Taking a wider view

Original post:  May 1, 2015

We often get so focused on our day-to-day tasks that we may sometimes lose perspective. There are many occasions where what we might personally be working on seems disconnected from a larger whole. It's only when you take a few steps back that you can gain adequate distance and appreciate a more coherent view.

Recently, I attended an exhibit with my kids that helped explain this much more elegantly. Here are some physical examples of the phenomenon.

Do you see anything in either of these two photos below?

Most people can make out the keyboard keys and the toast in the pictures. With a little wider perspective, the rest of the picture snaps into focus.

Believe it or not!

Here are the credits for the artwork:

You just don't understand me

Original post:  Apr 29, 2015

We've all done it, whether we want to or not. It probably happened several times yesterday and you didn't even realize it. At some point in your day (unless you were completely alone), you had an interaction with someone else. You may have thought you understood exactly what that person said or meant. Chances are, you were not entirely correct.

This article in the Atlantic helps explain why. Here is the opening:

In her new book No One Understands You and What To Do About It, Heidi Grant Halvorson tells readers a story about her friend, Tim. When Tim started a new job as a manager, one of his top priorities was communicating to his team that he valued each member’s input. So at team meetings, as each member spoke up about whatever project they were working on, Tim made sure he put on his “active-listening face” to signal that he cared about what each person was saying.

But after meeting with him a few times, Tim’s team got a very different message from the one he intended to send. “After a few weeks of meetings,” Halvorson explains, “one team member finally summoned up the courage to ask him the question that had been on everyone’s mind.” That question was: “Tim, are you angry with us right now?” When Tim explained that he wasn’t at all angry—that he was just putting on his “active-listening face”—his colleague gently explained that his active-listening face looked a lot like his angry face.

To Halvorson, a social psychologist at Columbia Business School who has extensively researched how people perceive one another, Tim’s story captures one of the primary problems of being a human being: Try though you might to come across in a certain way to others, people often perceive you in an altogether different way.

One person may think, for example, that by offering help to a colleague, she is coming across as generous. But her colleague may interpret her offer as a lack of faith in his abilities. Just as he misunderstands her, she misunderstands him: She offered him help because she thought he was overworked and stressed. He has, after all, been showing up early to work and going home late every day. But that’s not why he’s keeping strange hours; he just works best when the office is less crowded.

The article continues by discussing how often we are not understood even by those we think know us best!

Most of the time, Halvorson says, people don’t realize they are not coming across the way they think they are. “If I ask you,” Halvorson told me, “about how you see yourself—what traits you would say describe you—and I ask someone who knows you well to list your traits, the correlation between what you say and what your friend says will be somewhere between 0.2 and 0.5. There’s a big gap between how other people see us and how we see ourselves.”

This gap arises, as Halvorson explains in her book, from some quirks of human psychology. First, most people suffer from what psychologists call “the transparency illusion”—the belief that what they feel, desire, and intend is crystal clear to others, even though they have done very little to communicate clearly what is going on inside their minds.

Because the perceived assume they are transparent, they might not spend the time or effort to be as clear and forthcoming about their intentions or emotional states as they could be, giving the perceiver very little information with which to make an accurate judgment.

In summary, we aren't as clear with others as we think we are. Without full clarity, others will take mental shortcuts to fill in the gaps. Many of these shortcuts can be inaccurate or wildly wrong, but we are all so busy that we just don't have enough focus or energy to make the full commitment necessary to interpret the situation correctly!

There is an old adage that says that there can never be too much communication. Perhaps some of the reason why that is true is because there are so many mistakes made in the original communication that subsequent repetition helps iron out the errors!

Here is the link to the full article:  Mixed Signals: Why People Misunderstand Each Other - The Atlantic

You are now free to move about the country

Original post: Apr 28, 2015

In this new era of travel, it seems that baggage fees have pushed a lot of people to drag half their houses onto the plane. I think we've all seen the person with the overstuffed rollerboard and at least two additional bags struggle to squeeze down the aisle.

Boeing has taken this newer phenomenon into account. In the latest redesign for the 737, it incorporated a new design that will allow for up to six rollerboards to fit into the overhead space. Since the 737 is a workhorse that is frequently used on routes around the world, more and more of us should have less of an issue with the spacehogs on the flights--even if we don't all have elite frequent flyer status.

The key is that the new bins will hang lower so that bags can be stored on the short vertical axis. Lower bins will also be easier to load.

Now if only they can do something about the width of the seats....

Here is the link to the full article:  http://qz.com/385423/boeings-new-overhead-bins-will-hold-50-more-bags/

The future of cooking

Original post:  Apr 10, 2015

Kickstarter may have birthed another innovation. The Internet of Things sometimes seems futuristic and frivolous at the same time. As the technology evolves, innovators are starting to focus more clearly on useful items. Some of them tackle everyday problems that you simply shrugged off because there was no real viable alternative. This is one example.

Here's how the LA Times described it:

It's one of the most common complaints in cooking. "How high is medium high?" Now, somebody's done something about it.

A company called Meld is getting ready to produce a knob it says you can attach to any home stove that will read the temperature of what you’re cooking and automatically keep it stable to within a single degree.

Sound like a good idea? More than 450 Kickstarter backers think so. Meld’s campaign hit its $50,000 goal within seven hours of its launch Tuesday.

....

It works like this: A temperature probe is clipped to the pot of what you’re cooking and connects via Bluetooth with your smartphone (IOS or Android). Your smartphone then communicates with the temperature dial on the stove, which automatically adjusts to maintain the desired temperature.

....

“What we’re doing is taking the dumbest appliance in your entire house and bringing it into the 21st century,” Vengroff says. “We’re taking this thing that’s a great source of raw heat and bringing some control to it.”

The system will work no matter what's being heated in the pan — soup, plain water (as in a sous-vide bath), or even high-temperature fat for deep frying or sugar syrup for candy making.

An article in Mashable gives more insight into the device itself:

The Meld comes with three key parts: a knob that replaces your existing stove's knob; a clip that attaches to existing cookware; and a corresponding app, which tracks in your meal's progress in real time. The gadgets, which begin shipping this fall, are sold together and cost $129 for Kickstarter preorders (or $149 when they hit retail stores).

The device itself is surprisingly advanced:

"The Meld Knob contains an algorithm that understands the specific power range of the burner and how it influences the temperature of what's in the pot," Jenkins said. "This algorithm analyzes the heat dynamics of what's going on in the pot or pan hundreds of times and it adjusts the burner accordingly."

Here is the link to the LA Times article:  Game-changer? An automatic knob reads, controls the temperature of your stove - LA Times

Here is the link to the Mashable article:  Smart stove knob knows just how to cook your dinner, so you don't have to

Something you probably say everyday

Original post:  Apr 7, 2015

Language can sometimes spread like wildfire. There are certain phrases and catchwords that seem to catch the imagination in just the right way and explode onto the scene. Many of them will fade over time. Some will become mainstays in human communication.

I heard a radio broadcast that talked about one such word. It may have started in the Boston area. It's actually one of the few words that can actually be understood nearly universally. It seems people on every continent can use and understand exactly what it means (even if they don't speak your language)!

According to this story from WGBH, in the 1830s, Boston newspapers decided that they really liked abbreviations. With our texting culture (LOL), we may be familiar with the desire to communicate swiftly and efficiently. All of this abbreviation then came to its most famous achievement:

Amidst this abbreviation fad, on March 23, 1839, came a humorous article on the second page of the Boston Morning Post where writer and editor Charles Gordon Greene abbreviated the phrase “all correct” with two letters - OK.

"And of course readers were expected to join in the humorous notion or acknowledgement that OK is an abbreviation for all correct that is not correct, since 'all' does not begin with 'O' and 'correct' does not begin with 'K.'"

It was a little bit of wordplay that would take the world by storm.

"It happened because of newspapers," Metcalf said. "And one of the things that newspapers would do, they picked up things from other newspapers and that spread throughout the country quickly enough thanks to the newspaper exchange."

The term also got a surge in exposure during the 1940 Presidential election, when Martin Van Buren — also known as Old Kinderhook — running for the presidency, incorporated it in his campaign slogan: "Old Kinderhook is OK."

It seems that presidential election helped the story go national. While there were other potential origin stories, none of them seem as compelling.

As the 20th century dawned, the word continued to surge — and morph. People began spelling it “okay” to make it more word-like, created superlatives like A-OK, and variations like Okey Dokey, mmmkay, or the text-friendly, “K.” Today OK is regularly cited by linguists and writers as the world’s single most recognized word.

"If you’re talking with somebody and you don’t know that persons language, if that person knows 'OK,' which is rather likely, you can usually get a whole message across with nothing but 'OK' and various inflections of your voice and gestures," Metcalf said.

Metcalf is so enamored with this little expression that could, that he’s dubbed it America’s greatest word – in part, because he believes those two simple letters are an elegant expression of who we are.

"If something is OK for Americans then it’s working," he said. "You’ve succeeded with it. You can of course refine it, but it's good enough. OK allows you to say something positive for something that is less than perfect. I’m not a philosopher, but I argue that’s the American philosophy in two letters."

OK. Seems to work for me!

Here is the link to the full story:  How Boston Created 'The American Philosophy In 2 Letters' — OK? | WGBH News

Never be frustrated again

Original post:  Apr 5, 2015

Courtesy of the blog "Barking Up the Wrong Tree", here is some advice that can help you maintain your composure when everything around you seems to be falling apart.

When most of us are confronted by unfavorable events, it's only natural to grow frustrated. Think of all the times when we might be stuck in traffic or headed nowhere in the slowest line. Instead of allowing ourselves to blow a gasket, Albert Ellis proposes a different solution. He urges us to turn to concepts originally found in stoicism to adjust our beliefs.

You’re stuck in traffic and that makes you angry, right? Wrong.

Traffic happens. But you think it shouldn’t happen to you. And the thing that’s making you miserable is that word “should.”

Here’s an example. I say, “This headache remedy probably won’t work but give it a shot.” So you try it. And it doesn’t work. You’re not frustrated.

Okay, same situation but I say, “This always works.” It fails. Now you’re annoyed. What changed? Your expectation.

Or you tell a five-year old to stop yelling. They don’t listen. You don’t get that bothered. After all, the kid is five.

But if you tell me to stop yelling and I don’t listen, you get angry. What’s different? “Eric should stop. He’s an adult.”

Again, nothing changed but your belief.

Mr. Ellis proposes a simple ABCD system:

A is adversity. Traffic is awful.

B is your beliefs. And often they’re irrational. “This shouldn’t happen to me.”  Well, guess what, Bubba? It is happening.

C is consequences. You get angry, frustrated or depressed.

In very few cases can you change A. But you can change B. And that will change C. So let’s bring in the 4th letter.

D: Dispute your irrational beliefs. “Wait a second. When did the universe guarantee me a trouble-free existence? It didn’t. Traffic has happened before. It will happen again. And I will survive.”

There is much more to the article that helps to explain how recognizing our irrational beliefs can help us adjust our thinking and reduce our frustrations. You can find the full article here:  The Secret To Never Being Frustrated Again

As an added bonus, there is a reference to the name of my blog explained near the end of the article.

I've always thought that we usually find the things that we are looking for. Sometimes we just need to learn to look for the things that we find!

Predicting the unpredictible

Original post:  Mar 31, 2015

We'd like to think that if we could find the right algorithm, we could make predictions with 100% accuracy. The truth is that certain concepts are difficult to quantify. This is especially true when it comes to human behavior. Companies like Netflix have awarded a million dollars to make their movie recommendations just a tiny bit more useful. Amazon spends millions tweaking their recommendations in the hopes of increasing purchases. It's much more challenging to use data to alter human behavior in the workplace.

An increasing number of companies are turning to deep analytics in an attempt to transform their workforces into powerhouses. Despite incredible efforts, it seems that it isn't that easy to find helpful insights. This article from the Atlantic discusses some of the challenges facing the many companies who are attempting to harness company information in search of productivity gains:

But as the industry grows, big questions remain about what can be done with this newly discovered trove of data. Bersin's research shows that only four percent of large companies can make meaningful predictions about their workforces, while 90 percent can accurately predict business metrics such as budgets, financial results, and expenses. Can human-resources analytics do enough to capture the behavior and preferences of its endlessly complex subjects: humans?

"It’s one of the few areas of business that hasn’t really been figured out yet," says Bersin. "People are imperfect machines. Nobody ever figures out people completely."

But that doesn't mean companies aren't going to try. On the Big Data front, the company VoloMetrix mines calendar and mailbox data to determine over a hundred predictive indicators. From those indicators, the company works with clients to determine how to solve a given problem, from determining what makes a great salesperson to how emails can be more efficient.

There have been some surprises along the way:

Some of the surprising results VoloMetrix has found from client datasets challenge conventional workplace wisdom. For example, for a client that wanted to know when the best time of the day was to have meetings, VoloMetrix looked at how disengaged employees were by seeing how many emails they were sending during meetings. At 9 a.m. meetings, roughly 8,500 emails were sent, while meetings at 6 p.m. were only slightly better at 7,000 emails. Meanwhile, employees in meetings between 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. didn't send very many emails—so the company rescheduled for the middle of the day.

There are other interesting findings from "small data" surveys:

As for the problems that Big Data can't solve, small data might help. The company TINYpulse works with 500 companies to take feedback surveys, typically a yearly chore, and turn them into a weekly, anonymous, one-question pop-up. Some of the questions they've asked have garnered some very unconventional, but perhaps incredibly honest, answers. For example: the question “If you were promoted to be your boss's manager in the new year, what's the first thing you would change?" The most popular answers ranged from traditional answers such as better pay and hours, to firing and demoting employees who were dead weight. Another unconventional question TINYpulse asks to measure workplace satisfaction is whether employees have interviewed for another job in the past three months.

But all of this information still has to be weighed carefully:

"It’s very tricky. People data can be very misleading," says Bersin. "The data won’t necessarily tell you everything: You have to interpret it, know what it means, and try to make sense of it. It’s not like you can sit in a black box and look at the data."

Here is the link to the full article: The Quantified Workplace: Despite the Hype, Not All That Useful Yet — The Atlantic

Good to the last drop

Original post:  Mar 27, 2015

If you have ever struggled to get ketchup out of a glass jar, you'll understand why this phenomenon is annoying. Actually, it's beyond that. It's quite wasteful.

Tests by Consumer Reports in 2009 found that much of what we buy never makes it out of the container and is instead thrown away — up to a quarter of skin lotion, 16 percent of laundry detergent and 15 percent of condiments like mustard and ketchup.

A professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Kripa Varanasi, created a new company called LiquiGlide to market a product that promises to overcome this effect.

What makes it hard to get mayonnaise and toothpaste out is that they are what scientists call Bingham plastics. A Bingham plastic, named after Eugene Bingham, a chemist who described the mathematical properties, is not made of plastic; the term describes a highly viscous material that does not flow without a strong push.

Ironically, the professor actually was searching for the answer to an entirely different problem.

Dr. Varanasi did not set out to solve the problem of clingy glue and mayonnaise. Rather, he was thinking of larger-scale industrial challenges, like preventing ice formation on airplane wings and allowing more efficient pumping of crude oil and other viscous liquids. How to make a slippery surface has been an interest for many scientists and engineers with many potential uses.

When water or other liquids flow through a pipe, the layer of liquid next to the pipe wall typically sticks, not moving. Farther from the pipe wall, the liquid flows, fastest at the center. “Different layers of water are sliding past one another, and therefore there is friction, which is viscosity, and that is why you need to pump it,” said Neelesh A. Patankar, a professor of mechanical engineering at Northwestern University, who is not involved with LiquiGlide.

The trick is to find a way around the so-called no-slip boundary condition. “What people have tried to do is, can we have something between the solid surface and the liquid which will help the liquid slide?” Dr. Patankar said.

One simple example is when a droplet of water skitters across a hot pan that vaporizes some of the water. The droplet is riding on a layer of steam like a hovercraft, not touching the pan.

Dr. Patankar and other scientists have been investigating superhydrophobic surfaces. A hydrophobic surface repels water; a superhydrophobic surface, as one might imagine, really repels water. Inspired in part by lotus leaves, the surface of a superhydrophobic material looks rough, at least under a microscope. Water rolls up into balls, sitting on the tips of the rough surface, but mostly on air trapped between the droplet and the rough surface. The droplets roll off easily

The successful commercialization of this product could help reduce waste dramatically. There might even be potential uses in healthcare. The pictures below help show the action and how the product works.

Here is the link to the full article:  http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/24/science/with-new-nonstick-coating-the-wait-and-waste-is-over.html

Adaptation in healthcare

Original post:  Mar 26, 2015

As healthcare evolves, key customers will also have to evolve. Cleveland Clinic is among those organizations who are leading the way. Through a wide array of different ventures--some of them involving futuristic devices while others are simply new business models--they are fighting to stay profitable amidst the turmoil in our healthcare market.

Dr. Delos M. Cosgrove, a 74-year-old former heart surgeon who took over as chief executive about a decade ago, likens what is happening in health care to the upheaval decades ago in the steel industry, where companies disappeared when they were unable to respond to change and new competition. “The disruption is going to happen,” he said. As an inevitable shakeout takes place among health care institutions, a look at how the clinic is responding underscores the industry’s challenges and the flurry of activity taking place as institutions try to adapt.

Here are some of the ways that they are changing the way they operate in one low-income neighborhood:

We are doing things differently,” said Dr. Nana Kobaivanova, the medical director for the Stephanie Tubbs Jones Health Center, the facility that was built to replace Huron, which was demolished.

The Huron location has been designated as green space, with grass planted where the building stood. The health center’s doctors have shifted their emphasis to preventing disease and managing chronic conditions, with primary care consisting of about 40 percent of what they do.

A patient with diabetes could take a cooking class to learn how to eat healthful foods and work with a diabetes educator on how to better manage the disease.

The facility recently expanded the hours of its separate walk-in clinic, where patients with sprained ankles or sore throats can come in without appointments, and it is trying to persuade people who go to the emergency room for their basic medical care to visit the walk-in clinic instead.

They are also looking to provide more efficient care:

The clinic cut expenses by roughly $500 million last year. The system is avoiding unnecessary lab tests, for example, and performing a hip replacement for $1,500 less than it did two years ago by standardizing the devices used and using less blood and other supplies, all, it says, without sacrificing quality. Its doctors are typically on salary, making it much easier for the clinic to work with them to figure out how to better care for patients.

“Our biggest challenge is managing all the change,” said Mr. Glass, who is also trying to handicap the odds of whether the Supreme Court will rule against allowing subsidies for people enrolled in the federal health insurance exchange in states like Ohio.

There is also tremendous uncertainty as systems prepare for payment systems that have not yet been fully developed. But systems cannot afford to wait, said Jeff Hoffman, a consultant at Kurt Salmon. “You have to move forward,” he said. “This is something you cannot flip a switch on.”

They are tracking patients more closely to follow outcomes and changing the way they deliver care:

To prepare for these changes, the system has invested heavily in the computer systems that allow it to track patients in different settings and look closely at how they are managing their care. Systems like Kaiser Permanente in California have long used clinical information to better manage the patients they insure under their own health plans.

Under Dr. Cosgrove, the clinic has emphasized the need to measure patient outcomes and other information to better judge how well it is delivering care. “We should have the very best shot at figuring out what is optimal care,” said Ms. Huston, the chief strategy officer.

The question for many health systems is whether they need to add a health plan to their portfolios. While Dr. Cosgrove says he thinks the clinic will be soon assuming the risk of providing care under the new arrangements, potentially losing money if care is too expensive or ineffective, he is reluctant to take the plunge into insurance. “That’s a tough dilemma,” he said.

Read more about the many changes here:  http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/18/business/cleveland-clinic-grapples-with-changes-in-health-care.html?mabReward=R1

"Fixing" an innovation

Original post:  Mar 23, 2015

One common misperception of innovation is that it springs forth fully formed (like the apocryphal Venus in the Botticelli painting). In reality, many inventions require constant tinkering and improvement. Sometimes, it requires someone completely separated from the original creators to take an existing idea and transform it into a transcendent idea.

This photo is from the first successful attempt at some version of a typewriter. While it looks somewhat familiar, there are substantial differences compared to what you might commonly associate with the classic models.

But it had big problems. For one, the keys pressed onto the curved paper at an angle, which meant some of the letters were blurry. It also necessitated a hunt-and-peck approach to typing that made it hard to use — you could get used to a writing ball (just as you do to a QWERTY keyboard), but it was difficult to master the angled keyboard. Worse, it was hard to see what you'd typed until your document was finished. Finally, there wasn't a workable way to use a "shift" key.

Yet modern typewriters didn't really take off until 1873, when Remington produced a version of the typewriter that had a QWERTY keyboard and a shift key. Equally important, it printed sharper letters. People realized that typewriters were good not just for those with visual handicaps, but for anybody who wanted to write a clear document. Though writing-ball advocates are still fans of the device's aesthetics, the typewriter won for functionality.

By taking the original "pincushion" design and making it more useful, Remington actually paved the way for commercial success.

Here are some other examples of twists to the original invention that helped changed the future:

These 4 big inventions were terrible ... until someone fixed them - Vox