April 05, 2006
Microinequities
I had the oppertunity to attend a presentation entitled "Microinequities: The Power of Small" recently. The presenter, Steve Young, is a very dynamic personality who kept the crowd entertained throughout a potentially dry subject matter. I only fell asleep twice in the 5 hours. Both for brief flickers of time (about 40 seconds).
The base premise of the talk was really how to help employee motivation and communication. The catch on this talk was to note the unconcious messages sent while talking to others, and how they are perceived by the receiving party. The short example used in the lecture was "I didn't say she stole the book." If you were to say this same sentence multiple times, you could change the meaning by altering where the emphasis is placed. This really just reminded me of the classic "how many ways you can say Dude" (unfortunately I can't find a link anywhere).
A little later the discussion moved towards filters, and how each person has their own set of filters that are instituted without realizing it. The problem of course becomes how to reset the filter, so that an employee no longer feels a manager is "out to get them" and return to productively working together. The examples used in this section reminded me of the hunting safety course I was required to take before acquiring my license. In that class they played a video for us, our goal was to count the number of deer in the scene. The question immediatley followed was, who saw the other hunters? Playback showed a bright orange hunter near each deer that no one really noticed. That was our filter.
What are some of these gestures? Using a case of flirting, we were given an example of flirting from a distance. When the recipient was asked to explain how she knew it was flirting, she couldn't. Similar scenarios were played out for introductions, normal communications, and passdown scenarios. They even used a case of having your dog smile, as a means to explain how you knew this.
Finally the discussion moved towards, how do you talk about these issues? How do you discuss with your manager or employee that they are sending you these negative vibes without sounding like a complete dork. A difficult task by any means.
The one point throughout the discussion that I consistently disagreed with was manners. Everything being discussed seemed like a huge case for keeping your manners in top form at all times. Steve addressed this briefly, stating manners is just the tip of the bubble, but I really disagree on that point.
As far as a presentation, it's worth checking out. It seems he does this talk at many different companies, and possibly universities. Check it out if you get a chance. At the very least, it's always good to watch an amazing speaker keep an entire crowds attention.
You can read more about this work at Diversity At Work.
Posted by Dan at 06:14 PM | Comments (0)
April 27, 2005
WWDC
Thanks to Marko I've got an eTicket to WWDC. See you guys there!
In other news, check out Knox, an encrypted drive utility for OS X. I've been using it for a little bit and it's been fairly stable. I like it better than the Vault feature for OS X, as I don't need all my home directory encrypted... just the pr0n.
Posted by Dan at 11:27 AM
January 20, 2005
Travels with Dan
I'll be in Scottsdale Arizona next week for the Video Processing and Quality Metric conference. Some of the papers being presented sound like they will be interesting. While some leave me wondering.
For example, "WHICH COLORS BEST CATCH YOUR EYES: A SUBJECTIVE STUDY OF COLOR SALIENCY" a presentation that will cover (I'm guessing here) rod and cone sensitivity and response. To me, this seems like a rather silly discussion to be held as a lot of the research for this occurred many many years ago. More importantly, didn't the US military pay many millions of dollars to discover that green received the most response from the human visual system? Wasn't that the reason low-light goggles project in a green tone? There are of course other presentations with similar questions, and I look forward to being proven wrong.
I'll see what I can transcribe from the conference. The website makes no mention of wireless access in the auditorium. If anyone in the Scottsdale area wants to meet, let me know.
Posted by Dan at 12:33 AM | Comments (0)
October 18, 2003
Presentation: AODV
I had an opportunity to hear Charles Perkins discuss his thoughts and research on implementing mobile AdHoc networks (manet for short). Unfortunately, I believe most of the interesting details within his talk were missed due to time constraints (he blasted through about 20-30 slides). As such this will more than likely be an extremely lame write up about the discussion, which as a whole was rather interesting.
To begin with, mobile networks have a major challenge that includes link stability. Thanks to the nature of mobile devices, you can't completely depend upon the same route all the time to send your traffic. Further more, because these devices (mobile phones in this case) have a limited battery life, you cannot use many of the standard means of identifying a valid next node (broadcast, etc). The recent push has been to create a distance vector routing protocol better known as RFC 3561, or AODV. There are currently a couple candidates in contention to be the recommended protocol, but we only got to hear about one of them (unfortunately).
Some interesting challenges were brought up, mostly those unseen. For example, to test these networks, the simulation tools originally used would not work. After many hours of hacking on another simulator, they were able to simulate a 10,000 node network. The next step is a 100,000 node network as I understand it. The idea of inserting a base station to the network, and shown how it alters the network functionality/topology.
Posted by Dan at 04:35 PM | Comments (0)
September 12, 2003
Talk: networks and games
I attended the first technical talk I've had in a long time this past week. The presentation was conducted by Dr. Christos Papadimitriuo of UC Berkeley on the topic of computer networks, game theories, and how the two mixed can be used in conjunction to build a better network infrastructure. After looking through his web-page, I believe the discussion was a 50 minute introduction to the concepts he will be discussing in his CS294 seminar at UC Berkeley.
As a warning note there were points during the presentation that I could not hear Dr. Papadimitriuo, as such I may have missed some important details and my interpolated details may not be correct at all.
The talk begin with a basic introduction to game theory and some of the more popular concepts within, i.e. the penny game, etc. The main points I picked out of this talk revolved around the concept that, while the shortest path is always the desired route, sometimes taking the initially longer path will result in better performance, and the challenges of adding these to the current network traffic patterns. His best example used sample routes and had the attendees calculate out the optimal routes. The fastest route was easily found, not because it was obvious, but rather because we could see the future routes and predict around them.
At this point he began to discuss the challenges of adding this logic to routing, the games that need to be applied, and the theories of how/way this works. It was also at this point that an audience member challenged his theory, by stating that the theory works great but the reality is completely different (and well documented/understood). It was at this point that I could no longer hear the exchange occurring between the two, but it placed enough of a seed in my own mind to question the validity of the research. Thanks to this interaction the time frame for the lecture had to be compressed into a much more condensed version.
One of the parting questions asked was what would happen if an entity were actively trying to exploit the system. In a sense, the proposal he had given was for the induction of a benevolent monarch to control in a fair manner, and continue to push the expedient routes. The question revolved around this monarch being replaced with one who's intention was not to keep the fastest routes, but rather the most optimal? Or more importantly what would happen if one of the routes decided to act against the orders from above, how would that impact the overall network strategy? Unfortunately these questions went not really answered/explained due to time constraints.
[EDIT: typo corrections]
Posted by Dan at 01:13 PM | Comments (0)