Dave’s Whiteboard

Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, once imagined a spreadsheet with a difference — you put in the answer you wanted, and the software manipulated your input to make it fit the result.

Coturnix at A Blog around the Clock links to news that the Alaska state legislature apparently takes Adams seriously. According to the Anchorage Daily News,

The state Legislature is looking to hire a few good polar bear scientists. The conclusions have already been agreed upon — researchers just have to fill in the science part.

A $2 million program funded with little debate by the Legislature last month calls for using state money to fund an “academic based” conference that highlights contrarian scientific research on global warming.

…But the point is not to seek some non-biased measure of scientific truth. The point, said [Speaker of the House John] Harris, is to provide a forum for scientists whose views back Alaska’s interests.

“You know as well as I do that scientists are like lawyers,” Harris said.

For some reason, this reminds me of debates within large organizations about the role of training, as well as the role of training versus learning.

At some level, we know that contact hours don’t always have much to do with learning — more often, they measure nothing more than time spent sitting. At the same time we know that people need to spend time working with new information in order to integrate it and apply it.

In the world of what gets counted, counts, it’s easy to turn toward familiar concepts and measurements we recognize. Hence the overwhelming sway of multiple-guess questions, when outside of the driver’s license exams, so little day-to-day work involves A, B, C, D, all of the above, or none of the above.

I think it’s helpful to think of measurement and assessment, related but distinct concepts. What we measure should related to what’s important for the result we seek. That’s part of Thomas Gilbert’s framework: we measure in terms of quality, quantity, or cost.

Measurement is nonjudgmental: you measure your weight in pounds or kilograms. Assessment is the comparison of the result of measurement to some standard: you weigh 230 pounds, and for your height of 5 foot 2, you’re seriously overweight.

Angus MacAskill weighed 425 pounds (a measurement), which sounds pretty heavy (an assessment) until you recall he was 7 foot 9 inches tall (leading to a revised assessment).

I’ve believed for a long time that any effective learning starts with some idea of the result you want to achieve (e.g., a particular skill you want to acquire), which then guides how you select ways to achieve that skills and processes you can use to deetermine your progress toward your goal. This is a different frame of mind from “let’s have a bunch of courses.” The ends don’t justify the means, but they help you make rational choices about them.

Multiple-choice photo by Leia Schofield.

Tony Karrer pointed the way to Lifehack, which apparently had been hiding on the dark side of my conceptual moon. Perhaps because I’d been talking about feeds with a friend, I liked Dustin Wax’s post about going on a high-information diet. Here’s his input test:

• Is this input making me better informed?
• If not, is there any entertainment or social value I receive from this input?
• If so, is the entertainment or social value worth the time and effort to maintain the input?

Apply the Input Test to your email newsletters, RSS feeds, TV selections, magazine subscriptions, podcasts, and so on. Don’t let yourself fall into the trap of keeping something around in case someday in the future something important comes down the tube! There’s no piece of information so important that it can only be found amid a heaping mountain of crap — and so rare that you won’t find out about it otherwise.

Wax brought to mind Bertrand Russell’s notion that the time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time. Managing your inputs is something like the principles that guided A Cookbook for Poor Poets and Others:

• Always use real butter.
• Always serve fresh bread.
• Always serve wine.

Those rules didn’t mean only do those things; they means focus on the purpose and experience of the meal. Wax is reminded me to do the same with my info-gathering. And if I’m gathering for the fun of it, be aware that’s what I’m doing, and stop when it’s no longer fun.

Healthy Diet Coke photo by Lance McCord.

I mentioned the Xyleme Voices podcasts the other day. I particularly liked Conrad Gottfredson’s concept of learning at the moment of need. He talks about providing performance support to address each of these situations:

• When learning for the first time
• When learning more
• When remembering and/or applying what’s been learned
• When things go wrong
• When things change

The first two situations lend themselves readily to formal training ( though I’m sure some will disagree). The other three don’t fit well with traditional training modes; performance support tools make even more sense in these cases.

You’ll find an invitation to discuss performance support, and lots more, at PS: Learning @ the Moment of Need, a blog written by Gottfredson and Bob Mosher.

Looking at “when things go wrong” and “when things change,” I find myself thinking about an article in yesterday’s New York Times. For the Elderly, Being Heard about Life’s End discusses “slow medicine” — and approach providing less aggressive medical care at the end of life.

I’m sensitive to this because my parents are quite old, and my father in particular has faded in the past year or two. Although they still have their own home, the realities of their situation remind me that things always change and often go wrong.

My parents in the Red Rows, ca. 1951.

In our hyperlinked, hyperconnected world, it’s easy to think that technology trumps everything. The Times article demonstrates strikingly how facts can trump impressions.

…9 of 10 people who live into their 80s will wind up unable to take care of themselves, either because of frailty or dementia. “Everyone thinks they’ll be the lucky one, but we can’t go along with that myth,” Dr. McCullough [of Kendal at Hanover, a retirement community affiliated with Dartmouth Medical School] said…

A 2002 study, published in the journal Heart, found that fewer than 2 percent of people in their 80s and 90s who had been resuscitated for cardiac arrest at home lived for one month.

So that’s maybe a reminder with two edges:

• Make my own learning (for my work and for my life) a regular priority.
• Use time when I can as insurance against time when I can’t.

Brain rule number one says, ” Exercise boosts brainpower.” In a way that feels like saying, “The Atlantic is damp,” but author John Medina emphasizes his point evolutionarily. In the good old days, he writes,

We moved….

If we sat around the Serengeti for eight hours — heck, for eight minutes — we were usually somebody’s lunch.

The body needs food and turns a lot of it into glucose. The brain craves glucose. 2% of our body weight, the brain consumes 20% of our glucose. As we metabolize glucose, the process releases electrons in the form of free radicals. These aren’t good for us.

Oxygen in the blood stream absorbs the free radicals and expels them in the CO2 we exhale. The point of this biology lesson is that exercise increases blood flow, which can construct new blood vessels, which means more efficient disposal of the free radicals.

So, the Romans were right: mens sana in corpore sano. The sound body actually contributes to the sound mind.

According to Medina, research suggests that exercise also increases Brain Derived Neurotrophic Factor. BDNF appears to strengthen neurons and, even more important, increase neurogenesis: it helps you grow new brain cells.

Inch by inch, row by row

As with the garden in the David Mallette song, we can foster the growth. Medina suggests things like to recess periods per day for schoolchildren or treadmills in cubicles.

When I worked in a cubicle, there was barely room for a guest chair, let alone a treadmill. Still, the fundamental things apply: regular exercise makes you smarter. How many workplaces allow for, let alone encourage, physical activity? The organization and the culture laud multitasking, a myth with barely more evidence than the tooth fairy. Not then I’m in favor of mandatory company calisthenics; more that I’d like to see work-life balance means something other than, “We’ll provide the work and you spend your life balancing.” in the meantime, I’ll see if I can manage to exercise as often and as regularly as I scribble here on the Whiteboard.

(Note: since my WordPress update this weekend, the “Series” codes I’d put in don’t seem to work. I’ll try and resolve that today.)

Lego People are a detail from a photo by Joe Shlabotnik / Peter Dutton.

The so-called 80/20 rule (80% of [whatever] comes from 20% of [whatever]), which I’d always associated with Vilfredo Pareto, seems to have been named by quality guru Joseph Juran (who died last March at the age of 103).

It’s a heuristic, not a law of physics, of course (80% of the people who insist otherwise are rounded-number lobbyists). Juran and Pareto were big on analysis. As Tom Gilbert said once, science observes, which is why Pareto charts make a lot of sense.

I’m not sure if I got onto this track-and-think path because I wanted pizza last night, or because of the comment-on-blogs challenge I found out about. I do think it can be valuable for people who read blogs to make comments — assuming the comments aren’t “get V!_ag Ra cheap!”

I think there’s value for me in paying attention to whether, where, and when I comment. I’m a couple of days behind, but then, that’s a fair description of my life. The activities for the first three days of May:

• Do a commenting self-audit. I will, this weekend, though I understand that today I’m going to be redoing my closet.
• Comment on a blog you’ve never commented on. I see I’ve done that three times in the past three days. (My “three clicks out” habit helps me here.)
• Sign up for a comment tracking service. I’m on CoComment, though I have to say that it sometimes seems to be more about comment than about tracking.
  • I have the little gizmo that’s supposed to take me to “my conversations.” When I go there, as I just did, items appear somewhat randomly. The first in the list is March 24, the fifth is three hours ago, the tenth 36.
  • If I click “my conversations,” the list changes to most-recent-first. Why? I don’t know.

To me, this is all about taking active part in various communities. I don’t think I need to comment for the sake of commenting (that’s what talk radio is for). I do think that by engaging with other people virtually, as I might if I met them at some event we were attending, helps me find out things, share what I know, and focus on whatever the big picture happens to be.

Potato photo by vladdythephotogeek / Paul Vladuchick.