A Zany Hypothesis on How Many People You Want on a Group Trip

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Okay, this is one of those “why the hell am I even blogging this?” other than “I need the practice”, but …

So it’s Spring Break time, and it’s over for most everyone.  Some people had a bad time, sure, and let’s look into one small subset of it: the number of people in a group.  One of my friends was talking about a bad experience from a three-person trip that she took a few months ago, and something that I’ve always thought occurred to me, so here is my hypothesis:

When taking a trip with a group of people, you need to have no fewer than five and no more than ten people.

Let’s look at how it breaks down:

  • A two-person trip isn’t a group trip.  Also, two people are gonna bicker.
  • Three people has a huge problem: when the group breaks down.  If all three members agree to do something, it’s great!  But if it’s not unanimous, it’s almost always two people wanting to go one way and one another.  When that breaks down, you either have one unhappy person in the group or two people who go off and leave the third, leaving you with either an unhappy group or a fractured one.
  • Four people is a bad idea, too: if it’s 2-2, that’s fine, but it’s generally going to regularly break down that way, and that’s not a group trip.  A lot of 2-2 comes from romantic relationships — “Let’s go to LA together!” — and, well, that’s not a group trip, nor is that fair to the other couple, at least one of whom wanted to hang out, or the trip never would’ve happened in the first place.  When it’s 3-1, the one is going to feel very, very ganged-up-on.
  • Five people is a good number.  Rarely will it be 4-1; if it is, the one person usually sucks it up and deals.  The other breakdowns are 3-2 and 2-2-1.  While those breakdowns aren’t really great, they’re usually dynamic.  I’ve been on trips with both three other people and four other people, and I love the latter ones way more.
  • Six people is an okay number, but it is going to break down into even numbers more than odd ones.  Having an even number doesn’t make for a lot of churn, and I always find that churn is what makes group trips fun.
  • Seven people is like five: 6-1 is rare, 5-2 is okay, and 4-3 and 3-2-2 work for shorts stints.
  • Eight has the same problems that six does.
  • Nine, being odd, has the same advantages as five and seven.  Also, when you have nine people, you can have one hell of a time if you go to a bar as a group.  All those group churn dynamics can happen in the span of 10-15 minutes.
  • Once you get to ten, you’re really not a group anymore.

And now that I’ve posted something foofy about group dynamics to get it out of my head, I’ll go back to … planning a solo trip halfway across the country.

Six Years, Six Questions

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So the other day I Googled my full name and my full first name just to see what came up.  One of the things that did was some stupid Web meme I’d done here on the blog.  But it seemed interesting to me to answer those questions again seven years later.  Here goes, with extant content in italics if it doesn’t change..

0) What’s your name and website URL? (optional, of course)

Well, my full name is Geoffrey Franklin Morris. I have many URLs, but I guess I prefer linking to GFMorris.net the most these days. That has varied over the years.

1) What’s the most fun work you’ve ever done, and why? (two sentences max)

Without a doubt, it’s putting managing the build of unpressurized flight support equipment for on-orbit replacement units on the International Space Station.  When stuff breaks on-orbit and the astronauts have to go outside to make a fix, the chances are (>80%) that it’s something that my company built, and of that hardware, it’s about 50-50 that I managed the job.

2) A. Name one thing you did in the past that you no longer do but wish you did? (one sentence max)

I wish that I wrote here far more often, but the stuff that I want to write about these days shouldn’t be publicly available (but it will be in the future).

B. Name one thing you’ve always wanted to do but keep putting it off? (one sentence max)

Become a hobbyist computer programmer: I have all the good intentions and the O’Reilly texts to match and none of the output.

3) A. What two things would you most like to learn or be better at, and why? (two sentences max)

I’d like to be better at being fully cognizant of what I’m doing and what I should be doing, which are only occasionally the same thing. :)

B. If you could take a class/workshop/apprentice from anyone in the world living or dead, who would it be and what would you hope to learn? (two more sentences, max)

This is an easy question: I would dearly love to have been an apprentice rocket scientist under Wernher von Braun. I can learn all the management stuff, personal and professional, from just about anyone, but in terms of designing rockets? I’ll put WvB up against anyone, warts and all.

4) A. What three words might your best friends or family use to describe you?

I think that they’d say that I’m loving, passionate, and giving.

B. Now list two more words you wish described you…

Tall and athletic.

5) What are your top three passions? (can be current or past, work, hobbies, or causes– three sentences max)

I’m really passionate about project management: I’m working on a master’s degree in engineering management, and I just obtained my Project Management Professional certification (#1571776) last month.  I have a strong passion for the hockey program at my alma mater, The University of Alabama in Huntsville, and I played a small part in keeping that program alive and forward into a hockey conference that will help us thrive into the future.  I guess you could say that I’m passionate about manned spaceflight in a time when that’s not seeing any traction.  :(

6) (sue me) Write–and answer–one more question that YOU would ask someone (with answer in three sentences max)

What is your worst habit, and what do you believe is the underlying cause of that habit? How can you best eliminate it?

I didn’t answer this then, but the answer is somewhat the same: it would have been “procrastination” six years ago, and this time it’s “the failure to start”, which is somewhat the same thing but not completely.  One of the reasons that I can be bad about procrastination is because I haven’t broken the work down into small enough pieces.  If I’m stuck with a project, I often break it down into smaller chunks that I can do with 20-minute efforts.  When I do that, I’m successful.

[Bonus: What is one question you wish people would ask themselves?]

What are your good qualities?  Do you define yourself by external things (work, family, home, church, car, etc.) or do you focus on your inherent qualities that will be true regardless of season?

One Trick to Quicker Project Meetings: Realizing the Cost

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Well baby, there you stand
With your little head, down in your hand
Oh, my God, you can’t believe it’s happening again
Your baby’s gone, and you’re all alone
and it looks like the end.

— The Eagles, “Wasted Time”

Too few meetings have agendas.  Too few meetings think about the cost of what they’re wasting.  Here’s an idea from my instructor that I want to try out:

  1. Figure out who needs to be in the meeting.
  2. Get someone in finance to give you burdened labor rates for all people in that meeting.
  3. Write your agenda, including an expected duration.
  4. At the header of that agenda, write the dollar cost of the meeting, which is the sum of the product of each person’s labor rate by the duration of the meeting.
  5. Calculate the dollar cost of each additional minute in the meeting and put it just below the total cost on the agenda.

This will drive home the real cost of never-ending meetings.

I remember what you told me before you went out on your own:
“Sometimes to keep it together, we got to leave it alone.”
So you can get on with your search, baby, and I can get on with mine
And maybe someday we will find, that it wasn’t really wasted time

Adam Omelianchuk on Rachel Held Evans; Me on Authority in Book Reviewing

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Back in October, I put out a little statement on why I rarely participate in discussions of controversial theological books.  This was largely in response to the furore around Rachel Held Evans’s last book, which I haven’t read.  My friend Adam Omelianchuk has read Evans’s A Year of Biblical Womanhood, and I find that he had a lot of interesting things to say about it.  I’ll cheat and skip to his conclusion, although you should read the whole thing if interested.

So what are to learn from Evans’s book? That the Bible is a complicated book and that if we stick the word “biblical” in front of chosen topic we are inevitably selective and ignore passages that make trouble for our favored opinion. As much as I can sympathize with this point, it is somewhat banal. Whenever one engages the process of interpretation of Scripture, it is inevitable that one set of passages will be taken to interpret another set of passages. That’s just part of the process of interpreting Scripture with Scripture, a time-honored hermeneutical practice if there ever was one. Calvinists, Arminians, and Open Theists do this, as do Complementarians and Egalitarians, as does anyone who is trying to hear the central message of the Bible. It is true that we come to the Bible looking for things we want to get out of it; I guess I am just more optimistic that one can hold those things in one hand and work objectively through a method of interpretation that “gets at” what the writer was trying to say.

If that makes you want to read what is a critical review, I think that you should.  I like the timing of Adam’s response, because it’s clear that he’s taken the time to read it and has had time to formulate a response.  I think that the community of people that discuss theological books are like the people who rapidly rate software in app stores or post reviews of items on sites like Amazon with just a day or three of use of the product.  I trust the review of someone who’s had an item for six months and can tell if it’s cheaply-made or durable more than someone who went with “Rated ****, good value for my money, sounds good”.

When it comes to any book review, I simply question context: who is the reviewer, and does it seem that they’ve taken the time to read it well?  Often the former is easily deduced—this is the Internet—but one never really knows if a book has been carefully considered or read simply to be discarded.  [Or, in my case, thrown across the room because it was bullshit—one of Marcus Borg's books.  I damn near broke the spine.]

I think that a lot of Evans’s initial critics likely read the book in a huff, which is okay in general but poor practice in terms of preparing a review.  Evans spent a lot of time writing it—although Adam notes that she appears to lose steam in the last third of the book—yet I think you need to spend time thinking about a book if you are going to lend/demand authority to your response to the reading.  I think that too many high-profile theology types rush through book reviews purely knowing that their authority rests in their brand.  I think that’s a dangerous mistake.

When I began to recount the list of books that I read last year, I realized that I could spend a lot of time putting my thoughts back together on those books, but that doing a good job of describing any of them would involve re-reading them at least once to both get more out of them and to think of a good way of approaching the subject material and lensing that through to the customer.  I can think of one book that I’d like to re-read so as to present it to you: Nassir Ghaemi’s book on bi-polar disorder and how it can have positive effects upon leadership.  That first reading was for me; the next one can be for you.

Lastly, I would like to congratulate Adam on getting selected for a Ph.D. program in South Carolina.  Maybe I can make it over some weekend, Ochuk.

Books I Read in 2012

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Goodreads tells me that I read 27 books in 2012, a 93% improvement on 2011 and the highest number of any year I’ve recorded (since 2004).  At least all my free time isn’t going to seed.  Like Kari, I’m a bit miffed that Goodreads doesn’t make it easy to export this kind of data, so I’m not going to spend a ton of time putting meat on the bones of this list since I have to type this.  In order of when-finished:

  1. Nassir Ghaemi, A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness [Jan 21]
  2. Alice Walker, The Color Purple [Feb 2]
  3. W.E.B. Griffin, The Double Agents (Men at War #6) [Feb 8]
  4. Ken Dryden, The Game [Feb 29]
  5. Lauren Winner, Real Sex: The Naked Truth about Chastity [Mar 9]
  6. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice [Apr 21]
  7. Steven Frank, How to Count (Programming for Mere Mortals, #1) [Apr 21]
  8. Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility [Jul 3]
  9. Malcolm Gladwell, What the Dog Saw [Jul 4]
  10. Cormac McCarthy, The Road [Jul 7]
  11. Rev. William H. Willimon, Why I Am a United Methodist [Jul 10]
  12. Charles Baxter, The Feast of Love [Jul 11]
  13. Jeff Greenfield, The World’s Greatest Team: A Portrait of the Boston Celtics, 1957-69 [Jul 14]
  14. Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey [Jul 23]
  15. Gregory A. Boyd, Is God to Blame?: Beyond Pat Answers to the Problem of Suffering [Aug 5]
  16. Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest [Aug 21]
  17. Steven Johnson, Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life [Aug 30]
  18. K.J. Parker, Sharps [Sep 24]
  19. Lewis Boone, Great Writings in Management and Organizational Behavior [Oct 4] (for class)
  20. C.S. Lewis, A Year with C. S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works [Oct 24] (as a devotional; I started it 25 Oct 2011 and am continuing to use it)
  21. Peters and Waterman, In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies [Nov 11] (for class)
  22. Jim Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…And Others Don’t [Nov 13] (for class)
  23. William Byham, Zapp! [Nov 15] (for class)
  24. Peter Scazzero, Emotionally Healthy Spirituality: Unleash the Power of Authentic Life in Christ [Nov 24]
  25. Vilbord Davidsdottir, On the Cold Coasts [Dec 3]
  26. Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking [Dec 9] (professional development, after a fashion)
  27. Marti Owen Laney, The Introvert Advantage: How to Thrive in an Extrovert World [Dec 20] (professional development, after a fashion)

In looking at the pace of my reading, you can see my year: a brisk pace until I attempted Jane Austen for the first time, which also hit as my semester increased in difficulty; the break where I was in Tennessee for three weeks and got no reading done while helping Dad get back from his heart surgery; more slogging as I read S&S against a five-week speech course; my reading rate speeding greatly in July as I drew down to just one class; a gap for bartending school in mid-August following time spent watching the Olympics instead; the dry season of my fall semester against my in-course reading; the final flurry of December.

I carry forward two books into the new year: a book on passing the PMP exam that I’ll be taking on Tuesday the 8th, and Austen’s Persuasion, which I’m 20% through and would be tackling were it not for this impending exam.  I expect that graduate studies will continue to weigh heavily on my completion rate of books, but I’m happy with getting 27 of them read, even if six of those were for professional purposes.

Lastly:

  • Books I recommend without hesitation, Walker, Dryden, Austen (P&P and S&S only)
  • Books I think you should read: Ghaemi, McCarthy, Kesey
  • Book I’m prone to re-read first when I need fiction to break up my list: Baxter

I’m happy to discuss any particular book on demand.

Link

 

SHOULD TEACHERS CARRY GUNS?

 

We all have fantasies of rescue when it comes to a story like Sandy Hook. We all would like to be the one who spotted Adam Lanza as he first lifted his gun at the glass near the school door and, quick-thinking, somehow tripped him up before a single first-grader had to see his face. We would like to be the person in the cartoon who sets up the bad guy’s pratfall. And by all means, if a shooter’s gun jams, if there is a moment, like the one in Tucson, when a woman can snatch the next clip out of his pocket, all of us should be ready to seize the chance. But serendipity and dreams of glory are not policy choices; reducing the number of guns is.

I think that we should be very careful to make policy changes in a post-Newtown world; you’ve already heard from me on that score.  But if we seek to arm teachers, I think that we should consider peak threat vs. average threat.  If we optimize our system for peak threat, we limit ingress to one or two access points, have an armed guard at each point, and arm all willing teachers.  Is that really what we want?  Because I worry about the fact that kids—curious, mischievous kids—are suddenly going to have more access to firearms than they ever had before.  I think that sizing for a peak threat in this case would create an average threat.

My personal aim would be to review all semi-automatic firearms with high-capacity magazines.  I’ve put 25 rounds through a Ruger 10/22 in under eight seconds.  It was fun!  It’s also impractical as a self-defense mechanism and completely useless in a hunting situation.  All of the Bill of Rights come with limits.  [And yes, the linked piece is strident and left of my position.]

Link

After surviving Amy Bishop shooting, UAH professor Joseph Ng launches research on PTSD

According to Eric Seemann, a psychology professor at UAH who is working with [UAH biology professor Dr. Joseph] Ng on the research project, most PTSD candidates never develop it. He estimates that only 10 to 20 percent are appropriately diagnosed with PTSD and that other candidates gradually recapture normalcy or suffer from lesser issues than PTSD.

“Most of the time, 85 percent, people do not develop PTSD,” Seeman said. “Why is that? Joe’s hypothesis is based on biological markers of resilience.”

Drs. Ng and Seemann are into some interesting stuff here.  You have the molecular biologist and the psychologist coming at the problem from the nature/nurture axes.  Who’s right?  That’s why you research.

“Every one of us has a different experience in terms of building up our immune system,” Ng said. “The day you were born, even by virtue of whether born by natural birth or C-section, will give you a different biome. So every human individual will have a different type of biome. That defines your immune system.

“So that means, why are some people more prone to getting sick? Or even to the extreme of being very sensitive to cancer? We said if that’s the case, if your immune system can be compromised or defined, is there a pattern of gene expression for immunity that may be associated with PTSD?”

Seemann brings an additional perspective to the study. In addition to possible biomarkers that Ng is searching for, Seemann said he believes environment plays a role as well in how PTSD affects a person.

I look forward to seeing what they find out.

Link

Storm Exposes Fragility of Mental Health System in City

“When you have the most vulnerable folks, all you need is one chink in the system and you lose them,” Dr. Rosenthal said. “Whether they lost their housing, or the outpatient services they usually go to were closed and they were lost to follow-up, they have become disconnected, with predictable results.”

Those predictable results? For the mentally ill who’ve landed inside the correctional system, 2/3 will re-offend.  Frontline‘s “The Released” gives an excellent look at the revolving door of mental health challenges with America’s bursting-at-the-seams prison population.

It’s a public policy problem with no easy solutions, but it’s still one worth tackling.  If it’s less expensive to provide mental health support to convicts to keep them from returning to prison than it is to house and patrol them on the inside, then I think that we have a financial and a moral incentive to make that change.  Blanket public policy changes regarding the mentally ill can have disastrous consequences, but we can try some things.  That’s the beauty of a multi-level governmental system: we get small populations where we can experiment with good governmental solutions.  More of the same just won’t cut it.

In the confusion, some patients lost contact with their families and caseworkers. At Community Access, the same case managers who struggled to get hospital treatment for the young woman with the meat cleaver had to hunt for an elderly female tenant who had been taken to Bellevue by the police before the storm. The police had picked up the older woman for public urination near a schoolyard. But two weeks after the storm, which knocked out Internet access and telephone service at the apartment building, neither the staff nor her sister could find her.

Dorca Rosa, the elderly woman’s case manager, eventually located her at Gracie Square Hospital on the Upper East Side, behind several locked doors.

“I cried when I saw her,” Ms. Rosa said. “I found her in horrible conditions. She was lying in her own feces, she had a fractured leg and the provider could not explain how her leg was fractured.”

Database

Let me tell you this: nothing will scare the masses of undiagnosed and/or untreated mentally ill Americans away from the psychiatric care that they so dearly need quite like a database that will be intended to deny them access to firearms but that will undoubtedly be used for other purposes.

Link

Why You Should Want to Pay For Software, Instagram Edition:

Under these conditions, companies have to sell themselves because they do not have a sustainable business. And when they’re sold, they either A) get shut down or B) become part of an advertising machine, like Facebook’s.

Truly, the only way to get around the privacy problems inherent in advertising-supported social networks is to pay for services that we value. It’s amazing what power we gain in becoming paying customers instead of the product being sold.

In a world where I have the money to support it, I probably toss Facebook US$20 a year in return for a premium service with 1) no ads or 2) a guarantee that people who choose to see my updates will see all of them, rather than their current algorithm that requires you to Promote status updates or Life Events.  I use an or because I’m quite sure that Facebook makes more than $20/yr off of me in ads, and the current price for me to promote a status is US$7.

Instagram’s new ToS has me considering discontinuing my account.  I’ve only used it for a few weeks, and while it’s nice, I could do without it.