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.”

In addition to my other job duties, including teaching and coordinating a music program, I am the chairman of the humanities department at my university. Under the previous chairs, the department usually tried to use some form of voting when it came to making important decisions. Some of the results were satisfactory, but some unhelpful power relationships perpetuated themselves due to the numbers of faculty in specific subdisciplines, and several people lost out routinely.

When I was starting out as chairman, I told the department that I was more interested in building consensus. I’m not far into my tenure as chairman, and I still value consensus highly. But here we are in late October, talking about what positions to request as replacements for departed and retired faculty, and my, are we far away from consensus. And, hold your breath…. voting looks like it’s not going to come close to solving anything either. The votes we’ve had when this issue has come up before, and the inclination to vote now - all of the voting sessions lead to winners and losers, with no one willing to put in the serious effort it takes to build consensus (or, what may be the same thing, to look at all of the various angles of opportunity and liability that the department faces).

I’d like to keep the faculty to the task of forging consensus considering the interests of the department as a whole. But I don’t think I - as a peer leader with some informal authority and a bit of formal authority, but no extensive power - can make them do the work they need to do. I also cannot do the work by myself.

So I may be forced to make the best decision I can, submitting a couple of job descriptions to the vice president after getting input from the department faculty, but without either consensus or a vote. And then inviting the department and/or vice president to ask me to quit the chairmanship if they really want that. Someone else in the position would certainly work differently, but I’m not too sure that the results would be better.