Organizations need more people with leadership skills than you think

I would like to take issue with a point made in Why do we persist in trying to turn ourselves (and other people) into what we and they plainly are not?

The writer believes that only one or two leaders are needed to work with a very large number (tens or hundreds) of people. The following are counter-examples and counter-arguments.

  • A committee typically has between 5-10 members. It needs a leader to function effectively.
  • When an emergency, such as fire, earthquake or serious equipment malfunction occurs, there is not always time to bring the leader (assuming that the leader is not already busy putting out a fire elsewhere). At least one of the people dealing with the emergency needs to have leadership skills and be able to organize his colleagues as necessary to deal with the emergency.
  • People with leadership skills have also better team membership skills. They would support the current endeavor’s leader and make him more effective.
  • It is easier to restructure and expand the organization if external circumstances so require, if it already has high percentage of people with leadership skills.
  • People with genuine leadership skills would not indulge in petty politicizing to the detriment of themselves and their fellows.

Freedom of expression for primary and high school teachers

I was prompted to write this by a request, which I received today.

Some background information: large part of the contents of my DEAF-INFO Web site is material, which was posted to the DEAF-L mailing list by various subscribers over the years. When the mailing list was active, I saved the best posts and put them in the Web site, with attribution to the original contributor.

The request, which I received today, was to remove the attributions to a particular contributor.

In the past I received similar requests. Upon further questioning, it turned out that most of those requests were made by people, who expressed their strong opinions about various deafness related issues, while they were students. Few years later, they were to get jobs as teachers in schools of the deaf. Then they were concerned that they’ll get into trouble because of the opinions, which they expressed in the past.

I asked someone, who teaches in a regular primary school, about this. She explained to me that teachers are forbidden to publicly express their opinions. The teachers are usually state or county employees. The only people authorized to publicize opinions are the employer’s public relations specialists.

I believe that this state of affairs is rather unfortunate. Teachers work “in the trenches” – they deal with pupils with learning disabilities, they deal with non-working educational methodologies, they deal with poorly-designed materials. They should be able to criticize non-working methods of instruction. If their school principal does not improve the methods, the teachers should be free to publicize their criticism. This would allow parents to ultimately have a say in improving the quality of instruction their children receive.

This is important especially in the area of deaf education, which is especially rife with conflict among different goals (integration vs. separate identity), philosophies (oral vs. Sign Language) and a bewildering choice of communication methods.

Treatment of terminal patients by unapproved drugs

In a recent case brought before a federal appeals court in USA, the court ruled that patients with terminal illnesses do not have a constitutional right to use medicines that have not yet won regulatory approval.

There is a big gap in the reporting about the case in question. It was not stated whether the pharmaceutical companies in question would supply the experimental drugs for free or at most for nominal cost; or whether they would require the terminal patients to pay full price for those drugs.

On one hand, selling unapproved & experimental drugs to patients with terminal illnesses is akin to making loans bearing usurious interest to people with poor money handling skills, or to bilking gullible victims by witch doctors. Patients or their next of kin could be induced to part with huge amounts of money in a futile last-ditch attempt to save their lives. Such an activity should rightly be banned.

On the other hand, if a pharmaceutical company is willing to provide an experimental drug free of charge, then the above considration does not apply. The company’s researchers have to believe in the drug for them to want to foist it on the terminal patients. In such a case, the company would have no financial incentive to foist untested drugs on gullible victims. The only benefit the company would get would be from having more clinical experience with the experimental drug.

My suspicion is that the case in question was about the right of pharmaceutical companies to foist, for a pay, experimental drugs on terminal patients. It would be interesting to see who is really behind the Abigail Alliance, the case’s litigants.

Stephen Wolfram’s “A New Kind of Science”

Few months ago, I at last bought my copy of “A New Kind of Science” by Stephen Wolfram (ISBN 1-57955-008-8). I expect to finish reading the entire book few months from now, and then go on to reading other books.

The book fulfilled my expectations of being interesting and intellectually stimulating book.

The first observation, which I made from reading the book was that Continue reading “Stephen Wolfram’s “A New Kind of Science””

Updated warning to spammers

Due to shifting values of currencies, I updated the language of the standard spam warning text, which I affix to E-mail messages sent to public mailing lists, and to other information, which I put in the public Internet.

At this opportunity, I also improved a bit the styling and added links to certain stuff which I consider to be Very Important.

Responsible adult vs. lawsuit-happy childish

There are some countries, in which people are lawsuit-happy. USA is the notorious example. In such countries, whenever something bad happens to someone, he sues the nearest deep-pocketed individual or organization.

As a reaction, several organizations make laws restricting the freedom of people to take risks and do things. The organizations know that they cannot expect people to take responsibility for their mistakes.

The result is that even responsible people have their freedom limited. Because someone else was bruised and sued the organization for $2 million, you cannot take that shortcut way but have to walk the long way.

The problem is that people do not declare if they want to be treated as responsible adults or as irresponsible (but lawsuit-happy) children. My proposal is that each service provider shall register its clients as either childish or mature.

  • If you are childish, you are restricted, but can sue the organization for any slight wrongdoing.
  • If you are mature, you are expected to accept responsibility for whatever is happening to you. You may sue only at extreme circumstances.

People will declare how they want to be treated – as childish or as mature. The declaration for one organization is not related to declaration for another organization.

The distinction is by competence. For example, someone may want to be adult car driver yet childish scuba diver. Some organizations may want to provide more than two maturity levels (gradual steps from childish to mature). The declaration is not reversible – once you declared yourself as a mature adult, you cannot revert to being childish.

If you do not know if you can handle a situation, you may want the organization serving you to provide you with a self-test to help you decide if you want to be considered as childish or as mature in your dealings with the organization in question.

It must be a Monty Python skit!

The TDDPirate was red-haired (what the English call “ginger”) at his childhood. He remembers people being positive about his hair color.

He was startled by the news items Red-headed family forced to move after ‘ginger’ hate campaign and Is gingerism as bad as racism?.

Turns out that in England, red-haired people are singled out for teasing and harassment. And this is not an April Fool Day story either.

Thanks to for the links to the above news items.

Top 25 Censored Stories of 2007

Top 25 Censored Stories of 2007
Some of the stories are startling. For example:
#2 Halliburton Charged with Selling Nuclear Technologies to Iran
#11 Dangers of Genetically Modified Food Confirmed

The information is slanted against Israel – see:
#9 The World Bank Funds Israel-Palestine Wall
On the other hand, the story of Palestinian terror acts, before the Wall’s construction was started, is not widely known outside of Israel and is not in the list.

Hasamba-style Questions about Windows Vista Sales

It was publicized that Microsoft sold 40 million licenses of its Windows Vista OS. The question is if this is for real or not?

For real:

  • Microsoft’s revenues during Q1 2007 were reported to be much higher than in previous quarters.

But more than 10% of those revenues are deferred income from the Software Assurance program, which is being recognized now.

Reasons to doubt whether those numbers mean much:

  • The already publicized reason – it is not known whether those licenses represent PCs and laptops already sold to the public, or still in warehouses.
  • How many developers received licenses as part of their MSDN subscriptions?
  • How many licenses were disbursed at no extra cost to those, who paid for Software Assurance during the last few years?

And I still do not mention the question how many people tried Windows Vista and then switched back to Windows XP. In those cases, Microsoft already got the money for the Vista license, and the customer got several more gigabytes, with which to fill his bookshelf.

"Do you need assistance?"

Recently I flew with British Airways.
They seem to have recently made commitment to provide accessible experience to passengers with special needs.
At any case, when checking in for flights, I was now asked if I need special assistance. The accessibility program seems to be relatively new – they now know how to deal with passengers with difficulties in walking, but deaf passengers are relatively new experience for them. So I had my turn at educating the airline employees that deaf passengers need a way to see the captain’s messages in writing, especially in emergencies.
The airplanes, in which I flew both directions, had plasma TVs for each seat. However the video programs were suspended whenever there were announcements – with no written rendition of the announcements. This is something, which can be improved.
An hilarious experience was when the airplane neared landing. I was asked by two stewards if I need assistance. I explained that I’ll need assistance, only if we crash land, and the captain gives instructions to the passengers. We all laughed.