thinkfetti

Visit change.gov to learn more about the Obama administration’s current plans and list of issues. Transparency doesn’t happen overnight (I don’t know what would happen if ever there were complete transparency in government), but launching this website is refreshingly proactive.

Take a look around the site. I see it as an invitation to continue being a citizen. Not all ideas are created equal, but because there is a difference between needing to win an argument and needing to be heard, an ability to listen can be mutually empowering.

November 10th update: It looks like all of the substantive agenda content has been taken down. Propublica.org reports that the Obama administration is “retooling” the content.

November 15th update: The website is back up; I haven’t read enough to see what has changed (besides the YouTube weekly address link).

The quote, “insanity : doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results,” has been attributed to Albert Einstein and Ben Franklin, among others, but it was probably written by Rita Mae Brown (Sudden Death, Bantam Books, New York, 1983, p. 68). [1, 2]

But let’s say you’re sending out resumes, hoping to get a job. If each resume had a 1% chance of succeeding (a 1-in-100 chance), and if you managed to send out 100 resumes, you’d have about a 63% chance of landing a job. (The percentage chance of success in this idealized case is (1 - (0.99^100))*100 for reasons I won’t go into here…)

That’s a better than even chance, after doing the same, crummy thing over and over.

Or…

You decide you want to learn to draw. You sit down for an hour, try to draw a realistic picture of something on the desk in front of you, and it doesn’t come out.

(more…)

A few years ago, the theme of the New Mexico State Women’s Studies Conference was “Water in the Desert.” After moving to central New Mexico in 1997 from Los Angeles (and from Chicago and the Bay Area before that), I learned quickly how precious water is and, at least as importantly, how hard it is for a group of people to deal with scarcity.

Last week, my wife and I spent a few days in Scottsdale, Arizona because my stepdaughter was there for a two-week residency for her master’s program. Scottsdale, Arizona is pretty much Phoenix, Arizona, at least as far as weather, and we knew it would be hot. It averaged about 108 to 110, so that qualifies as hot.

I was struck by the use of water in Scottsdale. The monetary wealth of the area is obvious, but the water isn’t from there. Scottsdale is a desert. So why water huge expanses of turf with sprinklers at noon in 110 degrees? Why all the “water features” and misters? Is it a “use it or lose it” thing with the Colorado River? Ignorance? Or is there a good, positive reason to use all this water, one that I’m not aware of?

I like it that I am using David Allen’s system Getting Things Done and also enjoying parts of Lin Yutang’s book The Importance of Living that have particularly to do with “the Noble Art of Leaving Things Undone.”

Many things that are interesting to think about are also discouraging, at least initially. The “tragedy of the commons” is one such subject. The commons is communal property - imagine a square of pasture where everyone can graze their livestock. Each individual is allowed to add another animal to graze, because the commons belongs to everyone. Of course, it’s in the public’s best interest not to overgraze the pasture, but at the same time, individuals aren’t punished or fined by incrementally adding to the number of animals grazing. The tragedy of the commons reflects the tendency of individual, or local incentive, to trump global concerns: it seems that the commons generally tends to lose out, to the extent that there aren’t protective provisions in place.

In countries where taxes are collected, some of the revenues support public benefits. But in no such country is it optional to pay taxes, because the group of individual potential taxpayers would succumb to the tragedy of the commons.

As a department chairman, most of my work is in a supporting role for my department. I do some required tasks (reports and such) so that others in the department don’t have to. (Other department chairs choose to delegate this kind of work to other department members - that doesn’t really matter to my point.) But I am also the go-to person for faculty requests - everything from preferential consideration on course assignments to course release time, travel funding, student or colleague-related problem solving, or other special requests.

I do what I can to help the department as a whole function effectively and efficiently, and I also do what I can to help individual faculty members succeed in their careers. But I am the commons. I serve all, but each has some incentive to try to get something from me, and once I have been overgrazed, I will have no resources left to help the community.

I can see that I must generate my own protections in this type of service role, because no one else has acted to create them.