When U.S. air force discovered the flaw of averages

https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-force-discovered-the-flaw-of-averages.html

Before he crunched his numbers, the consensus among his fellow air force researchers was that the vast majority of pilots would be within the average range on most dimensions. After all, these pilots had already been pre-selected because they appeared to be average sized. (If you were, say, six foot seven, you would never have been recruited in the first place.) The scientists also expected that a sizable number of pilots would be within the average range on all 10 dimensions. But even Daniels was stunned when he tabulated the actual number.

Zero.

Out of 4,063 pilots, not a single airman fit within the average range on all 10 dimensions. One pilot might have a longer-than-average arm length, but a shorter-than-average leg length. Another pilot might have a big chest but small hips. Even more astonishing, Daniels discovered that if you picked out just three of the ten dimensions of size — say, neck circumference, thigh circumference and wrist circumference — less than 3.5 per cent of pilots would be average sized on all three dimensions. Daniels’s findings were clear and incontrovertible. There was no such thing as an average pilot. If you’ve designed a cockpit to fit the average pilot, you’ve actually designed it to fit no one.

My Restaurant Was My Life for 20 Years. Does the World Need It Anymore?

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/23/magazine/closing-prune-restaurant-covid.html

By the time of the all-staff meeting after brunch that day, I knew I was right. After a couple of weeks of watching the daily sales dwindle — a $12,141 Saturday to a $4,188 Monday to a $2,093 Thursday — it was a relief to decide to pull the parachute cord. I didn’t want to have waited too long, didn’t want to crash into the trees. Our sous chef FaceTimed in, as did our lead line cook, while nearly everyone else gathered in the dining room. I looked everybody in the eye and said, “I’ve decided not to wait to see what will happen; I encourage you to call first thing in the morning for unemployment, and you have a week’s paycheck from me coming.”

A catalogue of things that are stopping change. Part III, governance.

https://medium.com/@mortada/a-catalogue-of-things-that-are-stopping-change-part-iii-governance-2476601709e

The reality of responding to a situation like this is that things are changing day by day and hour by hour. We need to be responsive to the changing context, do the right thing for users, especially the front line and coordinate with the rest of the government. Long standing governance mechanisms like monthly board meetings, detailed risk logs and gantt charts fail to facilitate the responsiveness that we so crucially need. This certainly isn’t a time to dispense with governance but never has it been so important to implement it in a way that supports our work.

In this post, we are taking the term ‘governance’ to refer to the whole range of activities including the way people outside a team oversee, monitor, challenge, understand, support, direct, and control our work.

For Anyone Who’s Been Through It

https://www.theplayerstribune.com/en-us/articles/lauren-cox-baylor-wnba-draft-basketball

At seven years old, more or less overnight, I went from being this little kid without a care in the world to being a person with real responsibilities. And they weren’t the type of responsibilities that I could opt out of. You take a day off from treatment….. that’s not five minutes in the timeout corner or a stern talking-to or whatever. It’s life and death. You don’t have a choice — you have to do it.

You have to show up.

So why do I bring this all up now? Not for sympathy, that I can promise you. Sympathy has never interested me. And not for attention, I can promise you that as well. I’ve never wanted any attention for my condition, and I’ve gone out of my way to make sure that I haven’t been defined by it. The reason I bring it up now is because I think that managing a condition like diabetes and reaching the highest level of a sport — reaching the highest level of anything, honestly — actually have something pretty essential in common.

How China Sees the World -- And how we should see China

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/05/mcmaster-china-strategy/609088/

The party’s leaders believe they have a narrow window of strategic opportunity to strengthen their rule and revise the international order in their favor—before China’s economy sours, before the population grows old, before other countries realize that the party is pursuing national rejuvenation at their expense, and before unanticipated events such as the coronavirus pandemic expose the vulnerabilities the party created in the race to surpass the United States and realize the China dream. The party has no intention of playing by the rules associated with international law, trade, or commerce. China’s overall strategy relies on co-option and coercion at home and abroad, as well as on concealing the nature of China’s true intentions. What makes this strategy potent and dangerous is the integrated nature of the party’s efforts across government, industry, academia, and the military.

And, on balance, the Chinese Communist Party’s goals run counter to American ideals and American interests.

A Civil Servant’s prayer

https://medium.com/@michaelccata/a-civil-servants-prayer-b6b3af092ac3

One hypothesis: frustration is simply part of the challenge. Civic technologists can easily relate their frustrations with veterans of large institutions, both public and private. Occupational disillusionment is timeless and government is not the only place where red tape abounds and “nobody likes change.”

I think there’s more to the story. The job titles got me thinking. What if “bureaucracy hacker,” “service designer,” “innovation specialist,” or “digital transformation director” imply a level of discretion and autonomy that is fundamentally incompatible with the role of civil servants?

Are in-house civic technologists holding themselves accountable for things outside their remit and mistaking head-banging frustration with fighting for real change?

Behind the Johns Hopkins University coronavirus dashboard

https://www.natureindex.com/news-blog/behind-johns-hopkins-university-coronavirus-dashboard
“It was a bit of a spur-of-the-moment decision to say, let's build out this data set and let's keep doing it, let's make it public. And let's go ahead and visualize it while we're at it. And [we] built a dashboard that night.”

The intended audience, Gardner notes, was the research community - other epidemiologists and disease modelers, for instance. But the whole world took notice. The map receives more than a billion interactions a day - a number that includes both people visualizing the map and those who are mining the underlying data, Gardner says.

The team had anticipated the numbers would be more in the order of hundreds or thousands. “I think both of us were just pretty surprised with the general public interest.”

"BLACK POWER": A STATEMENT BY THE NATIONAL COMMITTEE OF NEGRO CHURCHMEN (1966)

http://www.talentshare.org/~mm9n/articles/dalit/7.htm

From the point of view of the Christian faith, there is nothing necessarily wrong with concern for power. At the heart of the Protestant Reformation is the belief that ultimate power belongs to God alone and that men become most inhuman when concentrations of power lead to the conviction—overt or covert—that any nation, race or organization can rival God in this regard. At issue in the relations between whites and Negroes in America is the problem of inequality of power. Out of this imbalance grows the disrespect of white men for the Negro personality and community, and the disrespect of Negroes for themselves. This is a fundamental root of human injustice in America. In one sense, the concept of "black power" reminds us of the need for and the possibility of authentic democracy in America.

How New York City’s Emergency Ventilator Stockpile Ended Up on the Auction Block

https://www.propublica.org/article/how-new-york-city-emergency-ventilator-stockpile-ended-up-on-the-auction-block
The city’s department of health, working with the state, was to begin purchasing ventilators and to “stockpile a supply of facemasks,” according to the report. Shortly after it was released, Bloomberg held a pandemic planning summit with top federal officials, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, now the face of the national coronavirus response.

In the end, the alarming predictions failed to spur action. In the months that followed, the city acquired just 500 additional ventilators as the effort to create a larger stockpile fizzled amid budget cuts.

Even those extra ventilators are long gone, the health department said on Sunday. The lifesaving devices broke down over time and were auctioned off by the city at least five years ago because the agency couldn’t afford to maintain them.

A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making

https://hbr.org/2007/11/a-leaders-framework-for-decision-making

Unfortunately, most leadership “recipes” arise from examples of good crisis management. This is a mistake, and not only because chaotic situations are mercifully rare. Though the events of September 11 were not immediately comprehensible, the crisis demanded decisive action. New York’s mayor at the time, Rudy Giuliani, demonstrated exceptional effectiveness under chaotic conditions by issuing directives and taking action to reestablish order. However, in his role as mayor—certainly one of the most complex jobs in the world—he was widely criticized for the same top-down leadership style that proved so enormously effective during the catastrophe. He was also criticized afterward for suggesting that elections be postponed so he could maintain order and stability. Indeed, a specific danger for leaders following a crisis is that some of them become less successful when the context shifts because they are not able to switch styles to match it.

Moreover, leaders who are highly successful in chaotic contexts can develop an overinflated self-image, becoming legends in their own minds. When they generate cultlike adoration, leading actually becomes harder for them because a circle of admiring supporters cuts them off from accurate information.

How ‘Unorthodox’ Captured One Woman’s Flight From Hasidic Brooklyn

Deborah Feldman left her ultra-Orthodox Jewish community for a new life in Berlin. She talked about what it has been like having her autobiography adapted for Netflix.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/31/arts/television/unorthodox-writer-deborah-feldman-netflix.html

I remember being surprised when I went to Sarah Lawrence, and I took a class on feminist philosophy in which everybody told me, “You left the patriarchy!” I was like: “Well, if I left the patriarchy, where were all the men in this patriarchy? Why were they always bent over books while the people who oppressed me were women? Why was it that the people who hurt me the most were my aunt, mother-in-law, female teachers, the female mikvah attendant, the female Kallah teacher and the female sex therapist? Why was it always the women that I felt hurt and betrayed by?” I had so little interaction with men, and the little I had made me see men as very passive and stuck.

Some good news

https://ewerickson.substack.com/p/some-good-news-303

You know the nightmare scenarios I’ve been telling you about? If we treat this like the seasonal flu we could get over 800,000 dead people. Well, here is good news.

We are not going to get the nightmare scenarios. Why?

It is not that the modeling was wrong. Actually, the modeling has been fairly accurate. The modeling is precisely why Governor Kemp has not locked down all of Georgia, for example. The modeling, it turns out, has been right.

That includes all the modeling — including the part that showed if we changed our behavior we could avoid the nightmare scenarios.

Because you and I have changed our behaviors, we are seeing good news in the data. There is still a lot to be troubled by and there are still shortages and problems ahead. But for most of the country, we are turning the corner. It’s going to take a bit longer to see for sure, but the data is really encouraging.

How to Talk to Coronavirus Skeptics

https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/how-to-talk-to-coronavirus-skeptics

In general, people use experts all the time, and most of us don’t spend a lot of time second-guessing experts on most issues. There are some definite exceptions to that. If we have reason to believe that people are dishonest or incompetent, then we may be skeptical. But, when it comes to science, the big exception has to do with what I’ve written about, which is implicatory denial. That is to say, we reject scientific findings because we don’t like their implications.

All of the major areas where we see resistance to scientific findings in contemporary life fall into this category. So if you ask yourself, Why do people reject the evidence of evolution? It’s not because evolutionary theory is a bad theory, or a weak theory scientifically, or that we don’t have good evidence for it. It’s because some people think that it implies that there’s no God, or that it implies that life is meaningless and has no purpose, or that it’s all just random and nihilistic. If we think about vaccinations, it’s a similar sort of thing. It’s not that the science of immunology is a bad science or a weak science. It’s not that the people who reject immunization really understand immunology and have an intellectual critique. It’s a matter of, if their children are autistic, they feel upset that their children have a quite devastating disease and modern medical science doesn’t have an explanation for it. So they feel upset and they want an explanation, and so they turn to something like vaccinations, and they say, “Well, that’s the cause.” And so on and so forth with climate change, et cetera.

That Discomfort You’re Feeling Is Grief

https://hbr.org/2020/03/that-discomfort-youre-feeling-is-grief?ab=hero-main-text
Finally, it’s a good time to stock up on compassion. Everyone will have different levels of fear and grief and it manifests in different ways. A coworker got very snippy with me the other day and I thought, That’s not like this person; that’s how they’re dealing with this. I’m seeing their fear and anxiety. So be patient. Think about who someone usually is and not who they seem to be in this moment.

One particularly troubling aspect of this pandemic is the open-endedness of it.

This is a temporary state. It helps to say it. I worked for 10 years in the hospital system. I’ve been trained for situations like this. I’ve also studied the Spanish Flu. The precautions we’re taking are the right ones. History tells us that. This is survivable. We will survive. This is a time to overprotect but not overreact.

America’s coronavirus response failed because we didn’t understand the complexity of the problem.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/03/what-really-doomed-americas-coronavirus-response/608596/

In the United States and Europe, the die is mostly cast for the immediate future. But understanding our failures leading up to this moment isn’t an abstract exercise. Maybe we will muddle through the next few months, at great cost. But we will still need all the systemic thinking we can muster to anticipate the second and third order effects that will follow this crisis. And if we hope to blunt the impact of others like it, let’s not forget, again, that all of our lives are, together, embedded in highly complex systems.

Hold the line

https://medium.com/@jpsmithalt/hold-the-line-17231c48ff17

First, we are in the very infancy of this epidemic’s trajectory. That means even with these measures we will see cases and deaths continue to rise globally, nationally, and in our own communities in the coming weeks. This may lead some people to think that the social distancing measures are not working. They are. They may feel futile. They aren’t. You will feel discouraged. You should. This is normal in chaos. But this is normal epidemic trajectory. Stay calm. This enemy that we are facing is very good at what it does; we are not failing. We need everyone to hold the line as the epidemic inevitably gets worse. This is not my opinion; this is the unforgiving math of epidemics for which I and my colleagues have dedicated our lives to understanding with great nuance, and this disease is no exception. I want to help the community brace for this impact. Stay strong and with solidarity knowing with absolute certainty that what you are doing is saving lives, even as people begin getting sick and dying. You may feel like giving in. Don’t.

The Virus Can Be Stopped, but Only With Harsh Steps, Experts Say

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/22/health/coronavirus-restrictions-us.html

Just as generals take the lead in giving daily briefings in wartime — as Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf did during the Persian Gulf war — medical experts should be at the microphone now to explain complex ideas like epidemic curves, social distancing and off-label use of drugs.

The microphone should not even be at the White House, scientists said, so that briefings of historic importance do not dissolve into angry, politically charged exchanges with the press corps, as happened again on Friday.

Instead, leaders must describe the looming crisis and the possible solutions in ways that will win the trust of Americans.

Above all, the experts said, briefings should focus on saving lives and making sure that average wage earners survive the coming hard times — not on the stock market, the tourism industry or the president’s health. There is no time left to point fingers and assign blame.

“At this point in the emergency, there’s little merit in spending time on what we should have done or who’s at fault,” said Adm. Tim Ziemer, who was the coordinator of the President’s Malaria Initiative from 2006 until early 2017 and led the pandemic response unit on the National Security Council before its disbanding.

“We need to focus on the enemy, and that’s the virus.”

THE TRIBES THAT BIND

http://annesnyder.org/2020/01/08/the-tribes-that-bind/
We live disaggregated lives. We are disaggregated physically, many of us living far from family and home base. We are disaggregated sociologically, many of us shuttling between contexts that don’t touch one another, compartmentalized social and civic habits compounded now by online engagement. We are also disaggregated morally, the elites we once trusted to lead either offended by the idea that there could be a shared compass in pluralistic times, or themselves so corrupted in character and vision that it’s hopeless to defer in their direction.

And so we resort to an ancient survival mechanism activated when fear is kicked up and identities of all kinds are under siege: Find your team and defend it. It’s your only shot at significance and psychic sanity.

How to Survive a Plague

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/03/andrew-sullivan-how-to-survive-the-coronavirus-pandemic.html
These weeks of confinement can be seen also, it seems to me, as weeks of a national retreat, a chance to reset and rethink our lives, to ponder their fragility. I learned one thing in my 20s and 30s in the AIDS epidemic: Living in a plague is just an intensified way of living. It merely unveils the radical uncertainty of life that is already here, and puts it into far sharper focus. We will all die one day, and we will almost all get sick at some point in our lives; none of this makes sense on its own (especially the dying part). The trick, as the great religions teach us, is counterintuitive: not to seize control, but to gain some balance and even serenity in absorbing what you can’t.

There may be moments in this great public silence when we learn and relearn this lesson. Because we will need to relearn it, as I’m rediscovering in this surreal flashback to a way of living I once knew. Plague living is almost seasonal for humans. Like the spring which insists on arriving.

See you next Friday.

“They Ignored the Warning Signs”: A New York City ER Doctor Explains What She’s Up Against

https://www.vogue.com/article/corona-virus-new-york-city-er-doctor

What are you seeing on the ground in the ER right now?

It’s changing every day. A point I want to emphasize, though, is that the federal government set us up for failure. They should have paid attention to what the forecasters were saying months ago, but they ignored the warning signs and stuck their heads in the sand. The underreporting and under-testing has made us fundamentally unable to combat this effectively. The New York [state] government has been remarkable; [Governor Andrew] Cuomo has been doing a great job. But the lack of federal oversight means that there will be pockets of success and pockets of failure. It makes it that much harder for us to combat this on a global level. On the ground, I’m seeing health care professionals do their best to catch up. New York has the highest number of infections of all the states in America, and we’re going to see that number increase exponentially.

The testing criteria is changing day to day, but we are not able to test enough people—just a fraction of the patients we see are getting tested. People who live with their 85-year-old grandmother and are displaying symptoms are not getting tested. People who have symptoms [and] need a positive test in order to keep getting paid by their employers while they’re not working are not getting tested. Right now, we are saving the tests for people who are in critical condition.

We’re all wearing as much PPE [personal protective equipment] as possible, including goggles that were given to us by the hospital. But we don’t know how long the supplies are going to last.