Discovered Dreams by Scott Murphy

 

In his third book of Poetry, Discovered Dreams, Scott Murphy examines the life of a child of Alcoholic Parents. This book is dedicated to the caregivers, the referees and the people who survived that childhood. The author survived the experience and so can you. 

His previous books, Poems of a Survivor and Recover or Relent deal with disappointment and the decision to actively pursue a path of recovery. 

Wildlife in a Wild Year - My 2020 Nature Journey by N. G. Carlson

 

Beginning in March of 2020, I was on the island of Hawaii as COVID-19 started to initiate the closing down of the country and the rest of the world. I spent time taking photos of the wildlife close to where I was staying before leaving. 

Back in Minnesota, my early mornings were spent taking photos at Silverwood Park, Long Lake Regional Park, Elm Creek Park, and Bassett Creek Park. Other photos were taken at locations throughout the Minneapolis and St. Paul area at locations similar to my 2019 book Photographs of Minnesota Wildlife. 

This year I was able to watch birds raise their young and take photos of the parents and juveniles. Deer followed me around this year and kept popping up in unexpected places. Muskrats were a late season addition to a year of photographing wildlife. Birds make up most of the wildlife photos with the focus on waterfowl, woodpeckers, songbirds, and shore birds. 

This time in nature proved to be an excellent way to shift the focus away from the difficulties of 2020. I hope you find the photos a welcome distraction. Wildlife in a Wild Year is available from Amazon in paperback and kindle. You can also see more of my photos at https://zaphodmirror.picfair.com.

Wood Ducks in a tree (similar to those in the book) - N. G. Carlson

Yellow-billed Cardinal from Hawaii (similar to photos in the book) - N. G. Carlson

TED Talks by Chris Anderson

Chris Anderson provides an insiders view to giving an excellent TED talk in his book: TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking.

Elements of a good talk. The speaker is prepared. The speaker has practiced the talk and knows it well. Depending on the speaker, they will have it memorized or have visual prompts that assist and they know the topic well. They have a story arc. The visuals and the speech work well together. Some speakers take appropriate risks to deviating from the standard format and interacting with the audience through music or performance art. The person has lived a life, done the research and shares their insights and discoveries based on experience.

A poor talk has an ill prepared speaker. The speaker is focused on being famous and self-promotion. The speaker is not comfortable in front of the audience. The speaker is trying to sell something provide a gift of knowledge to others.

TED secrets to great public speaking - 10 minutes

What makes a great TED talk - 24 minutes

Lessons worth spreading - 12 minutes

The Art of Critical Decision Making by Michael A. Roberto

The Art of Critical Decision Making by Michael A. Roberto covers many difficult decisions that often focus on man made disasters. This is a worthwhile course for managers or individuals responsible for safety culture. He dissects the Columbia Space Shuttle accident. Managers adopted the wrong frame of reference setting a high bar to proving it was not safe rather than proving it is safe. The leader of the group also did not actively seek out dissenting views.

There are two responses to a threat. Confirmatory response (actively discounting the problem) presuming that our knowledge is complete and there will be no change unless there is overwhelming evidence of a problem that needs a solution vs an exploratory response actively attempting to understand the threat. In the face of an ambiguous threat learn by doing, conduct experiments, and conducting experiments.

The Three Mile Island nuclear incident is an example of complex coupled system. These often have a series of adverse events lining up to cause a problem. It is like the holes of several slices of Swiss Cheese lining up.

He also reviews the Bay of Pigs failed invasion of Cuba and the resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Bay of Pigs was an insular process where differing opinions were suppressed. In the Cuban Missile Crisis, a diversity of opinions was sought out including former President Dwight Eisenhower. The former president asked questions about on the process of decision making. The problem solving groups were deliberately set up in opposing groups who offered solutions. The other group would attempt to poke holes in the proposal and request more information. This sharpened the solutions and provided better options for President Kennedy to review.

There was a failure to connect the dots with respect to the 911 terrorists. Both the Arizona and the Minneapolis Field office had people taking pilots lessons with large commercial aircraft with little previous pilot experience. Obstacles to information sharing include differentiation without integrations when dealing with an uncertain environment. Power is derived by the control of intelligence information. Work on both formal and informal network sharing. They have adopted password protected Wikis that allow information sharing between multiple agencies.

High Reliabilty Organizations (HRO) - Design enterprises to deal with interactive complexity and tight coupling (processes that are highly dependent on each other).

1. Preoccupied with failure ( may be a symptom of a larger problem) Actively seek out what might go wrong. Do not be preoccupied with success. Failures are not confined to a small area but may be systemic. Revealing problems allow people to work on them. 
2. Reluctance to Simplify interpretations. Do not put problems in a small box.
3. Sensitivity to the front line:   Invest time understanding in front line staff - Medicine used to be (ABC) Accuse Blame and Criticize.  Develop a culture of blameless reporting. 
4. Commitment to resilience: People who are resilient don't just anticipate they focus on mitigating the risk to build resilience. 
5. Deference to localized specialized expertise: Need to actively seek out localized specialized knowledge to find problems. 

Focus on concrete processes to improve safety. How to be preoccupied with failure. Code blue vs Rapid Response teams to diagnose people who are exhibiting ambiguous symptoms that may predict a cardiac event.  High reliability is a preoccupation with failure and resilience.

How do you become a problem finder? Seek out problems like Winston Churchill. He saw the rise of Hitler, the rise of the Iron Curtain. How do you do this. Become a voracious learner and go out in the field and ask questions. Discard the notion that you have all of the answers. The process matters.

Being a devil's advocate by Michael Roberto - 13 min. 

How Winston Churchill Changed the World Great Courses

I found the Great Courses lecture How Winston Churchill Saved the World by Michael Shelden to be informative giving more insight into the personal life of Churchill than the other two biographies I've encountered. Churchill had a lady friend who he relied on as and intellectual sounding board for his ideas. She would have gladly been his wife but Churchill married another. The friendship lasted.

Churchill was a man of intense curiosity. He was a cosmopolitan man of the world in contrast to Hitler and Stalin neither of whom ventured far from home. Churchill flew in planes to get a sense of the experience and also to obtain an overhead view of the British and European coastline. He advocated for aerospace research to develop airplanes capable of combating the German aircraft. The work on aircraft development was funded in part by a patriotic British heiress. 

Churchill's experience in the Boar War as a combat soldier and a prisoner also informed his experience. He deplored the idiocy of the British generals ill advised charges out of the trenches into direct machine gun fire. Churchill's support of research on tank development, although ridiculed at the time, proved to be a useful resource in breaking the stalemate of trench warfare. As Lord of the Admiralty, his ill advised venture in the Dardanelles lead him to be pushed out of important public office.  This was done with full endorsement of others but they disavowed the action once it failed.

This was similar to Harry Truman giving Churchill his backing for the Iron Curtain speech and then claiming he had no knowledge of it when there was a political uproar. One thing Churchill never lacked was the courage to stand up and eloquently defend his convictions.

His party's ouster from government after the war allowed him time to paint but resulted in disaster for the country. The post war socialist government under labor resulted in food and power shortages. Churchill referred to Socialism as "shared misery." The leaders were grossly in competent and lasted a few short years before Churchill's party returned to power and cleaned up the mess by keeping the things that worked and correcting the agriculture and energy sector.

At the end of the course leader Professor Shelden offered an alternate time line where Great Britain sues Nazi Germany for peace. That gives Hitler 10 years to develop advanced weaponry and tighten his  control over a large area of the world. If Churchill and Great Britain had not stood up alone against Hitler, our world may have been very different.

Darkest Hour Movie (2017) - Blood, Toil, Sweat, and Tears - 4 min. 

The Better Angels of our Nature by Steven Pinker

In The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Steven Pinker takes an exhaustive look at the factors that contribute to the level of violence in human and closely related animal cultures.

He provides evidence that violence per capita has decreased from the paleolithic (hunter gatherer) culture to the present time. Many factors enter into this equation. Having a leviathan or large societal structural control will usually reduce the level of violence as a percentage of the population by pacification.

This is not a permanent state and society will devolve as in the Middle Ages after the fall of the Roman Empire or in countries where the central government no longer functions well (Libya, Syria, Afghanistan etc.)

The optimistic scenarios about the noble peaceful savage have largely been disproved. The tribal behavior by humans is similar to the behavior of chimpanzees and not does not track to the slightly less violent bonobos who are very peaceful when well fed in captivity but less so in the wild where there is competition for resources. Chimpanzees and tribal cultures kill when they have the advantage. They will kill lone non tribal members if the likelihood of success is great with a ratio of three attackers to one victim. Killing early in the morning when others at sleep is also a successful strategy.

The printing press proved to be a positive vehicle for building empathy in other people. This was associated with a reduction in acts of public cruelty for entertainment. Human life became more valuable and the painful acts of torture developed during the Spanish Inquisition became unacceptable.  Empathy is not enough to reduce violence.

It also needs compassion and self control and a willingness to not follow along with the crowd. People often are more candid in private written assessments than in public forums in front of groups. This has implications for obtaining honest feedback about self-assessment.

This is a very difficult, well researched, and important subject matter. Readers can take this information and help foster an environment where violence continues to be reduced.

Bill Gates and Steven Pinker - 7 minutes

Steven Pinker - The Better Angels - 76 minutes

Steven Pinker - The Better Angels - 23 minutes