Group work / Daily crono / Blog of the day / Music / Back to paying business / War -…

Group work

I have written about group work earlier, so bear with me. I just cannot help wondering how much different groups differ from each other: in some groups things are easy, results come without any real effort, and everyone has real fun. Some other groups are the opposite: the amount of results is less than individual work would accomplish, work is not fun, and everyone just suffers. I do not know what causes it, but I know that the following are some of the necessary conditions for a group being better than doing things alone. 1. People have more or less similar speed of thinking. 2. People can trust each other to do what they promise and if something is not OK, to tell it openly and in time. 3. Everyone is able to understand some common language, and understand without excessive repetitions. 4. There are no secret subgroups reversing common decisions. 5. People communicate with each other: sending status emails must be a common habit. 6. People have somewhat different backgrounds.

Daily crono

Today we had the last systems optimization class. It has been a good class, and I have learned if not lot, at least a decent amount. The exercises have been hard enough, but still doable in less than 5 hours. In the afternoon, we had the disruptive technologies class, which was as good as always. In addition to learning what Clay Cristenssen means with this "innovators dilemma", I learned that MIT has two over 100-year old active faculty memmbers, including one professor in aeronautics. He has seen it all since 1920s. Quite fascinating. Then we has the product development class with several group presentation. I cannot understand how much time some students are willing to spend on making fancy presentations. It is total waste of effort: learning to make presentations is not what at least I paid for. Of course, one must have some skills in making slides etc, but overdoing it is just wasting one's only life.

Some cohort-building in the Characters-par ended the day. Nice to chat with the distance students. I did not drink beer - I still have to read one 100-page paper today.

Blog of the day

I find the blog of Bruce Schneier both entertaining and important. Even if one would not be that interested in encryption algorithms, one cannot be but fascinated in the things that are going on around the world in the security area. Like the government telling the airliner pilots not to fly close by nuclear plant, and at the same time not telling where the plants are. Well, the pilot went to the internet, and draw a map containing all nuclear powerplant. They dared to publish this map in their website. The government told them to take the map of, since the information is classified...

If you have some doubt on the political importance of blogging, you should know that China has now banned most widely used blogging software. Some other countries are bound to follow. See the article.

Speaking of China, this article claims that there is already a shortage of unskilled workers in some parts of China. Which in free capitalism (which is what there is now in China) means that the salaries must get higher. Interesting.

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Music

Yet another net radio: David Byrne's. May be interesting. Other interesting thing is Arthur magazine, which I even subscribed to. One needs to stay up to date with contemporary art. Which means that one must visit NYC bimonthly or monthly.

Blog of the day

Strange things are taking place in Nepal. Check a Nepalese blog if you want to keep up to date. Or ckeck United We Blog.If anyone knows a good blog from Myanmar/Burma, I would like to know it too. In English, that is.

Back to paying business

Or the business I pay dearly for. So, this was my first day of MIT after the spring break. We will have 7 weeks before the next break, and I am already a bit excited how this all will turn out. I assume well, but I will have to work more than I have ever worked: some 10-14 hours a day, every day. This is what I calculated. Today, I went to the ERBA-class. They would have returned my quiz with intermediate grades, but I consider that unnecessary information: I cannot change the result, and knowing the result would not change my way of studying. I will just do my best and try to get a B. Next, we would have had some guest lecture. It is our spring business trip, after all. I and other Apollo-scholars were too busy. We just went for the free lunch. The Sloan faculty club has always decent food. And it was fun to see at least some of the distance students in flesh. The Apollo-class was good, but I will have to do a lot of work for it: first of all, I need to figure out whom to interview for the class. A smallish anxiety is growing bigger. I continue to work on Apollo for the rest of the evening: I got a draft reading list and a draft outline done. In addition, I did some system optimization and product development things. Enough of MIT for now.

War - warriors missing

The mighty US-army is not able to recruit enough new cannon-fodder. The recruiting is some 25% smaller than necessary. This has cause more and more serious discussion about introducing draft again. Quite many respectable commentators are speculating about draft (see for example articles in the www.antiwar.com and in New York Times). The real meaning of this discussion is that USA cannot really attack any new countries at the moment, which is a good thing for Iran and other dictatorships who are not allies. And China also knows, that USA could not really do anything, if China would try to invade Taiwan.

China evaluates US human right situation

Since USA has evaluated China's human right situation for a long time, China has started to evaluate US. The report tell, for example, that "American society is characterized with rampant violent crimes ... 31000 Americans were killed by firearms each year", "the number of Americans in poverty has been climbing for three year ... to 35.9 million". Read the report, it is, well, interesting. I assume the statistics are more or less correct. How to interprete them is another matter.

Alun perin julkaistu kuukausikoosteessa "Blogs March 2005".