I’ve been reading the essays and speeches on Michael Crichton’s website. I heard this debate on the radio but I did not realize it was posted on his site (and youtube). I just listened to it again and, as you can see, I posted all ten parts here. Worth a listen…
There is a little, teeny link to Brewed Fresh Daily in my blogroll at the bottom of this page. Though I really like this wordpress template, it is kind of old and does not support widgets and such. So until I have a chance to go in and figure out how to update it, I will just have to live with it…
The point of this post, though, is that I am a frequent contributor to BFD. So, you might want to check there periodically if you are following me. Once I get this template stuff worked out, I will aggregate my posting info…might be a while though…working on some other stuff at the moment.
I signed up for LinkedIn a year or so ago and to Facebook about six months ago. Both accounts sat, neglected, the occasional login, the 20% completed profile. Then, ironically I guess, I started using Twitter (what some have described as the Magic 8 Ball of humanity) , that constant flow of comments & information, plus the Facebook message I received from a college-era friend I lost contact with 20 or so years ago, plus the financial crisis, have conspired to snap me from my stupor. I’ve added profiles to LinkedIn and Facebook and started sending out connect messages on both platforms.
Though I live online, many hours everyday, I have been negligent in building and/or reconnecting with friends and business associates. It feels very good to be opening these channels again. For me, personally, the silver lining to the current chaos is my reawakening and reconnecting with the world around me…plus, I’m working on new projects and focused. Hopefully some good stuff is on the way…
Everyday the men and women in legislative bodies around the United States are confronted by complex issues and the need to craft laws to address these issues. What, unfortunately, is clear, is that due to complexity, politics and other influences, many of our laws do not address core issues but rather address perceived or biased interpretations of these issues.
We are all presently dealing with the ongoing subprime lending and credit crisis. Coverage of various aspects of the crisis appears daily in hundreds of newspaper, on thousands of blogs and in video freely accessible online. However, upon analysis, much of the information available is wrong, misunderstood, biased or in other ways misrepresented. When so much of the information is questionable it becomes particularly difficult to separate the signal from the noise, the quality analysis from everything else. Additionally, Congressional hearings and testimony investigating the crisis demonstrate that our legislators are overwhelmed by the scale and complexity of the issues. Yet, it is a given that new laws and regulations will be written and enacted as a result the present situation.
The purpose of Legistraight.org is to refine complex issues into detailed, nuanced, and actionable understanding. If we expect well-crafted, well-reasoned, generally beneficial laws to be enacted, then we need to participate. Otherwise, we can expect laws that may favor corporations, may be well intentioned but poorly crafted, may miss important elements or leave gaps, or otherwise fail to deal with the intended purpose.
Wikipedia, due to broad participation, ease of access and many well-written and carefully considered articles, has become a premiere source of information on the Internet. Though it is understood that Wikipedia has limitations, the newly found prominence is well-deserved. Legistraight.org is an open, collaborative, Wikipedia-like initiative that builds on the Wikipedia methodology, content, and open source platform.
I’m in the process of porting my blog to Wordpress (from blogger) and I’ve encountered some technical issues that I have not figured out yet. In the meantime, my older material can be accessed through http://peak.rickpollack.com. Let me know what you think of the new site. Oh, from what I’ve seen so far, I really dig Wordpress.
Thanks!
I’m extremely bummed that Michael Crichton died. His insight into complex matters has been a source of inspiration for a long time. Apparently his death was unexpected, I had no idea he was ill. What a loss :-((
His last interview with Charlie Rose in 2007
Charlie Rose also did a 20 minute tribute. Assorted writings, speeches and other items can be found on Crichton’s website.
The radio crackled. “Now you see the flaw in your procedure,” Ian Malcolm said. “You only tracked the expected number of dinosaurs. You were worried about losing animals, and your procedures were designed to advise you instantly if you had less than the expected number. But that wasn’t the problem. The problem was, you had more than the expected number.” - Jurassic Park
Here is slight revision with a modern twist:
“We always asked the same question. Where are the rating agencies in all of this? And I’d always get the same reaction. It was a smirk.” He called Standard & Poor’s and asked what would happen to default rates if real estate prices fell. The man at S&P couldn’t say; its model for home prices had no ability to accept a negative number. “They were just assuming home prices would keep going up…” - Steve Eisman, the ‘Ian Malcolm’ of the financial crisis looking into the ratings of mortgage backed securities. - From The End by Michael Lewis
A tech form of peer pressure…
I’ve been building up my following-list and it now includes, for example, Lance Armstrong. I rather enjoy getting his frequent tweets that he is getting ready for a ride. It reminds me, on a daily basis, that people, like Lance, are out there putting in their hard work. It seems to be helping my focus a bit…
I volunteered to work for the Obama campaign on election day. They assigned me to a precinct in Collinwood, Ohio (Cleveland). I was given two assignments 1) if a line forms do whatever I can to keep people from leaving 2) use the lists posted periodically at the precinct to determine if Obama supporters were voting and report that information to Obama central. On the line management front, no line formed so there is nothing to report. I did put quite a bit of time and effort into the second task.
In Ohio, at designated times, precincts are required to post voter lists. These stacks of paper are supposed to have a check mark next to the name of each person who voted. The Obama campaign supplied volunteers, like myself, with lists of the Obama supporters voting at one of the three precincts located in the Church where I was stationed. The Obama supporter lists had been developed during the campaign through canvassing, phone banks, and campaign contributions, etc. My task was to compare the Obama lists to the precinct lists and check off Obama supporters who had voted and then feed that system in the Obama database.
Two days before the election, on Sunday evening, I attended training to learn how to complete my task. It was explained that we would receive lists of Obama supporters, categorized by precinct, with a four-digit code identifying each voter. The precincts were required to post the first voter lists on election day at 11:00 AM, at which time we would compare the two lists. Once the lists were compared, I was supposed to use my mobile phone to dial into a campaign-created system where I could use my keypad to key in the four-digit voter codes. The person who explained all of this, said it would take about twenty minutes to key the numbers in. Once the numbers were keyed in, they would be used to direct the phone banks and canvassers during election day. As I listened and learned about the phone system they’d created and having a background in technology, I got the distinct impression the system was new and effectively untested. I pretty much figured it would not work. Plus, since there was no password protection or other means of security, I figured if it did work, it was likely to be hacked/compromised.
I was scheduled to be at my staging area around 9:30 AM on Tuesday, election day. I voted at my local precinct Tuesday morning and then headed to the staging area, a private home about 10 minutes away from the precinct where I would spend the day. Since it looked like I would be fifteen minutes or so late, I called in but only managed to get the answering machine at my team managers house. When I arrived at the staging area they seemed somewhat surprised to see me, I said I’d called and only reached a home answering machine. My team manager, Thomas, had tried to call me but one of the digits for my phone number was off so all he got was a phone-disconnected message. Since they thought I was not going to show, they re-arranged personnel so I was no longer needed at my original destination. I was assigned a new location, got the phone number situation resolved but since Thomas had a phone issued by the Obama campaign and he’d only received it that morning or the day before, he did not have the voice mail password and could not set up or access voice mail. He was on the phone constantly during the day but no one could leave a message. In the end, these communication problems were trivial but the lesson here is that under different circumstances these minor errors could have caused serious problems - details matter. Oh, and at the staging area I learned that the special phone system I was supposed to key my voter list into, was not being used because it took too long to key in the data. Instead we were directed to a web page where the data could be entered.
When I arrived at my precinct, a church in Collinwood, Ohio, there were already four Obama volunteers working outside and one, a poll observer, was observing inside. So, including me, there were six Obama volunteers at this one location. There was Wesley, an attorney who’d flown in from San Francisco, a female high school student from Shaker Heights, two Morehouse College students who’d driven up from Atlanta in a nine van caravan from the college, and inside was a local urban high-school teacher. One location. In Wesley’s training session, a few days earlier, were hundreds of attorneys and many, like Wesley, had traveled on their own dime, from around country to participate. And, that was just one of multiple attorney training sessions. For volunteers who just wanted to help, like me, there were hundreds of training sessions all over the state, and I suppose all over the country.
A little after 11:00 AM, when the precinct posted the first voter list, I sat down at a table in the precinct and went began the rather tedious exercise of checking voters off my list. One list per precinct, one voter at a time. I probably spent about 40 minutes comparing lists and that only covered one and half precincts. Several of the poll workers were new to the process, probably poorly trained, and did not really know the process. Half of the voter data on the precinct lists I used was blank and as far as I could tell there was no straight-forward way to collect the missing data without disrupting voting. I gathered what information I could, went outside, called my wife and she keyed the data into the website. I read off pages of numbers while she typed away. The web site was less than optimal for keying in long lists of numbers but we managed to get through the list. I could not help but wonder if the data would really be used.
When entering the data in the Obama system, the first step required entering your phone, then the precinct ID and then the voter codes. After we finished the first precinct I just started reading off the numbers for the second precinct and was probably twenty voter codes into the list when I realized I’d forgotten to change precincts. We corrected the precinct information and re-entered that precinct list.
About an hour later my wife called and said she’d received a call from a Chicago Obama office inquiring about the errors in our data entry. She explained what happened. The fact that they picked-up on our relatively small data entry error and called to investigate was re-assuring. Shortly thereafter, I drove back to the staging area, the private house, and spent half an hour in the basement, reading off voter codes from other precinct lists while another Rick keyed them into a PC. Outside the house, the team prepared for another round of canvassing (I hope) based on the what was retrieved from the precinct voter lists. In the end, I don’t know how much of a difference the election-day canvassing and phone calls mattered but I do believe that the intensive, month after month, grassroot effort by the ten of thousands of Obama volunteers made all the difference. Stepping into an Obama campaign office was different, it wasn’t just an election, it was a cause.
I think it would be wise to keep many of the local campaign offices open. The passion, the energy, the cause that brought thousands from across the nation to Ohio needs to be harnessed and re-focused. Winning the election was the easy part, really. The real work - finding and implementing solutions to extremely complicated and emotionally-charged issues - starts now. If you’ve ever tried to change the culture of a large organization or been in a large organization that tried to change, then you know the degree of difficulty. Well, we need to change the culture of a country, our country. Any kind of meaningful and lasting change requires buy-in at all levels - from Wall Street to Main Street (as the cliche goes). Meaningful change also requires champions, those people willing to put their careers and reputations on the line, to see the process through. Change is friction, change is pain, change is hard.
By electing Obama, our nation has opened the door to change. We have buy-in at all levels. Now, we need the champions, tens of thousands of champions, not just at the top, but at all levels. We need youth and passion and energy to keep the process moving and see it through. Meaningful change will not happen top-down, it will happen bottom-up, when people modify their daily habits and implement change into their lives. Enough people changing their personal habits will force change at all levels.
Obama can set the tone, he can push for legislation, he can inspire. But in order for him to succeed, he will need the same kind of motivated, grassroots effort that put him in the White House. He will need this effort everyday for the next 4 - 8 years. There are few tasks in our world more difficult than changing American culture. But nothing short of a cultural shift - how and what we consume and how and what we produce - will allow us to deal with the enormous challenges we face.
People want a cause, they want something to believe in, they want to participate in something bigger than themselves. If nothing else, the Obama campaign was a cause but the Obama campaign needs to evolve, into Obama Corps.
Here is a little compilation from video I shot on election day…don’t let the momentum get away.