Category Archives: Social

Prince Caspian

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Saw it last night.  Read the book a while back.   There are quite a few liberties taken here, certainly the castle raid.  The last battle was about 1 page in the book and last 15 minutes in the movie.  A lot of the religious allegory is missing to the point where the message seems to be “only kids can believe in God”.  Makes it sound like the tooth fairy.  I guess the older you get the easier it is to notice such things, which is sort of the point.

To go off track for a minute, why do religious groups have trouble with The Golden Compass and not this?  Amazing.

Is it good?  Yup, it’s a 3 star movie.  The BBC version is better though and that’s a TV show!

Oh, forgot to add; Tuesdays at my cinema are horrid.  The moved the automated ticket machines around, half are broken so there’s lines of 40 people waiting to use one machine.  Redonkculous.

Rafting

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Yesterday 6 of us went white water rafting. The company we chose was Eau Vive, a small-ish group up on la rivière rouge in Québec.  I had done some rapids on a canoe before but this was a new experience.

We left at 7:30, with about a 90 minute drive to the spot.  It was the last weekend where wetsuits were included. Note to others: get your suit first, they keep the older ones for the later clients.  We left the site near 11 in a bus, jackets and helmets and all, ready for a nice ride.

First run was a discovery run, where we got to learn the various features of the waterway.  The first 2 spots were really nice, the 3rd was pretty calm.  We lost a few people on all the spots actually, which made the trip all the more fun on the first run.  Had a small lunch (chukwagon, styrofoam cup of soup and a granola bar) and went for round #2.  This time we were much more aggressive and I sat up front.  There’s something pure and basic about riding the water.  You hit a wall of mass and get thrown back, you get up and feel great.

On the 2nd rapid there are 2 turbulence pools.  We tried a few times to hit the 2nd one and after about 5 attempts of crazy paddling, we just couldn’t get there – not to mention that we couldn’t feel our arms anymore!  Our guide suggested we team up with some of the stronger paddlers and give it another shot.  We took the left path, dipped in and in about 3 seconds, 2 people were already gone.  It was like being inside a washing machine, spinning around and people getting shot out.  I held on to the side ropes and sat in the middle, the water was just pouring in and keeping us stable.  Finally after about 30 seconds we shot out, myself, the guide and my pal John still inside.  Along with about 2.5 feet of water in the bottom of the raft.  I was exhausted yet enthralled about the whole experience.  The downside was the paddling to continue on, my arms were just done.

The supper when we returned was boiled chicken and spaghetti.  Bah.  Can’t expect much for 80$ really.  One thing I’d do different is to go later in the season, where the water is warmer, no suits are required and there are more rapids.  The current might be a bit weaker but with less water, there are more rocks and the bottom end of the river opens up.

Tons of fun though.  I suggest everyone gives it a shot!

Ideas!!!

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I had dinner with the GF last night.  Note 1)  Don’t go to East Side Mario’s anymore.  They have 2 pages of pasta – well, 1 page and the 2nd is the same but BIGGER – and 2 pages of pizza.  That’s it.  Plus the GF had her pasta served 2 minutes after ordering, a full 10 minutes before either of us got our salad and a full 20 minutes before I got MY pasta.  Amazing.  Garbage food I might add.

That’s off topic anyhow.  Here’s the meat of it.

School Reform

For the past 50 years (since WW2), the schooling system has been the same.  A very military/hierarchy system where a person recites something and students are graded on memorization.  When’s the last time you had a math project in class?  This worked great for our parents and ok for Gen X.  Why won’t it work for Gen Y/Net Gen?

Kids today (I use the term loosely as it includes people in their 20s) are inundated with multiple streams of simultaneous data.  I can read my laptop, stream music, chat and watch a TV show at the same time without issue.  This baffles our parents.  Technology and multitasking is our birthright, we don’t know any different.   We’re in a continuous period of adaptation where we believe our input should matter; after all, we’re the intended target!

I’ll give you an extreme example.  World of Warcraft.  Watch the following video first, it will take about 10 minutes.

I wanted to show you before I explained to you what it all means.  There are big groups of people, called guilds, made up of people from around the world.  Everyone has a common goal, to succeed in challenges.  They participate in the game in groups of 5 to 25 (in the above case, 25) in order to achieve what seems impossible at first.  There are 9 types of playable characters (classes), each with their own dynamics.  Some heal others, some do damage, some take damage to protect the rest.  Each has the ability to affect the performance of the rest of the group with beneficial temporary effects (buffing).

In a boss situation, as you can see above, each person’s screen is inundated with information.  Damage your doing, taking, commands and what the boss is doing.  Misstep for a second, attack when you should fall back, take a fraction too long to heal and boom, someone’s dead.  There is a continual stream of information that you need to concentrate on, all the while maximizing your output.  Let’s say the boss has 1 million life points and after 10 minutes he goes bonkers and will kill everyone (enrage).  You need to do 100,000 damage per minute.  Now, with the types of characters above, only 18 of the 25 really can concentrate on damage, the rest are healing.  That’s about 5000damage per minute.  The strongest player can do about 4000 alone, the weakest about 2000.  How do you reach 5000?  Synergies through buffs.  Not only do you start at a disadvantage but you need to always be on the ball.  If someone dies, then the average damage needed goes up (from 5000, to 5500).

On top of all of that, you have voice chat going on where a leader or two are explaining what needs to be done and when.  They coordinate the group efforts and you must listen to every word as it will make or break an event.  It requires maximum damage output, minimum damage intake and maximum attention to the environment to avoid dying in a single strike.

In a given evening, a group will spend 2 to 4 hours doing this.  10 minutes of intensity with 15 minutes of calm if you win.  If you lose, then it’s repetition until you get the job done.  4-5 sources of data, non stop where your results affect the entire group.  Hours at a time.  Failure is PART of the job.

Then you go to school and listen to someone read a book.  How in the world can school’s ever compete with that?  There’s no interactivity.   There’s no feeling of “I helped make this”.  You just sit back, no stimuli, no talking, no concentration, just boredom.

What am I proposing?  Moving from a 1:25 format, where the teacher doles out information to a 25:1 basis, where the students are the structure of the classroom.  The teacher is still there as a moderator, a reference point, a guide.

For example, parenting class.  You could have a teacher just read books, watch movies, give you the “protect the egg for 3 days” project.  What are you really learning?  Nothing, you’re just committing to memory.  Turn it around.

One day, you get the students to write down parental roles and situations.  Based on those suggestions, on the Monday you have a role playing situation with random students.  They have to resolve some conflict and stay in character for 5-10 minutes.  After that’s done, the class discusses what went right and what went wrong.  Tues, Wed and Thurs you go over material that would assist with that conflict.  Visual aids, real life stories, guest speakers.  On Friday you repeat the same role playing with different students.  Afterwards, the class sees how the discussion has changed from Monday’s attempt.

The content is still in the teacher’s hands.  The method is in the student’s.

This can be applied to any subject.  Have math students design a house as the year project; groups of people concentrate on rooms and have to make sure everything fits at the end of the year.  History classes have to make a comic book about some battle, each person having their own module.  Civics classes build a charter of rights.

The point is that you can’t expect someone to sit there, listen to you, repeat it and be happy.  Do you tell your friends to shut up, sit down and listen?  Of course not, you talk it out, grow as a group, learn new things from everyone else’s experiences.

There’s more to discuss on this topic but that’s definitely for another time.

Distributed Engineering – A Proposal

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By nature, I’m a rather social individual.  Perhaps not on a face to face basis all the time but I definitely recognize the fact that I’m a single person trying to solve the world’s problems.  Pardon the analogy, but being a gamer as well, I can see that it takes 25 people and concentrated effort to accomplish goals in World of Warcraft.  That same analogy needs to be applied to Engineering and Policy development.

Current State – It takes one person to design a house and 100 people to build it.

The problem with this statement is that the weakness is not in the 100 people who build an item but in the person who designed it.  A good analogy is when you buy a new house from a company.  They have designed it with certain features in mind and they take the common denominator.  If you want your bathtub on the other side of the wall, they need to redraw everything and charge you 4x the price of the tub.  Not too logical.

Future State – It takes 1person to design, 100 people to modify and 100 people to build.

Now I bet you’re thinking this process takes longer.  In truth the extra time is on the middle man and you definitely need some constraints, otherwise the last 100 will have to learn new skill sets.  So here’s the plan.

  • Design a platform.  Using the house analogy, build your walls, windows and doors.
  • Design components.  Like lego blocks, all components (sinks for example) fit into pre-defined criteria; size being the major factor. Rooms are components.
  • Baseline the installation cost per component (TIME).
  • Associate a COST to each component.  No brainer here.  A sink is a sink but a marble sink is not an aluminum sink.
  • Associate a COMPLEXITY cost.  This is a little harder.  It should be a percentage of total cost.
  • Make the information available to buyers.  This information is hidden from buyers currently.  Sure, you can swap carpet for hardwood but you won’t know the cost until you’re already buying the house.  Clients want to mix and match.
  • Make client templates available for other clients.  Wouldn’t this be great?  You wouldn’t need to spend hours tinkering around.  You could take a look at what other people have done and see if it fits your needs.  This is also currently hidden.

A good example of a successful business model is car manufacturer websites.  You can customize from A to Z online and know going in to the vendor what the cost will be.  Our parents here the old tagline, “You can have it in any color you want, as long as it’s black”.  This is simply not an acceptable answer in today’s world.

Makes sense so far doesn’t it?  Now why don’t we apply the same set of rules to engineering and policy.  Instead of having one person decide on what’s best for everyone, let’s have a focal point.  Initiate discussions with clients to get a few ideas on what’s needed for change.

Example, a local printer policy.  Open the floor for opinions.  Some people will want everyone to have one, others think it’s a waste.  The middle layer will need to coordinate with the operations layer to get some numbers as well.   Let’s get some numbers going first; these are approximations.  A local printer costs 200$ to buy.  It costs about 500$ in anual support and is on a 1 to one basis.  A network printer costs about 2000$ to buy.  It costs about 3000$ in annual support and will support a group of people.

So, let’s look at some numbers for a group of 5000 people with a 4 year lifecycle, on a yearly basis

Everyone has a local printer:  Lifecycle cost = 250,000.  Support Cost = 2,500,000

No one has a local printer, network printer supports 50 people: Lifecycle cost = 50,000.  Support Cost = 300,000.

Both are extreme cases but you’re looking at 2.75 million vs 0.35 million dollars, almost 8x less money.  Remember, it’s not support who’s paying for this, it’s the clients.

Fine, so now we have numbers.  Let’s share those numbers with the clients.  Have your engineer moderate and channel the ideas.  Let them come up with a plan where a middle ground can be found.  If the community comes up with a final number where they are ready to accept the cost, then that’s the policy.  Bring it to the people who stamp decisions with the background that process provided.  In the end, your engineer had a role shaping the decision, crossing the Ts and dotting the Is, but it’s the group of people who came up with a decision and they are empowered.

That’s my goal for the next 12 months.  Empower everyone to be involved in decisions that affect everyone.

100 Must Read Books

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This list is great. I’ve personally read only a handful of them but everyone should make an effort to check a few out.

Edit: Ok, I wanted to add a bit more to this.  I realize a lot of people don’t read anymore.  That being said, most of you have heard of these books, which is a start.  The web and wikipedia is all fine and dandy but the ability to read or listen or watch a story and grasp the foundational ideas is what’s key.  40 Year Old Virgin is a good example of the sexual pressures put on teenagers.  Last Kiss demonstrates a man’s inability to cope with drastic changes.  Beyond Good and Evil (Neitzsche) demonstrates the vast gap between existentialism and religion when dealing with philosophy.  Great Gastby (Fitzgerald) shows that a single friend is better than many acquaintances.  The Hobbit (Tolkein) exemplifies the significant behavior changes found with dangerous stimuli.

So you’re thinking, “so what?”.  That’s a good question I suppose.  If you live for today, have no aspirations, don’t feel the need to grow as a person, that’s your bottle (Atlast Shrugged deals with this).  For those of you who have personal questions, those who have ideas about why we are who we are, those who want to try something new and aren’t certain, read people!  There are so many good ideas out there, so much reference and character building reference available, we shouldn’t be leaving it in the library to dust.  /rant off 🙂