Author: admin

Winterson offers:

1. Turn up for work. Discipline allows creative freedom. No discipline equals no freedom.
2. Never stop when you are stuck. You may not be able to solve the problem, but turn aside and write something else. Do not stop altogether.
3. Love what you do.
4. Be honest with yourself. If you are no good, accept it. If the work you are ­doing is no good, accept it.
5. Don’t hold on to poor work. If it was bad when it went in the drawer it will be just as bad when it comes out.
6. Take no notice of anyone you don’t respect.
7. Take no notice of anyone with a ­gender agenda. A lot of men still think that women lack imagination of the fiery kind.
8. Be ambitious for the work and not for the reward.
9. Trust your creativity.
10. Enjoy this work!

Source: Jeanette Winterson’s 10 Tips on Writing – Brain Pickings

My work with Dr. Rao reveals similar problems: Employees who start big programs are often celebrated, but rarely those who end old, obsolete and ineffective programs and practices. And managers who lord over big teams and keep adding underlings are rewarded with prestigious titles and big raises—even when their ever-expanding army of bureaucrats adds unnecessary rules and procedures that sap time and energy from people who do the most important work. Instead, the best leaders discourage this addition sickn

Source: How Bosses Waste Their Employees’ Time – WSJ

The Eclipse Foundation recently announced two milestone achievements in September 2018: the migration of GlassFish source code from Oracle has been completed; and the Java EE TCK is now open-sourced at Eclipse. GlassFish Application Server The migration of GlassFish source code from Oracle has been completed. Considered a major milestone for the advancement of Jakarta EE and a new era for GlassFish, the announcement continued to say:

Source: A New Era for GlassFish

TLDR: On a personal level Efficiency is about staying at the PPF while Productivity is about extending the PPF.
I use to tell people how certain professions affect the Production Possibility Frontier.
 

(image from Investopedia)
Doctors try to keep output at a certain point along the PPF. This is because doctors try to keep you alive and healthy for as long as possible.
The fewer people there are the lower the PPF is.
Lawyers supposedly create transactions in a low trust environment. They allow people to operate at a certain efficiency. The creation of trust or trust substitutes by lawyers may also allow us to operate near the PPF.
Engineers like lawyers can allow us to operate near or at the PPF. Engineers also when they invent new processes allow us to extend the PPF.
Researchers/Inventors/Innovators more so than engineers allow us to extend the PPF. This can be illustrated by silicon technology. The science of transforming sand to silicon has made an abundant resource the foundation of what some people term as the 4th industrial revolution.
 

I saw this post in Medium: https://medium.com/swlh/focus-on-productivity-not-efficiency-4ed4fe9a454f
This has made me realize that a lot of people I know do the efficiency thing more than the productivity thing. Efficiency mostly is doing the same thing only a little bit better while increasing productivity in the expanding mindset means expanding what you do.
I know it is not an exact example but it’s close.
Regards

An argument is frequently put forth that the government made a huge profit on the bailouts. This is an impossible stance to counter. It’s like trying to quantify how plaid something is. Sure, in an environment in which the chief bailout recipients were allowed virtually limitless access to free capital; affirmatively non-prosecuted for severe regulatory violations (like rigging electricity prices or laundering money for drug cartels); repeatedly saved from crippling litigation by sweetheart settlements; an

Source: Matt Taibbi on the 10-Year Anniversary of the Crash – Rolling Stone

…He spoke with Knowable Magazine…. “One of the experiments we did compared the ability of individual ants or colonies to distinguish light levels. We found that when light differences are tiny, the colonies make better decisions than individual ants do. It’s a nice example of the wisdom of crowds—groups can improve their acuity or precision by combining the efforts of many relatively noisy, imprecise individuals. But where there’s a big difference in brightness, the individuals working on their own actually get the question right more often than the colony does. That surprised us, because we were expecting the wisdom of crowds to work across the board.Our best guess is that there is a downside to the way these colonies integrate information. One animal finds a dark nest, and she’ll recruit a nestmate with a probability that depends on how dark the nest is. Another ant will find a competing nest that’s maybe a little bit brighter, so she’ll recruit a nestmate to that with a probability that’s a little bit lower, because the nest is not quite as good. The ant who’s been recruited then decides herself whether she’ll stick with that nest and start recruiting still others to it. That allows the colony to detect a small difference in light level and move to the darker and better nest. But sometimes, just by chance, one ant makes a mistake and recruits others to a nest that’s not very good. If the ants she recruits also make a mistake and get too excited about this not-very-good nest, then pretty soon you can have an amplification of the error—the madness of crowds. That doesn’t happen often, but it’s a danger that’s always present. For an individual ant, that can’t happen, because she has to do everything on her own. If it’s obvious which nest is brighter, then an individual ant can solve it on her own with a high probability of being right. And since she doesn’t have this danger of falling into a positive feedback cascade, then maybe she can do better in those cases than a colony can…

Source: Grasping Reality with at Least Three Hands

Japan’s GDP growth lags most other developed economies, and will likely continue to do so as the population slowly declines. But what matters for human welfare is GDP per capita, and on this front, the country excels.

Source: Japan’s Successful Economic Model by Adair Turner – Project Syndicate

Daily Cadence of OPS Meetings
09.20 PS
09.40 HCP
10.00 Cosaint
10.20 MW
10.40 BFS
11.20 DTC
Agenda:
Status of activities/goals last Friday
Activities/goals today
Activities/goals tomorrow

If you want to say something don’t.
Stop
Think
Determine
When
How
What