2010 Archives

Amongst the stream of articles that turn up through my RSS reader was one for pulled pork, aka cochinita pibil. Eric Guthey had told me how great pulled pork could be, so I thought "why not?". So, off to Mexican Specialties for some achiote paste and 24 hours later I had some of the most delicious pork ever.

This recipe is definitely a keeper.

I should say that my darling wife made some picked red onions to go with the pork. It was the perfect accompaniment.

For a long time (ever since I've been in Auckland) my preferred video store has been Videon. No matter where in Auckland I have lived, I have always used them. They've a great range (more than just block busters) and really well informed staff.

Recently, the moved from 654 Dominion Road in Balmoral, to 244 Dominion Rd, Mt Eden

it's a move of only about 1.5 Km, but I worry about the impact it will have on the business.

Here are some of the reasons why I think the move might be less than successful for Videon:

• When we visited the store on Saturday only one other person came into to browse while we where there. In the old location, at a similar time, I would have expected around a dozen or more customers.
• The new store is almost invisible from the street. The store is now very narrow and provides little street appeal. The signage--what there is--looks unappealing and doesn't echo the previous location's style. We nearly walked straight past the store even though we were looking for it.
• Insider, the store is very long an narrow. There is little room to browse (which is worrying given that it was just my wife and I for most the time). There is no ambiance; it feels very sterile. The fit-out of the store is looks cheap. In fact, our impression that from the outside that it was a cheap DVD outlet store was reinforced by the inside.
• Although we decided to walk to the store, parking seems to be a problem when compared to the old store. At the old store, Videon had its own parking and it was relatively easy to find street parking. This isn't the case in the new location.

Now it may be that the extra foot traffic will compensate for the invertible drop off in customers (who can't be bothered to go the extra distance). But I'm not sure. Perhaps the managers at Videon have examined their records and know how many people were very local to the store and how many are actually traveling some distance to the store (and thus may not be bothered by a little extra distance). I don't know.

What I do know, is that the store didn't feel 'alive' and that might be fatal. This move could be the end of Videon. It may be Vide-gone.

Around the bays is an Auckland tradition. So, I had a go this year. My time for the 8.4km was 45 minutes 47 seconds or about 10.5 km/hr. Lisa assumes that I'll do it next year -- she is probably right. Now I have a target to beat.

Andrew did it in about 41 minutes (having run distance from the finish to the start). Outstanding!

Norvig says (with tweaks to the contemporary references by me) ...

Researchers (Bloom & Sosniak, 1985; Bryan & Harter, 1899; Hayes, 1981; Simmon & Chase,1973) have shown it takes about ten years to develop expertise in any of a wide variety of areas, including chess playing, music composition, telegraph operation, painting, piano playing, swimming, tennis, and research in neuropsychology and topology. The key is deliberative practice: not just doing it again and again, but challenging yourself with a task that is just beyond your current ability, trying it, analyzing your performance while and after doing it, and correcting any mistakes. Then repeat. And repeat again. There appear to be no real shortcuts: even Mozart, who was a musical prodigy at age 4, took 13 more years before he began to produce world-class music. In another genre, the Beatles seemed to burst onto the scene with a string of #1 hits and an appearance on the Ed Sullivan show in 1964. But they had been playing small clubs in Liverpool and Hamburg since 1957, and while they had mass appeal early on, their first great critical success, Sgt. Peppers, was released in 1967. Malcolm Gladwell (2009) reports that a study of students at the Berlin Academy of Music compared the top, middle, and bottom third of the class and asked them how much they had practiced:

Everyone, from all three groups, started playing at roughly the same time - around the age of five. In those first few years, everyone practised roughly the same amount - about two or three hours a week. But around the age of eight real differences started to emerge. The students who would end up as the best in their class began to practise more than everyone else: six hours a week by age nine, eight by age 12, 16 a week by age 14, and up and up, until by the age of 20 they were practising well over 30 hours a week. By the age of 20, the elite performers had all totalled 10,000 hours of practice over the course of their lives. The merely good students had totalled, by contrast, 8,000 hours, and the future music teachers just over 4,000 hours.

So it may be that 10,000 hours, not 10 years, is the magic number. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) thought it took longer: "Excellence in any department can be attained only by the labor of a lifetime; it is not to be purchased at a lesser price." And Chaucer (1340-1400) complained "the lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne." Hippocrates (c. 400BC) is known for the excerpt "ars longa, vita brevis", which is part of the longer quotation "Ars longa, vita brevis, occasio praeceps, experimentum periculosum, iudicium difficile", which in English renders as "Life is short, [the] craft long, opportunity fleeting, experiment treacherous, judgment difficult." Although in Latin, ars can mean either art or craft, in the original Greek the word "techne" can only mean "skill", not "art".

References

I'm stepping down as the bibliographer of the strategy-as-practice website. That site is going through a redesign, and as part of that, the team is considering how/what to do with the bibliography.

My own view is that a social bibliography, such as mine might be more useful than a stand alone bibliographic silo.

As many people know, I keep my bibliography in Zotero. Zotero also does community base groups too, such as this one on strategy as practice

There is a very good (well, I like it) summary of how to use Orgmode as a day planner at Lost in Technopolis.

I've been a big fan and user of Remember the milk. I found it a great way to manage my task, and so on, in a GTD like manner. As a bit of an aside, the GTD methodology really works for me ... and every time I find work getting a bit out of control its because I've not been ruthlessly applying the principles of GTD.

Anyway, I've switched to using org-mode (aka orgmode). I don't recall how I stumbled across Org-Mode: Your Life in Plain Text. No before I go any further, let me say that I don't think orgmode it for everyone. Its an extension to the emacs text editor, and in this WYSIWYG world a texted based programme may be 'a bridge to far'. But, as an old hand a unix (albeit a a vi/vim user) the transition to emacs hasn't been too hard.

But why change? Is this just part of the ongoing search for the perfect tool [Andrew might comment here]? Is it just displacement behaviour (avoiding doing PhD work)?

As I said at the beginning of this post, when I find things spinning a little out of control (or what I've come to regard as control) it's because my GTD system isn't out of date/wack. So, moving to a new central store (orgmode) is a mechanism for me to get things back in order (and on track). So, today I've finished the migration from Remember the Milk to orgmode. No doubt I'll have some ongoing tweaking of orgmode ... but I have deleted my Remember the Milk account.

There are lots of useful resources on using orgmode in a GTD way. For example, this one, this one or this one. Most of the articles assume you have emacs up an runnign already (which isn't hard), and that you know how to configure emacs (which is harder). Fortunately, emacs now ships with orgmode included, so there isn't a lot of additional work that needs to be done. you can just jump right on in.

Orgmode understands lists and dates ... and a whole lot more; but lists and dates are enough to get started with.

First of all, one needs to turn on orgmode. There are a few ways to do this. I do it thought my .emacs file (which, is normally in your home directory; if it isn't there you can create it). In .emacs I have the following text.

;;
;; Peter's setup for orgmode in .emacs
;;
(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.\\(org\\|org_archive\\|txt\\)$" . org-mode))
(global-set-key "\C-cl" 'org-store-link)
(global-set-key "\C-ca" 'org-agenda)
(global-set-key "\C-cb" 'org-iswitchb)
(add-hook 'org-mode-hook 'turn-on-font-lock)  ; Org buffers only
(setq org-log-done t)
;;
;; Some more settings
;;
(setq org-agenda-files (file-expand-wildcards "~/org/*.org"))
;;
;;
;;quickly open my gtd file - "M-x gtd"
;;
(defun gtd ()
	(interactive)
	(find-file "~/org/gtd.org")
	)
;;

The main parts of this code are (1) the first line turns on orgmode for any file that is ends with .org .txt or .org_archive. (2) I keep all my orgmode files in a directory off my home directory, i.e., ~/org. any files ending in .org in that directory are scanned when orgmode puts together my agenda. (3) The last little bit of code opens my main 'to do' file called gtd.org when I execute M-x gtd (for non-emacs users that means pressing ALT-x then typing gtd and pressing return). This provides me with a quick way to get to my my to do list. Oh, the "org-log-done" line results in my to do items getting a date attached to them when I mark them as being done.

Now for some fun stuff. First I create my gtd.org file (using c-x c-w org/gtd.org ... that means Control-c Control-x and then typing the path/file name). I can then start making my to do list, vis:

* Work
** Review APR
** Revise article on governance
** Order textbook for INTBUS 202
* Home
** Pick up milk on way home
** Buy a copy "The Wire" (Series 5).

So far so good. I have to have my APR review done by Monday, so let's put a deadline beside it. Positioning my cursor somewhere on the relevant line I type c-c c-d mon (and press enter)

The line changes to be:

** Review APR
   DEADLINE: <2010-01-18 Mon>

And I what to schedule doing the article revision on next Monday. So, on the appropriate line, I type c-c c-d +2mon (and enter). The line changes to be:

** Revise article on governance
   DEADLINE: <2010-01-25 Mon>

I also want to schedule buying "The Wire" today. On the correct line I type c-c s and press enter. The line changes to be:

** Buy a copy "The Wire" (Series 5).
   SCHEDULED: <2010-01-16 Sat>

Now I have dozens of tasks to do. And looking at them all at once doesn't always add clarity. So let's look at my agenda. Pressing c-c a a will bring it up (no need to press enter). My agenda looks like:

Week-agenda (W02):
Monday     11 January 2010 W02
Tuesday    12 January 2010
Wednesday  13 January 2010
Thursday   14 January 2010
Friday     15 January 2010
  gtd:        Scheduled:  Buy a copy "The Wire" (Series 5).
Saturday   16 January 2010
Sunday: 17 January 2010
  gtd:        In   1 d.:  Review APR
  gtd:        In   8 d.:  Revise article on governance

And that's probably enough examples for now. So to sum up, c-c c-d marks an item with a deadline, c-c c-s marks an item with a scheduled date. Oh, and to save your file (the currently open buffer) use c-x c-s

From time-to-time its necessary to display time-series data. I've always tended to use some form of line graph. But there are other ways. In 11 Ways to Visualize Changes Over Time, Nathan suggests aside from the line, one might use:

• the scatter
• the bar
• the stacked bar
• the area (I think Nathan skipped this one)
• the stacked area
• the bubble
• the colour scale
• the timeline
• the everything
• the animation

And in the comments there are a whole lot more suggested.

I was so interested in Nathan's post, that I read more of his site. It's good. Very good. So much so that I've subscribed to his RSS feed.

I really like Zotero. The more I use it, the more useful and powerful I find it. Also, the technical support for the product (from the community of users and especially from Dan Stillman is outstanding.

Dan pointed out a really useful feature to me today. When adding items to Zotero, sometimes the title of the item is published ALL IN UPPER CASE or sometimes In A Mixture Of Upper And Lower Case (i.e., title case). It is really tedious to fix by hand; but there is a better way. I viewing mode (thats in the right-hand-side panel), right-click on the title and choose "Transform text->lower case". It can then be quickly tweaked to be sentence case.

I think it was Stephen Turner (2007) who lamented that much sociological theory is uninformed by our contemporary understanding of neuroscience.

David Rock, in series of articles (2006, 2009) looks at leadership and management from the perspective of neuroscience. One particular section caught my eye, in which he writes about teams; the Relating to relatedness of the title.

Fruitful collaboration depends on healthy relationships, which require trust and empathy. But in the brain, the ability to feel trust and empathy about others is shaped by whether they are perceived to be part of the same social group.... Each time a person meets someone new, the brain automatically makes quick friend-or-foe distinctions and then experiences the friends and foes in ways that are colored by those distinctions. When the new person is perceived as different, the information travels along neural pathways that are associated with uncomfortable feelings (different from the neural pathways triggered by people who are perceived as similar to oneself).

Leaders who understand this phenomenon will find many ways to apply it in business. For example, teams of diverse people cannot be thrown together. They must be deliberately put together in a way that minimizes the potential for threat responses. Trust cannot be assumed or mandated, nor can empathy or even goodwill be compelled. These qualities develop only when people's brains start to recognize former strangers as friends. This requires time and repeated social interaction.

Once people make a stronger social connection, their brains begin to secrete a hormone called oxytocin in one another's presence. This chemical ... disarms the threat response and further activates the neural networks that permit us to perceive someone as "just like us." Research by Michael Kosfeld et al. in 2005 shows that a shot of oxytocin delivered by means of a nasal spray decreases threat arousal. But so may a handshake and a shared glance over something funny.

Conversely, the human threat response is aroused when people feel cut off from social interaction.... Leaders who strive for inclusion and minimize situations in which people feel rejected create an environment that supports maximum performance. This of course raises a challenge for organizations:

This, of course, has implications for teaching, especially when teams are used (as in team-based learning). We have always known that how teams are put together is important, but this article gives us a more nuanced understanding. It also reminds me how important it is for teams to have some (structured) time to get to know one-another.

References

From Andrea James

a. Five conglomerates control 80% of textbook production.
b. They sell their product to distributors/retailers, who in turn sell them to bookstores (on and off campus, including internet).
c. Four wholesalers dominate textbook distribution, especially used books.
d. These four wholesalers operate about 1/3 of college bookstores. About 1/2 are university owned and operated, and the remaining 15% are independents.
e. If a new book costs $100, wholesalers typically buy it back for $15 to $25 and resell it for $50.

I knew that the retailers mark-up was about 100% (that is, from $50 to $100), but I was surprised at how much the wholesaler makes (from $15 to $50, that's over 300%. I doubt that the situation is that much different here in New Zealand.