Sad but True. Check out this piece on Fox News:

Corporations rule the world! Advice: eat organic.

In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell discusses the kind of thinking that occurs in about the same amount of time it takes to blink: Rapid Cognition. The brain has an ability to make excellent or devastating decisions in a fraction of a second. In some cases, if we relied more on this part of our brain for decision-making we might all be better off. In other cases, not thoroughly thinking through a decision could lead to disaster.

I’m posting about this book here because I think that the basic ideas holds true for any type of development project, whether it is a vertical application or a data warehouse. I couldn’t help but relate the material to my work with business intelligence and data warehousing applications in particular.

Malcolm claims that “we have come to confuse information with understanding” (page 264). How many times have you heard the phrases “information overload” or “analysis paralysis”? In fact, that is one of the problems that data warehouses are trying to solve: Get the right data to the right people at the right time to help them make better decisions. A “better” decision might simply mean making a decision with less information, less noise, and less bias. Don’t throw the album at the CEO, give him a photo.

Thinking too long about complex matters often leads to paralysis — or if you’re lucky, some sort of compromise that weaves in and out of your 3-page long pro and con list. Conversely, making snap decisions on simple matters can lead to equally bad results. A good rule of thumb is that if the matter is simple, think about it. Spend time on it. Make a good decision. Do this when you buy a new dishwasher, if you’re deciding what to feed the kids for dinner, or if you need to hire a new employee. For more intricate and complex matters, like asking your girlfriend to marry you, rely on rapid cognition to deliver an appropriate amount of insight without all the noise (the “she doesn’t dig sci-fi, but she does like roller coasters” back and forth in your brain might take years to sort out). Your brain’s rapid cognition center will automatically filter out the noise, make a good decision for you, and in the end, you’ll be happy with yourself moving forward. Do you really need to think long and hard about getting out of the way of a speeding bus? Should you go on an impulse-shopping spree?

Malcolm doesn’t talk about this, but I think that regret comes out of making bad choices after thinking too long and too hard. You end up making some sort of compromise, when you knew exactly what you really wanted in the first two seconds. Think about some of your greatest regrets. Before you made the fatal compromise or decision, the one that you would come to regret, did you think long and hard about it? I have a silly monkey tattoo on my ankle that I thought long and hard about getting. My gut told me no, but here I am more than 10 years later not too happy with my decision.

Blink and Bloomberg Professional

Yesterday I attended a training session for using the Bloomberg Professional data service. Within their training, they talked about their Launchpad desktop application. This got me thinking about Blink and data warehousing.

Launchpad allows you save any number of functions that are specific to your business needs so that you can easily get to them again (sort of like your Internet Favorites or Bookmarks). With thousands of functions, I’m quite sure that Launchpad was well-received. But on a deeper level, Launchpad gives brokers and researchers the ability to make better decisions faster. You now have a filter. Not as fast as a blink of your eye, but close. You can get lost in Bloomberg Professional and spend hours upon hours achieving absolutely nothing. Is this the cost of research? Or is it that we need more filters? As Business Intelligence professionals, application developers, and solution providers, we must start thinking that “Less is More” and start giving our end-users access to new brain functions.

Scorecards, dashboards, and aggregations are great examples of initiatives that are in this arena. But it isn’t so much about the latest tool or interface, it’s about a mindset. It’s about providing decision-makers with just enough information to “thin-slice” a situation or condition and make an approriate decision to gain some business advantage. Malcom talks a great deal about thin-slicing and provides several great examples of how it works.

Recommendation

Tipping Point was a better read and seemed to have a better direction. In fact, I was wondering throughout Blink what Gladwell’s real point was: Should we or shouldn’t we rely on Rapid Cognition? He added an Afterward some time after the book was first published and this actually tied his thoughts together. Without the Afterward, I would have been thoroughly disappointed.

That said, this is a good book that got me thinking (not so rapidly, though!) If you liked Tipping Point, this is another book with a subtle social message (that involves screens, women, and large musical instruments — now doesn’t that make you want to go out and get it?).

More importantly for me, it has given me a bit of a push into a different way of thinking about business problems, data as an asset, and decision support.

You can get Blink here from Amazon.

Let me sum up how I feel about Bush’s question to a group of Israeli students: WTF?

This man is totally out of touch with reality. He has no idea what is going on. One Christian Arab asked the lame President (I mean lame duck President) this question as Bush tried to convince them that he doesn’t hate Muslims: “I think it comes out that you don’t like Muslims because in most of your speeches you tend to relate extremism to Muslims”

He responded,

“Actually, what I say is you’re not a religious person if you’re a murderer,” he replied. “But you’re right. I’ve got to do a better job of making it clear when I talk about Islam [that] I talk about a peaceful religion.”

Ok, fine. But then the conversation took a Bush twist. Dances. Unbelievable…

Buses 79 and 21, to be exact.

I attended a business event with my colleagues at our new offices in the Tractebel region of Brussels. From Troon, which is where I am currently stationed, Tractebel is pretty far. The only way to get their aside from driving is by bus.

So I logged into the SNCB (b-rail.be) website and planned my route. I like their site, it makes it fairly easy to get from place to place in Brussels. I wish they had some better mapping, but no biggie.

After I got my route together, I took hold of my jump pass and hopped on the 21. Totally uneventful except for the fact that it started to rain. It always rains when i head to a work event *sigh*. Next came the 79. Again, totally boring. But this time, at least, the bus was pretty much empty so I had more room to sit and relax. There was a pretty interesting fellow with his seeing-eye dog. I really have no idea how that works. This man, using his dog as a guide, walked right over to the open doors of the bus and up into it without troubles. He then went right over to a seat and sat down. How did he know some old lady wasn’t already sitting there? Certainly his dog couldn’t relay that info.

Anyway, I sat through a DRP (disaster recovery plan) and Business Continuity presentation from a colleague that was both very interesting and thoroughly boring. Later I ate some oddball Belgian food then got a ride by new friend Frank to Central Station.

So there you have it. The most mundane adventure yet. I hope to have more interesting things to say… at some point… hopefully…

So I had an aha moment the other day while in Amsterdam. I was talking with a new friend about the Dutch language and he said something that really made me stop and think. For all my life (well, for as long as I could count to at least the number 13), I never questioned where the “teen” came in. We go from twelve to thirteen to fourteen and so on. I reasoned that “teen” was just a better and more fluid way of saying “ten”. Thirten and Fourten just don’t sound as cool.

But here is the aha. Ten in Dutch is “tien”, which is prounounced like “teen”. Also in dutch, numbers are built backwards (which I am still getting used to). So, for example, the number twentytwo in dutch is translated as “two and twenty”.

Just like our “teen” system! Three and ten, four and ten, five and ten, etc… Get it?

I feel so much smarter now. It turns out that our “teen” system is likely a derivative of Dutch and/or Germandeveloped before 900AD. Real linguists out there will know for sure. But I don’t really care about the specifics!

As the death toll in Myanmar rises (Red Cross now predicts more than 120,000), so too does the death toll in China. The new number is somewhere around 12,000.

“Chinese workers are racing against the clock to find survivors Tuesday, one day after a massive earthquake struck southwestern Sichuan province. Officials say the death toll is near 12,000 and rising, as officials slowly make contact with the hardest-hit areas. Stephanie Ho reports from Beijing.”

Here is an open letter to Hillary Clinton. Presidential candidate wanabe:

Come on Hillary. You know as well as the rest of us you cannot get enough votes to be the Democratic nominee. You know that you’re just hurting the party by prolonging this race, by making Barak spend more time and money campaigning.

But you just won’t give up.

I hope she looses, and then because of all this, Barak picks another running mate. If she bowed out now, he may in fact pick her to gain the support of all those working class women she seems to garner. But she’s now making things difficult when it is almost impossible for her to pull off a win.

Policy will help. Technology will help. But the most important thing we need to make a greener world isn’t something you can buy at the store.

This article is Lighter Footstep’s contribution to Blog Action Day, a remarkable cooperative event in which some 15,000 blogs and websites will address the topic of the Environment.

The combined readership of the committed sites — as measured by their RSS feed counts — totals about 12 million. Most of the bloggers involved do not regularly address green issues. Of course, that’s not the case with Lighter Footstep and its sister publication, EcoTech Daily. We talk about environmentally related themes all the time, which makes picking a topic for Blog Action Day a bit more problematic.

We face a bewildering series of challenges over the next few decades. In Atlanta this morning, officials will meet to discuss a previously unthinkable crisis: the city is approximately 120 days from exhausting its supply of fresh water. This same issue, the result of climate change and outdated management policies, will soon be faced by other major metropolitan areas, such as Mexico City and Beijing.

Water isn’t the only thing in short supply: so is petroleum, the energy which powers virtually every aspect of our industrial society. The oceans are becoming vast whirlpools of plastic waste. By the time you finish reading this article, 430 acres of old-growth forest will have disappeared forever. The calculus of human survival is becoming increasingly complex.

But there’s one thing — a very simple thing, really — that can turn it all around. And I’ve decided to share this secret with you for Blog Action Day.

The Big Secret

So here you go: We must reduce our consumption.

That’s it, really. Technology will help. Policy will help. There may be new discoveries and unforeseeable developments which mitigate our transition to a lighter, more resource-efficient society. But we’ve left things a bit late to expect business as usual in the new century.

The era of single-occupant, six thousand pound vehicles is over. So is the expectation of limitless fresh water, productive farmland, and the energy to bring food and goods to market if we continue to apply yesterday’s solutions to contemporary problems.

There’s good news, though. People get it. In just two short years, the environmental movement has gone from being on the ropes to being on the front page. Green advocates and big business are working hand in hand.

Step By Step Green Living

But it still comes down to individual action — you and me, each doing what we can to reduce the amount of stuff necessary to run our lives. It’s taking a bus or riding a bike instead of driving; swapping our lightbulbs for CFLs (or, even better, mercury-free LED lighting). Helping to reduce livestock runoff into our precious watershed by swapping a few meat meals for healthy vegetarian fare. Slashing unnecessary power use around the home. Recycling and reusing, rather than burdening our landfills. Choosing bulk goods over heavily packaged products. Taking our green ethics to the grocery store. Relearning skills pushed aside by thoughtless consumerism.

It’s often argued that all the individual action in the world won’t offset the environmental damage caused by one dirty coal plant halfway across the globe, and there’s truth to that. If there’s one thing politicians are good at, though, it’s getting in front of a parade.  When people act, politicians follow. That’s what they call “leadership.” And we need to let them lead us exactly where we’re headed — toward the agreements we’ll need to make sure the process of greening the planet fair for everyone.

You Can Help

Sometimes at Lighter Footstep we feel a bit like those politicians, running as hard as we can to keep pace a motivated and well-informed readership. I’ve always said that the best ideas for green living come from you. Over the coming weeks, we’ll be asking you to step up and lend your experience to the cause. In the meantime, we’ll renew our promise to make Lighter Footstep a unique source of practical and actionable strategies for green living. Thanks for participating in Blog Action Day — and here’s to a greener world.

This article originally appeared on Blog Action Day: 15 October, 2007. In all, 20,603 websites participated in the event, generating 23,327 green-themed articles and features. Blog Action Day reached over 14 million readers subscribed to the RSS feeds of its participating sites.

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It’s true that April showers bring mayflowers. But first, there’s the lawn.

Spring has arrived in the Northern Hemisphere — and with it, the warm weather ritual of trotting out the mower and getting that yard under control. We all want to present a decent-looking lawn to guests and neighbors. Unfortunately, that raises some questions for wannabe green gardeners.

In environmental terms, lawnmowers are absolutely filthy. According to the California Environmental Protection Agency, running an average mower for one hour produces about as much air pollution as 40 late model cars. In the same hour, that mower would emit as much pollution as an automobile driven 650 miles.

Skyrocketing fuel prices alone are enough reason to reconsider gasoline-powered lawn tools. At EcoTech Daily, we’ve rounded up examples of the world’s three most eco-friendly (and gasoline-free) lawnmowers. If you’re thinking about replacing your smoke-belching lawn beast, here are a few ideas to help make your lawn deep-down green.

Remington Cordless PowerMower

The Remington Cordless PowerMower is a good example of a plug-in replacement for today’s gasoline powered rotary models. Once a fairly exotic item, electric mowers are now stocked by most full-service lawncare and home improvement stores. Their performance and feature sets are similar to conventional models.

We’ve chosen this particular mower for its beefy 60 volt battery, which Remington claims will provide a full hour’s operation under average use. The PowerMower features a modest 17 inch cutting deck — presumably to keep the mower’s workload down to a reasonable level. The unit should be suitable for most surburban yards. If yours is unusually large, extra batteries are available. Charge time is about 10 hours, so having an extra cell on standby is probably a good idea.

Remington has designed the PowerMower to be lightweight and quiet. It retails for $449.99. This class of mower is the closest electrical equivalent to the familiar gas-powered machine. The big difference, of course, is that it’s emission-free — and will only use about $5 worth of electricity a year. It won’t be long before that’s the price of a single gallon of gasoline.

Brill Razorcut 38 Push Reel Mower

Yes: push. With your muscles.

Until the late 1960s or so, power mowers were considered a luxury. Kids spent their summers hustling pocket money by doing the real work of cutting lawns, and push mowers were the only game in town. The mowers were inexpensive, durable — and heavy. They were also pollution-free.

The Brill Razorcut 38 Push Reel Mower is a big improvement over the monster in Ozzie and Harriet’s garage. It’s lighter — about 17 pounds — and features tempered and welded steel baldes which should stay sharp for five to eight years. That’s about four times longer than a traditional push mower. The Razorcut uses sealed bearings, so it won’t need oiling. Parts are enameled or powder coated. It could last as long as you do.

Don’t be mistaken: a push mower is work. They’re a struggle in tall grass, so you’ll mow more frequently. And while the Razorcut’s 38-inch cutting deck sounds plush, the preferred push mowing method is to overlap your previous pass by half. Your lawn will appreciate the effort, though: most yard experts think reel mowers, with their scissor-like cut, are gentler on the grass.

They’re certainly gentler on the environment. The Brill Razorcut birns nothing but belly fat. Suggested retail is $249, shipping included. A grass catcher is an extra $35.

A scythe

Green tech needn’t mean high tech. The scythe has been around in various forms since humans became interested in agriculture.

It wasn’t until well after the Industrial Revolution that the scythe began taking a back seat to machinery. There’s no topping the scythe’s efficiency: The average worker could clear an acre of wheat a day. All without fossil fuel or draft animals.

The two blades pictured here appear at Scytheconnection.com. They’re a Canadian website that serves as a clearinghouse for all things scythe, from supplies to instructional DVDs. These people are serious about the beauty of steel in the hands of someone who knows how to use it.

Scythe blades come in different weights and sizes, depending on the job. The pair pictured here would make short work of yards too dense for even the most muscular gas-fired mower. Blades range from $60 to $80, with snaths (the handle) priced at about $80. You’ll need a wetstone and some odds and ends, too.

Wielding a scythe is more a matter of technique than strength. Not convinced? Watch the barefoot 14-year-old girl in this video show how our ancestors got things done.

This article originally appeared on EcoTech Daily, one of Lighter Footstep’s sister publications.

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Perhaps this initiative is just simply too late.

Here is the word-for-word release by CAIR:

U.S. officials are being advised in internal government documents to avoid referring publicly to al-Qaida and other terrorist groups as Islamic or Muslim, and not to use terms like jihad or mujahedin, which “unintentionally legitimize” terrorism.

“There’s a growing consensus (in the administration) that we need to move away from that language,” said a former senior administration official who was involved until recently in policy debates on the issue. . .

Urging officials not to use the word Islam in conjunction with terrorism, the guide notes that, “Although the al-Qaida network exploits religious sentiments and tries to use religion to justify its actions, we should treat it as an illegitimate political organization, both terrorist and criminal.”

Instead of calling terror groups Muslim or Islamic, the guide suggests using words like totalitarian, terrorist or violent extremist — “widely understood terms that define our enemies appropriately and simultaneously deny them any level of legitimacy.”

Any thoughts? We’ve all had this discussion about word associations for years now. It seems as though the government and their advisers should have caught on a long time ago. Too much damage has already been done.

I’m not even sure what to write about this one. So here’s a quote from the New York Times. The headline read: “Germany: Bodies of 3 Babies Are Found in a Family’s Freezer”.

A 44-year-old woman has been arrested on suspicion of killing her own babies, after her older children found the bodies of three infants stashed at the bottom of the family’s freezer while looking for a frozen pizza, the police said. Police officials confirmed the discovery on Sunday night in the town of Wenden, near Olpe, in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia, after the woman turned herself in. A son, 18, and a daughter, 24, discovered the bodies Saturday afternoon while their parents were away for the weekend, investigators said. The infants are believed to have been born alive, the police said. The authorities were awaiting autopsy results.

Ugh…

Last night I jumped on the train to Amsterdam to attend a conference put on by Q4K (Quest for Knowledge). (I’ll blog more about the content of the conference over at Tod means Fox.) The conference runs ’till Friday.

The train ride was long and hot. For a stretch (between stops Brussel Centraal and Mechelen), I had to stand. Not a lot of fun when you have to stand with about a dozen other people in a poorly ventilated tin can. And not a lot of fun when you have a laptop and suitcase resting at your feet. One kid took a tumble when the train hit a bump and his foot got caught on the exposed wheel of my bag. I felt bad, but hey — he was alright. Nothing broken. No blood.

The train got significantly lighter when we dropped off passengers in Antwerpen Centraal. And then again in Roosendaal. By the time we reached Den Haag, I was living large. I bought a Coke from the cart guy (a dirty old man wheeling a cart of expensive goodies down the isle like a stewardess on Northwest Airlines). I had a seat next to me all to myself, and I was cruising along in my new book: Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, by Malcolm Gladwell.

I really enjoyed Malcolm’s Tipping Point, and am really enjoying Blink so far. I’ll be posting more about this soon…

…

So here I am, at the hotel. Questing for knowledge and thinking without thinking. Sort of ironic I suppose.

Yesterday, I took the family out to to see the steam engines. I don’t take them out much, but when I do…

We had a great time. And my son — a major Thomas & Friends fan — didn’t stop smiling all day. That was well worth the 10 euro price of admission.

The event was in Maldegem. We drove from Drongen up the E40 toward Brugges. The ride was about 30 minutes and both kids were fast asleep the entire time. Ahh… zen.

On to the steam engines: These things are much louder and smellier and dirtier than I imagined. And yes, I have spent time imagining what it would have been like taking a steam train into work very day. Now, I take the electric trains, which are reasonably quiet and clean.

At one point, my wife pointed out all the little black particles (not really sure what they were, maybe bits of coal or some byproduct from the steam) scattered on her and our daughter — sort of like steam engine dandruff you could say. I felt like a real bad dad for a bit. My poor daughter is only a few months old and here we are! Sprinkling her with coal jimmies.

That’s the headline.

Update: The death toll from the Myanmar cyclone is more than 15,000 people, Myanmar’s government has said, with at least 10,000 killed in the township of Bogalay alone, according to the Chinese state-run news agency Xinhua.

The Cyclone hit over the weekend and has claimed the lives of thousands, with thousands more missing in Myanmar (Burma). Not only that, but there are many injured and those left cut off without access, without clean drinking water, and likely without a home to return to.

The Burmese people are used to monsoon-like rains (causing flooding and landslides), but this Cyclone was really something else. Earthquakes are also very serious there.

This adds to recent news about AIDS problems in the area. Life isn’t good right now in Myanmar.