the vast majority of parents who get upset continually at those who teach their children either suffered a great deal of frustration when they went through school, or suffer under the illusion they could not possibly have children who are anything less than perfect. The brutal truth is that children are flawed, and they do the wrong thing sometimes, sometimes more often than they do the right thing. As adults, we need to teach them to work within systems rather than stand proudly outside while our advantages are stripped away by some misguided sense of pride. Pride comes from being competitively fit, not from tilting against windmills.
Believe it or not, parents have far more to do with their children’s education than do the teachers. If children don’t bring their books home to study, it is their fault, and thusly the parent’s fault for not insisting on it. If a child rebels and refuses to bring their materials home (HOMEwork, which most have given up on and many classes don’t assign anymore, as well as textbooks and notes) it is not up to the teachers to provide reminders to them, but up to the parents to provide incentives and deterrents as the case may demand. Parenting is difficult, education is difficult, life is difficult, ad nauseum. If everything is easy you are either doing the wrong thing, or you are doing the right thing the wrong way. It is the occasional struggle that produces the backbone we need to compete.
This is a simplistic approach, but it is one that has to begin. It is not thoroughly fair and respectful to every single group, sub-group or other division of society in every aspect, but it is necessary to restore us to the point where we should be. There will be people who are angry about the perceived injustices within a traditional educational system, and they will have a point. Here’s the bottom line, though: we cannot have both true competitive advantage and a life of ease. When my kids come home to tell me that they “know” their teacher doesn’t like them, I tell them the same thing I’d tell them if they were talking about their boss: deal with it and make sure you do what you are supposed to do.
When they complain because they happened to have homework, I remind them that adults sometimes have to work past 5:00, so it’s good practice. They are beginning to ‘get it’. This is still the land of opportunity, and still the greatest place to be. Their opportunities are effective when they are, and I hope to get the message through to others so we can rise to this occasion.
Tuesday, January 06, 2009
Sophie Tech 4 – HELP!
It has been said that if you place multiple primates in a room with multiple typewriters, one will produce a novel. In my case, though, only one primate was required to generate some interesting excitement.
Much like her father, Sophie exhibits an attraction to shiny things which blink, the LED status light on my Blackberry Pearl being one of the best examples. I don’t know if she is enthralled by the fact that the light blinks, or that it blinks in different colors, but it speaks to her in a voice that whispers, “Push buttons.” It does communicate to her, though differently than it does to me. I see the red that notifies me of new e-mail, the blue that lets me know I’m attached via Bluetooth, the green that tells me when I’m in a preferred network and the amber which tells me I’ve surfed too long without recharging; she sees the blinking.
To both of us, the device communicates a possible need for action, which is a great advance over having to click on icons to check status, find out if there is new mail, etc. A great design that communicates rudimentary information to the user without user interaction being necessary to obtain it, and best of all, it uses a visual communication language that is recognizable across a broad spectrum of the population.
One of the other things that she has done has been to actually open up applications using the roller ball interface. Even at her age, she has associated the action of rolling the ball with moving a cursor to another icon, and the action of pressing the roller with causing the screen to change into something else. Once that application is open, she can even make letters appear by hitting the buttons she sees there. That seems like a pedestrian feat, but in what is really a small amount of time, we have come from devices that require us to modify how we do things to devices that we customize to do things our way. The example that springs to mind is the old Palm Pilot.
I’m not sure if all the readers of this blog will have first-hand knowledge of this, but there was a time when the ability to enter information into a handheld organizer required the learning of a new language called Graffiti. Graffiti was based on the English alphabet, but the shapes of the letters you had to learn and use with the Palm equipment were in some cases confusing, and the entire process was definitely one which tool some practice. Whether your device uses a full QWERTY keyboard, or a stacked keyboard such as is used on the Pearl (as a side note, you can set it up to learn your vocabulary, and after a while of learning the device can guess the word you’re trying to type in, making the process a lot better), input and usability are vastly-enhanced over even 5 years ago. Sophie will most likely be guided toward learning and using L33Tspeak (ROFL, etc.) by peer pressure, but will not have to learn a different way of writing just to enter appointments into a device. The concept will be extremely foreign and well-removed from her world.
Though there are many observations on the usability of my particular mobile device, time and the reader’s attention demand a brief summary. Thus, the reason for this post emerges. I remember a time when one of the most popular giveaways to customers was a vinyl phonebook cover, upon which were listed the phone numbers of the fire department, police department, hospital, and other, similar organizations. One reason for that listing was that, should a need arise, one would need to have that information handy. 9-1-1 service was being developed and deployed, but it certainly had not been as widely-applied as it is today, and so the need to make a decision on whom to call was placed onto the individuals undergoing a stressful situation.
Today we don’t even need to remember where we are, the caller ID and location technologies do that for us, and the 9-1-1 operator makes the decisions on who and what manner of help to send. Sophie found this to be true even of cell phones, because a couple Saturday’s ago, I was watching her when my phone rang. She had called 9-1-1 service and then hung up, so they were checking to see if there truly was an emergency. After the embarrassment wore off, the concept hit me that what has been done with that technology is truly remarkable. None of my children will ever have to worry about what to dial in the event of an emergency, at least in the States. They won’t have to try to evaluate the physical signs to try to determine their location or the prevailing issues, because they will be aided by a technology that takes care of that for them.
The technologies we’re working with clearly have the ability to be helpful and efficient, and they are also apparently very usable. The overall point of my observation is that we have done a great job in designing usability into our communications devices, and usefulness has also been fairly well-done, but that the entire experience is on a continuum, and we constantly need to evaluate where we are on any given project. If emergency service required seven digits, then the number of accidental calls by the Sophie’s of the world would be a lot lower, but then again, the reason it was made to be three digits was that that was as many as some situations would allow, so the decision was made to deal with a lot of false alarms to ensure that the true emergencies were handled properly. There was also a time when you could get on the POTS, dial only five digits and reach someone who shared your exchange, but today you have to dial the full seven (or with the proliferation of cell numbers from other areas, all 10), which is less convenient for those making only local calls, exchanging usability for efficiency and better equipment. As we carry designs forward, we need to make sure that the systems are so intuitive that the average least-experienced users of those systems are served, while eliminating the ability to shoot oneself in the foot.
The reason for the last statement is the way that Sophie had to have dialed the number (I have surmised this, because of the negative potential for finding out I’m right during an actual test). She didn’t dial in 9-1-1, she just pressed on the trackball while the phone was locked. It asked her if she wanted to make an emergency call, and she clicked as such. At that moment, usefulness gave way to annoyance, for as many times as we’ve all leaned against something with our cell phone in its holster and accidentally made a phone call, how much more annoying would it be to have that happen with fire trucks showing up?
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