Endless Knots

And she's off...see you in 2010!

To the shock of friends and family, I am taking an electronic break - completely - from the posting of this note until after January 1, 2010. No blog posts, no email, no Lexulous/Facebook/Twitter. All analog, all the time. You who know me also know how to reach me - the phone works! And remember when people used to drop by and visit? Wishing you all a wonderful holiday and sending so many thanks for reading and enlightening me over and over.

--Jessica

Stop(ped) the presses at 140 papers and counting

Ian Lamont, editor of The Standard, alerts us to this great/concerning/comprehensive "Best blog on the business of news(papers): Reflections of a Newsosaur. If you're not reading it, start now." I've done a few tear-stained posts here, including referencing Paper Cuts which the Newsosaur mentions as its blogger, Erica Smith, is keeping a map of where newspapers are disappearing. As per the title, 140 in 2009 gone, kaput.

For any of us who got our start getting high on newsprint and printers' ink (legal but so addictive that at 16 I preferred reporting from 3-11 at The Pottstown Mercury to going to the drive-in to meet boys), the transformation from packed newsroom and the ca-thunk of presses churning out papers to sitting alone and googling for sources--while charming in its own right and oh-so-efficient--is nevertheless unnerving and filled with loss.

List #358 of virtual team success factors

I don't mean to denigrate these lists -- and this one is pretty good -- but they do tend to be the same, often derived from someone else's research, or, as I've said before, come right off the top of someone's head. This one, from Carl Eidson at Wilson Learning, rests on research published in Sloan Management Review this year that reinforces our findings in our 2004 Harvard Business Review article: virtual teams can outperform their face-to-face counterparts...if they behave like grown-ups. Yes, I added that last bit. Here are Eidson's six points. All good.

1. Keep all team members in close communication.

2. Create a collaborative mindset.

3. Clarify the team’s purpose and goals.

4. Establish clear performance standards.

5. Adapt coaching strategies for distance management.

6. Celebrate milestones and successes.

What's to argue with, whether face-to-face or virtual? Let me try.

1. To stay in close communication requires a slightly different angle than "regular communication." Requires cooperative development of operating agreements, pairing off those who don't know one another, attention to time zones, holidays, cultural differences...and on and on.

2. Yes...and what precisely do you do to establish a collaborative mindset? Big topic that requires design of work that calls for collaboration and rewards it.

3. No argument at all. Clarifying purpose and goals is the first task of any successful work endeavor. How the team has access to its clarity is the key here. Online venues for updating how purpose plays out are critical to success.

4. Performance standards can't be a throwaway line for virtual teams. Because members often come from different organizations, this can become a huge challenge and negotiation among leaders. Huge.

5. Finally the issue of coaching virtual teams is showing up in nearly everything coming out. Very important. Watch for virtual leadership coaching to be developed for executives, the cutting edge of this new coaching market.

6. Celebrations are very important - but the article fails to mention that virtual celebrations may be the only alternative. Execution is the Achilles heel of intent.

Go, Geek Doctor! @jhalamka

What a thrill! Our very own fave Shakuhachi player--and doctor/CIO--John Halamka (or see this bio) is the cover boy on today's NY Times Business Page in Steve Lohr's "New Programs Aim to Lure Young into Digital Jobs" as the emblem of nerdiness. He wears it proudly, even posing as the mirror to his brilliant little 10-year-old self winning a science fair.

I've written about John myself (see The Standard), done wacky things with him, recommended him as a guest on BusinessWeek TV, and enjoyed having him join the Margaret Fuller birthday celebrations each year. May 23 is his birthday too and he's made a practice of bringing his flute along.

Which gives me license to republish this picture.

Congrats, John. The world's best example of geekiness, viz., he doesn't even mention the NY Times piece on his blog today.

Ardath Rodale

Sad to learn of the passing of Ardath Rodale, most recently "Chief Inspiration Officer" at Rodale Press. Although I never met her, her husband, Bob, who was killed in an accident while traveling in Russia in 1990, was on the Calvert Social Investment Fund Advisory Council with us (Jeff Stamps and me); her son, David, who died in 1985 of AIDS-related pneumonia, was one of our co-founders ("our" here meaning Lisa Kimball et al) of the Electronic Networking Association; and her daughter, Heather, became a friend. Rodale Press, one of the last family owned publishing enterprises in the U.S., is responsible for so many good ideas--books, magazines, initiatives. [Update: Rodale Press was sold to Hearst Crown Company in 2017; the family legacy continues through Rodale Institute; a brief history of what happened to the company can be found here.] Ardie was an innovator in business thinking for decades, served as chair and CEO of the company, and was a fearless AIDS educator before people really understood the disease. Thinking of the whole family today.

Mass math

Tongue twister? No, mind bender. Jordan Ellenberg wrote up Massively Collaborative Mathematics for the NY Times Sunday Magazine's 9th Annual Year in Ideas--and what an idea this one was. Cambridge University mathematician Timothy Gowers and Toronto writer and physicist Michael Nielsen launched the Polymath Project earlier this year, throwing out an intractable math proof to the digital masses. They wrote up their experiment for Nature under the same title the Times used.

On 27 January 2009, one of us — Gowers — used his blog to announce an unusual experiment. The Polymath Project had a conventional scientific goal: to attack an unsolved problem in mathematics. But it also had the more ambitious goal of doing mathematical research in a new way. Inspired by open-source enterprises such as Linux and Wikipedia, it used blogs and a wiki to mediate a fully open collaboration. Anyone in the world could follow along and, if they wished, make a contribution. The blogs and wiki functioned as a collective short-term working memory, a conversational commons for the rapid-fire exchange and improvement of ideas.

The collaboration achieved far more than Gowers expected, and showcases what we think will be a powerful force in scientific discovery — the collaboration of many minds through the Internet.

I could go on quoting their article for paragraphs but it's better if you click to see in detail how things unfolded transparently and across the minds of a whole lot of people, in contrast, the authors point out, to how most science happens:

The Polymath Project differed from traditional large-team collaborations in other parts of science and industry. In such collaborations, work is usually divided up in a static, hierarchical way. In the Polymath Project, everything was out in the open, so anybody could potentially contribute to any aspect. This allowed ideas to be explored from many different perspectives and allowed unanticipated connections to be made.

Much more networky. Ellenberg also turns the clever phrase on all of this -- the Polymath Project suggests that the "wisdom of crowds" might better be called "the genius of crowds."

This is important stuff. Collaboration in science goes against the grain of competitive intelligence of the I'm-smarter-than-you variety. Yet most problems facing us require putting our heads together. Perhaps the MacArthur Foundation should consider expanding its genius awards to collaborations? What if fellowships were awarded to groups rather than individuals? What if we awarded a global collaboration Nobel not for the content of the work but for the process?

(And now for a long, tangentially related nit: It would be impossible for any journalist to write about this project without using a variation on the phrase "a beautiful mind," derived from the best-seller by my college roomie, Sylvia Nasar, about mathematician and Nobel laureate John Nash. (If you didn't read the book, you should, but you probably saw the movie.) Ellenberg's variation: "But some problems we still jealously guard as the province of individual beautiful minds." Let me be irked for Sylvia because, of course, she is much more mature than I am. Every time I see the words strung together without attribution I grrrr, including last Sunday when The NY Times Book Review section used them in a headline without mentioning her at all, even though the book being reviewed was about Gregory Perelman, the subject of former-NY Times-reporter-oh-the-irony-Sylvia's fascinating "Manifold Destiny," her New Yorker piece about the elusive Russian mathematician who turned down the Fields Medal, which, wrapping back around to the subject of this post, Gowers of the Polymath Project holds.)

Voices of MS sells out!

Publisher Victor Starsia reports this morning that Voices of Multiple Sclerosis, where an excerpt of my essay, "Feeling Numb," appears, has sold out of its first printing in barely three weeks since its publication date. "This is the fastest this has happened for any of the books," Victor told the group of authors in an email just moments ago. Congrats to everyone involved!

We (the contributors) are cross-posting. Please see my original post to click to everyone else's.

Oh, heck. I'll just post them here as well.

Off-Topic: Non-profit MS anthology release -- Rachel Pollock

Exclusive Interview with Dr. Terry L Wahls, a Doctor with MS -- Diane J Standiford

No longer silent -- Caryl Hunter

"The story" -- Terry Wahls, MD

"New piece in Voices of Multiple Sclerosis" -- Marie Carter

Yay, Russell! He really can dance!

And a bit off-topic...

Am I the only one who loves this show? I guess not as 8 million people voted but I'm a little surprised that the Boston Globe hasn't even mentioned that Roxbury's own Russell Ferguson won the "So You Think You Can Dance" competition last night. Russell is a krumper. No, I had no idea what krumping was until getting hooked on this show, thanks to extended periods of time on Lake and Finn's couch (click and ye shall see).

Russell may be a krumper but he is also unbelievably talented, the kind of dancer who takes over the stage, regardless of how graceful his partner is. (He injured himself in the finale and had to limp out to hear that he'd won, meaning that we never got to see his last performance on the show.)

Honestly, I'm not hooked on any of the other dance shows or Idol or Loser or Survivor Season 983...none, but this show snatched me. I even voted for Russell, something I've never done before. Yes, he's a neighbor (of sorts, go, Boston) but mainly I voted because this is one major talent.

Last point: the show's host, Cat Deeley, is superb. She oughtta have a talk show. Her resume doesn't do her justice. She's funny, smart, and compassionate - never mind that she's stunningly beautiful (though, as a mom, I am tempted to send her a basketful of cookies - eat, honey!).

Medicare explained: Your monthly premium will be $0

Want to drive yourself completely mad? Help someone subscribe to the confusing insurance that supplements Medicare.

I don't mean supplements unless we're talking about Medicare Supplements which is different from Medicare Advantage plans, which may or may not be the official name of them, no, sorry, it is the name of some of them, which probably are Medigap plans that address the Medicare doughnut, which is not something you eat because if you're paying for it you don't have any money to buy food unless you never go to the doctor which you most likely would not be able to do because any doctor you've ever gone to or possibly heard of doesn't take whatever plan you're on, which is OK because you wouldn't be going for your annual physical anyway since Medicare doesn't pay for that, a nod, I would venture, to its illogic that prevention is not that profitable so why bother with that so having learned all of this through approximately three weeks on the phone during which time you contracted, suffered from, and recovered from at least the seasonal flu and perhaps swine, which you can't be vaccinated against due to the fact that you're not in a high risk group even though you got it, you call everyone else you know who had to sign up for insurance that lives in the neighborhood of Medicare whereupon you learn that, to a person, they impulsively signed up for something rather than jump out the window which would be unfortunate since your daily co-pays are so high that you'll lose your house if you even drive near the hospital, at which point you call your relative's primary care provider's office for the thirty-fourth time to discover that the doctor whom the insurance company just told you was covered by the plan is not covered by that plan ("it's a mistake on their site and we can't get them to fix it"), whereupon you scream ohmygodcanyoupleasejusttellmewhattosignhimupfor and the primary care's insurance expert, having run into this a time or two before, pulls the standard answer out of the pile, which is that there is only one plan that the office has a contract with and even though you've never heard of the plan and are slightly suspicious because when you look it up on their site you see that the monthly premium is $0 and think naturally it must be a total typo, leading to seven more hours on the phone wherein you make the insurance company representative swear in court that the premium is $0 (don't ask, Medicare just pays them a lump sum so they don't need to charge you, the consumer), which seems completely like a total lie and certainly has been designed to catch you out on your first claim, well, you're so exhausted by this point, not to mention your poor relative who's very good at abstract systems thinking and, shall we say, less inclined to tolerate this kind of thing, but who because he unlike you can read manuals actually reads the whole 3000-page document the government sends out, which means he knows a gap from a doughnut and you just say, ok, sign him up and if you never hear from me again it's because I have, as you can see, gone completely bonkers.

It's not covered.

The biggest byte yet

I thought what was interesting about Nick Bilton's NY Times story was its headline: "Part of the Daily American Diet, 34 Gigabytes of Data." OK, we're info hogs; we can quantify it; the number is soaring, etc. But talk about burying the lead: we now have a word for a VERY BIG NUMBER: a zettabyte, or, start counting now, and continue into infinity, a billion trillion. Sounds like something a three-year-old would say, no?

Collectively, American households consumed 3.6 zettabytes of information of all kinds in 2008, the researchers estimated.

A zettabyte is equal to one billion trillion bytes: a 1 with 21 zeros at the end. A single zettabyte is equivalent to 100 billion copies of all the books in the Library of Congress, or as the report says, seven layers of textbooks covering the continental United States and Alaska.