Sometimes, It All Just Works

Mitch HobishGrowth, Innovation, Leadership, Productivity

As of this writing, the successful landing of the Mars Science Laboratory (aka Curiosity) is old news, but the technology that allowed it to happen and also allowed me to partake of the excitement is what I wish to address today.

The night of the landing, I was exhausted—so much so that I just couldn’t get my act together enough to get into the office to watch it all on NASA-TV on my desktop monitors. So, I fired up my iPod Touch from my chair in the living room, accessed a portal, and proceeded to watch on that very small screen.

And then I realized what was happening.

Image: Courtesy NASA

I live about four miles outside of a very small town in southwest Montana. I mean, we’re talking rural here. And yet, I was able to watch the first images from Curiosity almost as quickly as they were appearing on the screens at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the site of mission control.

Think about it: Here’s a one-ton technological marvel that landed on Mars via a very complex and untried Skycrane after having traveled for almost nine months. Very few course corrections, split-second adherence to timelines, and landing within a couple of kilometers of its nominal target. Photos within minutes of landing, crossing the void and being distributed around the world in near-real time, and—specifically—right to my little screen. The prowess, genius, and perseverance of thousands of people all contributed to this success, and my incredible satisfaction at being part of that chain.

It all just worked.

Questions: Do you assume that your plans will always “just work”? When they do, are you complacent?  Are you aware of all the contributing factors that go into your plans working? Do you undergo any contingency planning, just in case they don’t work?

Did You Say What You Meant?

Mitch HobishGrowth, Leadership, Productivity

The topic of an item I found today is interesting in its own right, but it was the shortened title of the material, provided by the editor of a summary newsletter, that caught my eye.

“Modern culture began earlier than thought”, reads the headline—not too far removed from the title of the linked-to item, above.

My first interpretation of this was that there was culture before people began to think.

Huh?

While fascinating in its implications, I finally settled on an interpretation that was what was meant, that human culture began earlier than was previously thought to be the case.

In all things—but particularly in nominally scientific discourse—clarity in communications is an absolute requirement. This example doesn’t rise to that standard.

Questions: Are you always sure that what you say (or write) conveys what you intended to communicate? How can you be sure that such communications will convey the information you wish transferred?

 

Miscommunication Potential

Mitch HobishGrowth, Leadership, Productivity

As is often the case, I find things in my daily perusal of things technical items that can have wider implications.

Take this piece from the July 3, 2012 Wall Street Journal, which describes different approaches to using online communications channels, and the problems that result from the disparate styles and choices.

I pride myself on my ability to communicate. Whether by written word in several media or spoken, I take the time to formulate my statements, partake of spirited but informed conversation, and just generally try (usually successfully) to make my points, and elicit or solicit information from others.

And yet, there are times I find that whatever I’m doing just isn’t working. Depending on the circumstance and my relationship with the person with whom I’m trying to communicate, I’ll call a time-out, and suggest that we figure out where the miscommunication is coming from, with an eye toward getting back on track.

It doesn’t always work. There are times when it’s seemingly impossible to effect an efficient and effective transfer of information, and I can’t always figure out why.

Frustrating.

Questions: How good are you at communicating with others? Do you know why that is so? Have you ever examined what you could do differently to either make a good channel clearer, or a bad channel clear? What are the effects of your communication style(s)?

Do I Really Need It?

Mitch HobishGrowth, Innovation, Leadership, Productivity

A few weeks ago, I noted in this post that I’d had some difficulty with a new laptop computer, given by a long-time friend as a gift. I’ve been thinking about the outcome of the repair situation, and decided to use it to address a more-general issue.

Since that post, I had two visits by an on-site technician. The gift included this on-site service for which I am very grateful, considering both that I live in the sticks, and that it would have taken several volleys of returning the problematical computer before the issue would have been solved.

The bottom line is that the earlier-referenced inability to effect a WiFi connection to my internal LAN was the result of an incompatibility—at what level as yet unknown—between the as-provided WiFi card and my router. Oh, I was able to get it all to knit up, but only if I (a) turned off encryption completely, or (b) used WEP encryption, instead of the WPA2-Personal I desired.

[For those non-geeks reading this, what these are and how they differ are not germane to this post, although I invite you to do some of your own research to see why WEP has some problems.]

Whether or not I actually needed to use that level of encryption is the point of this post. There were two factors to my insistence on its implementation: I wanted the extra protection here and, potentially, when on travel; and I just plain wanted the system to work the way it was supposed to. After all, every other WiFi-enabled box in the house/office worked just fine, and I didn’t want to settle. It took swapping out the card twice: once, with an identical replacement; the second, with a model from another vendor. Once that final replacement was made everything worked just fine, immediately. Success!

Questions: Do you insist on things working as per spec or design, even if you don’t need such capability? What criteria do you use to determine if you are satisfied with your technology? Or with anything else, for that matter? “How’s that working for you”?

“That’s Ridiculous!”

Mitch HobishGrowth, Innovation, Leadership, Productivity

My reading is eclectic, and I never know when I get started what I’m going to find.

A recent item got me thinking about technology and its uses—and potential “misuses”. (The reason for the quotation marks will become apparent in a few sentences.)

First a bit of context: ‘Way back when I was an English major, I participated in a seminar, with the topic, The Intentional Fallacy. As I remember it, we discussed the distinctions between what an author may (or may not) have intended (the intention), and what the reader concluded or decided or felt as a result of the reading. You may correctly infer that the “connection” was very often a disconnect.

This leads me to today’s discussion: The mashup between the various technologies described in the linked-to article resulted in a guy having a “virtual date” with an apparently well-known anime character.

What?

Yep, on the face of it, “that’s ridiculous!”

But therein lies the fascination for me: Who is to say that an individual’s use of a technology is simply a misuse, or even ridiculous?  And, why limit this question to technology? Just because an innovation or application is designed for a given use, why not apply it in some direction that’s off at some odd angle from that intention? I addressed this basic theme in an earlier post (see Functional Fixedness, if you’re interested.)

Questions: How tied are you to the “purpose” of a tool or an idea? Might you benefit from thinking about other possibilities for its utility? Are you concerned what others might say or think about such “off-label” use? Why or why not?

The Technology Spectrum

Mitch HobishGrowth, Leadership, Productivity

I came across two apparently unrelated items today that I managed to relate.

The first has to do with what could be a major discovery in the realm of particle physics and its impact on our understanding of the underpinnings of reality: Scientists at CERN have announced that to a greater than 99.9999+ percent level, they have detected the long-sought Higgs Boson (the so-called “God Particle”, because—according to the Standard Model in this area—it is everywhere and is responsible for the phenomenon we call mass). Using the phenomenal technological construct, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and its huge detectors, teams of thousands of people have worked together for years to come to this point. Even if it’s not the Higgs Boson, the particle in question is a true discovery.

Quite at the other end of the technology spectrum is this item, which describes how a very tired legislator in North Carolina caused the institution of legislation to allow “fracking” in her state, even though she had long fought against it. The cause was, simply, because she pressed the wrong button on her voting panel, apparently owing to extreme fatigue and subsequent inattention. Because of legislative rules, she could not undo her wrong vote.

In both cases, the technology worked the way it was supposed to. However, in the case of the LHC, not only the technology worked, but it worked because people paid attention to the tiniest details, and worked together to get a fascinating result. In the second case, the technology worked, but the result was not what was desired, because of one person’s inability to pay attention.

Draw your own conclusions.

Questions: How dependent are you on trusting that you and others with whom you work will pay attention to details? What remedies are in place to rectify problems that will arise, should such attention not be paid? How do you ensure that everyone does their job to the best of their abilities?

Levying Blame

Mitch HobishGrowth, Leadership, Productivity

I was the lucky recipient of a gift laptop last week, sent quite out of the blue by an old (as in long-term) friend. What generosity! I got right to work, checking it out, making sure the delivery manifest matched the options he had purchased for me, learning Windows 7 (I still mostly dwell in the XP realm; hey! It works for me!), and configuring this and that.

What I could not seem to do was to verify that all the extended warranties with in-home service were present, nor could I get the wireless card to work with my in-house/office WPA-2/TKIP-AES encryption. (BTW, it worked fine with no encryption and with WEP, but I wanted to use WPA-2.)

I ended up working with both customer support and tech support for more hours than I’d like to admit to, and no one could figure out what I had been sent, whether what was loaded on the unit was what had been ordered, and more. They just couldn’t match up the service tag with the express service code.

I was getting, shall we say, frustrated, in the extreme, and was having increasingly negative thoughts (and words) about the manufacturer, customer support, and tech support.

After a long series of phone calls, it turns out that I had mistranscribed one of the required numbers. My fault, me culpa, and embarrassing so forth. Once we were able to get the right numbers into the system, all was well. Everything that had been purchased was indeed loaded, registered, and functioning.

Finally.

Oh, as for that wireless card, they’re going to ship me a new one, with arrangements to have a tech come to my office to effect the repair. Nice.

Questions: When things do not go as you think they should, how do you determine the root cause(s)? Do you include yourself in the “systems analysis”? What do you do when (if) you realize that you are the source of the problem?

The Urge to Merge

Mitch HobishGrowth, Innovation, Leadership, Productivity

I come across all kinds of interesting things in the course of my daily activities. Take this item from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which describes how and why mosquitos aren’t just crushed when they collide with raindrops—which are many times more massive than the troublesome insect.

Using high-speed videography, they demonstrated that mosquito’s strong exoskeleton and low mass prevent any significant momentum transfer from the raindrop. As they said in the abstract, “Our findings demonstrate that small fliers are robust to in-flight perturbations.”

It would seem that being a lightweight in the presence of heavy-hitters is not necessarily a problem.

Questions: When faced with seemingly overwhelming odds, what do you do? Do you “ride with the tide and go with the flow”? Do you might against those odds? What benefits accrue from either of these approaches? What does it cost you?

 

Expectations

Mitch HobishGrowth, Innovation, Leadership, Productivity

Although the guidelines have been available to a subset of interested parties since 2011, it was not until late May 2012 that the broader community became aware of and accepted “…guidelines established by NASA to protect lunar historic sites and preserve ongoing and future science on the moon.”

Designed to maintain the historical and scientific integrity of these historical sites—such as Tranquility Base, Apollo 11’s touchdown site—NASA acknowledges that these are guidelines, and that it has no authority to require any organization reaching the moon under the aegis of such catalysts as the Google Lunar X Prize to actually obey them.

That said, representatives of Google and the organizations working toward reaching the moon under the competition’s provisions have agreed to abide by them. When—not if—the moon is reached by an organization other than NASA, we’ll have to see if—not necessarily when—these guidelines are followed.

Questions: Do you expect others to respect your wishes? How do you feel when they don’t? What can you do about such a circumstance? Can you make a case that such expectations are worthy of being met—by everyone?

Unintended Consequences

Mitch HobishGrowth, Innovation, Leadership, Productivity

It seems that The Machines are much in the news lately. I’ve seen several articles on increasing uses for drones and other UAVs in domestic “security” applications, not to mention the prospects of arming them for bona fide warfare.

On a much less violent front, we have this item from the Wall Street Journal, which describes how a seemingly innocuous (but nominally helpful) tool for hiring managers is blocking even qualified candidates from further consideration in job application processing.

I’m very much in favor of having machines help humans; that is, after all, why they are conceived of, built, and used. But if you read the article you’ll find that—as is increasingly the case in too many areas—humans are not only being required to adjust their own activities to accommodate machine incapabilities, but to overcome obstacles brought on by the use of the machines in the first place.

I know that, for the moment at least, the machines are still being programmed by people, and it is the programmer’s (or systems engineer’s, or manager’s) failure to take into account all possible requirements and outcomes that leads to this situation, but it’s a real problem, nonetheless.

Questions: How do you determine if your decisions will have the results you want? Can you make such a determination with any certainty? How (can) you tell if a decision is the “right” one? What criteria do you use for such determination? Do you learn from situations where your decision was the “wrong” one? What made it wrong, anyhow?