INTERESTING: A “bad BB call” versus a “bad PR strategy”

Saturday, June 5, 2010

http://blogs.jobdig.com/wwds/2010/06/04/irrevocable-mistakes-at-work

Irrevocable Mistakes at Work
Posted in June 4th, 2010

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Heard about Jim Joyce, right? He is the umpire who cost Armando Galarraga a perfect game…only twenty EVER in major league baseball…with a horrendous call at first base with two out in the ninth inning.

He’s gone from goat to hero. Sportsmanship and all that. I heard Matt Lauer thank him this morning for the “teaching moment” he gave us all. To be fair, Umpire Joyce did admit his mistake right away, took the abuse like the man he undoubtedly is, apologized personally to Armando and did not hide from fans nor media. A class act, even with his outdated Leon Redbone mustache; luckily, there are no pictures of him in his wife beater or we all might not think so nicely about him.

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http://www.northjersey.com/news/95486624_BP_oil_spill_is_a_public_relations_disaster__too.html

BP oil spill is a public relations disaster, too
Thursday, June 3, 2010
Last updated: Thursday June 3, 2010, 6:13 AM
BY ERIKA BOLSTAD The Record MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS

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A litany of half-truths, withholding crucial video, blocking media access to the site and a failure to share timely and complete information about efforts to contain the largest oil spill in U.S. history have created the widespread impression that BP is suppressing the facts about the April 20 oil rig blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, if not misleading the public and the government.

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Imagine the difference.

The head of BP gets up at a twice daily briefing and explains what is being done. Bring in real people to talk. Demonstrate how they are pulling out all the stops. Bring the people into the loop.

May not be a smart legal strategy, but it’s smart PR.

Explain why they had to drill in deep water. Explain about all the regs and safety they have to meet. Explain what the Plan A, Plan B, … Plan Z are.

Imagine the difference.

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INTERESTING: Pontius Pilate, Lady Macbeth, and I; all wash our hands

Friday, June 4, 2010

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/brainstorm/201005/washing-your-hands-reduces-cognitive-dissonance

May 6, 2010, Anxiety
Washing Your Hands Reduces Cognitive Dissonance
Soap reduces the effects of postdecisional dissonance.
By Matthew Hutson on May 6, 2010

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Some decisions just leave you gutted. Your iPad 3G or your finger. Your son or Sophie Jr. Paper or plastic. The only way to alleviate the anxiety that results from saying no to something you want is to convince yourself you didn’t really want it in the first place. Now there’s a way to reduce the effects of cognitive dissonance: Wash your hands.

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Previous research linking disgust and moral purity has shown that recalling an unethical act increases the desire to atone and that this increase is attenuated by hand-washing. Lee and Schwartz suggest that that Lady Macbeth effect and their own results might both be subcases of a broader “clean slate effect”: washing may expunge the emotional power of past acts–perhaps even good ones–from the mental record.

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I tried to explain to my friend about this “finding”. He listened patiently and added an interesting aspect. In the Gospel According to Matthew, Pontius Pilate washes his hands of Jesus and reluctantly sends him to his death

Hey, I didn’t even think of that!

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INTERESTING: We know so little about our tuckus (tuchus?) (butt!)

Sunday, May 30, 2010

http://www.impactlab.com/2010/05/30/scientists-believe-a-near-death-experience-is-the-last-gasp-of-a-dying-brain/

May 30th, 2010 at 10:09 am
Scientists Believe a Near-Death Experience is the Last Gasp of a Dying Brain

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A Dutch study published in The Lancet in 2001 found around one in five cardiac arrest victims underwent a near-death experience. They found these patients tended to feel happier, more altruistic and less afraid of death later on.

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We know so very little about everything?

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INTERESTING: Benford’s Law

Friday, May 28, 2010

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/25155

The Physics arXiv Blog
Friday, May 07, 2010
Benford’s Law And A Theory of Everything

A new relationship between Benford’s Law and the statistics of fundamental physics may hint at a deeper theory of everything

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In 1938, the physicist Frank Benford made an extraordinary discovery about numbers. He found that in many lists of numbers drawn from real data, the leading digit is far more likely to be a 1 than a 9. In fact, the distribution of first digits follows a logarithmic law. So the first digit is likely to be 1 about 30 per cent of time while the number 9 appears only five per cent of the time.

That’s an unsettling and counterintuitive discovery. Why aren’t numbers evenly distributed in such lists? One answer is that if numbers have this type of distribution then it must be scale invariant. So switching a data set measured in inches to one measured in centimetres should not change the distribution. If that’s the case, then the only form such a distribution can take is logarithmic.

But while this is a powerful argument, it does nothing to explan the existence of the distribution in the first place.

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Haven’t heard about this since injineering skrool. (Thanks, Brother Barry Austin. Engineering Measurements 101. I’ll never forget the difference between “blunders” and “errors”. I’ve made a lot of both since.)

Still don’t know what to make of it.

Perhaps, it’s like “the Name of God” in the Indiana Jones sense. The Ark! The key to creation?

Still fascinating! After all these years.

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INTERESTING: Wash your hands and forgive past mistakes?

Thursday, May 27, 2010

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/05/100506141601.htm

Wash Away Your Doubts When You Wash Your Hands

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ScienceDaily (May 7, 2010) — Washing your hands “wipes the slate clean,” removing doubts about recent choices.

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“It’s not just that washing your hands contributes to moral cleanliness as well as physical cleanliness, as seen in earlier research” said Lee, a doctoral candidate in social psychology. “Our studies show that washing also reduces the influence of past behaviors and decisions that have no moral implications whatsoever.”

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What interesting people the Creator made. How weird is our wiring? I’m not sure to make of this, but I’m going sure start washing my hands more often.

OCD?

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INTERESTING: Just had a windshield star repaired; easy, cheap, and effective

Monday, May 17, 2010

Had some time to kill. (Lots of that from time to time.) Did the Safelite Auto Glass thing on my “star”. Worked well. THe insurance company waived my deductible and paid the 138$. (Why I don’t know? I had high deductible so they would never get bill for the windshield. So why did they pay? A process failure? Maybe they need a BPR consultant? You know “bothering people relentlessly”.)

RECOMMENDED!

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INTERESTING: Where is the edge of the flat earth?

Sunday, May 16, 2010

http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-1005.html

Crypto-Gram Newsletter
May 15, 2010
by Bruce Schneier
Chief Security Technology Officer, BT

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Worst-Case Thinking

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Remember Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s quote? “Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.” And this: “the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” Ignorance isn’t a cause for doubt; when you can fill that ignorance with imagination, it can be a call to action.

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“We don’t know what we don’t know”

In the dikw (i.e., data, information, knowledge, wisdom) meme the elements explode into: Data is the elemental atom of the paradigm. Information is data in context. Knowledge is actionable information. Wisdom is knowing the implications of knowledge.

Wisdom is that “don’t know what don’t know” area.

Where is the edge of the flat earth?

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INTERESTING: The “Ghost Army”

Wednesday, May 12, 2010

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/world-war-2/7658261/Second-World-War-Ghost-Army-helped-Allies-win-war.html

Second World War ‘Ghost Army’ helped Allies win war
They were known as the ‘Ghost Army’, an eclectic group of actors, make-up artists and sound experts who together engineered one of the greatest deceptions in military history.
By Nick Squires
Published: 7:00AM BST 01 May 2010

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But now, more than 65 years on, the extraordinary work of the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops is being detailed in a documentary and an exhibition in the United States.

The top secret unit, which carried out its mission without firing a shot, consisted of around 1,100 make-up artists, actors, sound technicians, painters, photographers and press agents, many of them drawn from Hollywood.

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Neat. Now that’s the way to “fight” a war. Smarter!

Now, if we could just avoid them in the first place.

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INTERESTING: Identify people; not so good

Saturday, May 8, 2010

One thing sucks on the net is identifying unique people.

Just try finding your classmates from your high school class.

Even fellow college alums are hard; high school is near impossible.

My advice: start collecting now.

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INTERESTING: Verify and validate “change”

Thursday, May 6, 2010

http://www.careerhubblog.com/main/2010/04/17-tips-for-dealing-with-volcanos-change-and-uncertainty.html

17 Tips For Dealing With Volcanos, Change and Uncertainty

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Ever-changing technology, globalisation and hyper-competition have conspired to make most of our professional lives an ever-changing landscape. Add to that a changeable economic climate, political uncertainty and a sprinkling of volcanic ash and voila – you have the makings of constant change and unpredictability.

While your ability to create and execute detailed plans may have served you well in the past, in today’s economy and work place, it’s your ability to operate in a much more fluid environment that determines your progress.

Regardless of whether you’re currently trying to lead a team through change or attempting to navigate your own career through a turbulence, here are 17 tips which may help.

1. Focus on clear outcomes instead of detailed plans

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(0) Check your paradigms and memes. Change is a delta based on a previous perception. What if that perception is wrong? Our memes shape our perceptions and vice versa. Sunset is the other side of sunrise. Both are unique changes but they are inexorably linked. Are they one? Similarly, we have so many blind spots about some many things (i.e., time; culture; distance; interpretation). Those paradigms and memes might be wrong. Worse yet they can be silently invalidated by changes over time without us perceiving that change. So, very carefully, examine and reexamine your paradigms and memes. Challenge what you think is true. Test it. Don’t depend upon it without reexamination. It can bite you in the a double q.

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