‘Listening’ at a Pool Table

Posted on June 27, 2008
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This is how novels get written (I often wish I had the creativity and staying power to write one): A friend at our retirement community told me today that the 101-year-old male friend he plays pool with two afternoons a week can’t play any longer. Why? Because women residents have wanted to play pool, too, and have been given from 1 to 3 P.M. each day to do so.

Two world class pool tables are involved. For the 101-year-old male player, pool has been an important Tuesday and Thursday ritual, for exercise and companionship with the friend who calls for him and walks him over to the “pool hall”. Now the friend says, “We’ve been shot down.”

Well, maybe not, really. My wife checked with another woman and was told that the centenarian was told he could play at one table and the women at another on “his” days. But he doesn’t want to play with women in the room.

If that’s so, there’s probably nowhere else to take this. But what’s happening here? My friend may not have been really listening to the situation, and thus missing an important facet of it. Or he may have decided to put it aside, not sort through the intricacies and possibly arrive at a solution. Or there may be no solution. This is an example, a reminder, indeed, of how communication doesn’t occur until there is close observation/listening and then all-important feedback on whatever messages are in play.

An injustice could be unfolding here, but to whom? The “deprived” centenarian or the women who, bless them, want to play pool too?

Wouldn’t it be fun to be a staff person at a retirement community and sort out relationships like these?

Energy Behavioral Changes on the Highways: ‘Get With the Program’

Posted on June 18, 2008
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President Bush has come out for offshore oil drilling. Whether that’s good policy or not, it’s an expedient announcement, given all the opportunities he had to change his position before gasoline reached $4 a gallon.

But, with gasoline at $4 a gallon, we don’t need energy policy changes as much as energy behavior changes. Our political system seems unable to produce behavioral promptings for the American people, only a crossfire of bickering over policies. That really needs to change.

How about a president or congressperson who told the people something like the following:

“Gasoline may come down in price a bit, but we need to act as though it will always be $4 a gallon, or higher, for it will be unless we manage to reduce consumption significantly. To do that, we, the Amerian people, need to change our consumption habits. For example, I am today asking state and local police officials to begin strict enforcement of highway speed limits. I know I don’t have authority over state and local police, but I want to enlist them as leaders in a behavior change campaign – a behavior change like that with which the American people united to win World War II.

“My message to my fellow Americans is, “We have to all get with the program. If that means driving at the stated speed limits, we have to get with the program. The program is to curtail gasoline usage as much as possible without giving up our cars (as many Americans did during World War II). We have to realize that oil will be in shorter supply than it has been, and we have a responsibility to future generations, as well as to ourselves, to see that it is used prudently. We have to get with the program.

“Our carmakers also have to get with the program. They need to achieve more ambitious gasoline mileage goals, with more fuel-efficient cars, than Congress has yet legislated, sooner. Detroit, too, has to get with the program.”

That would be a message with meaning, one that would get our attention. Instead we have the President making a late-inning policy announcement and coastal governors and the congressional Democrats retorting that it is ill-advised. Nobody is talking about behavioral change on the highways, and that’s what’s needed. We have bickering as usual, rather than getting with the program.

Even if offshore drilling is authorized, as unlikely as that is, it would be years before any new oil is discovered and refined. What might oil prices be then? It’s time for behavioral change, and national leadership to prompt it.

Free Rides to Try Out Buses – Remember Them?

Posted on June 17, 2008
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Are we at a historic turning point in American community development – that of turning back the suburban tide?

The Wall Street Journal features two California commuters as emblematic of many around the country, it suggests, who are finding “the driveable suburb – that bedrock of post-World War II society – …a mile too far.”

The Journal quotes Christopher Leinberger, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution and a developer of walkable areas that combine housing and commercial space, as observing that the spiraling price of gasoline, plus the preference among many younger Americans for urban living, may be signaling the “beginning of the end of sprawl.”

If so, reeducation is going to be in order for many people who have been accustomed to driving to work. And that’s precisely what the County of Lebanon Transit Authority (COLT) in Lebanon, PA, has been attempting this week. COLT has been offering free rides on its buses to give people an idea of what it’s like to ride a bus to work.

My Dad could have told them. For 50 years, he rode a New York City bus from the outer edge of Queens County to a subway station 10 miles closer to the city and then on to his job as a loan officer at a Time Square bank. Some days, many, in fact, he had to be a straphanger on the bus as well as the subway.

But he died at 90, and I think that commuting was healthy for him, especially the five-block walk to and from the bus-stop, year-round, in all sorts of weather.

COLT and other transit authorities may have to fine-tune their runs, that is to say, increase their frequency a bit during rush hours, and their fares probably will have to be somewhat more than competitive with the price of gasoline. There’s also a question whether sprawl patterns have gone too far for public transportation to be feasible in many areas. Maybe strategic parking lots can be introduced, or wives or husbands can serve as morning and evening “taxi drivers.”

Whatever. If the long-needed redress of development and transportation patterns is going to start taking hold, let’s hope that people find COLT’s free rides inviting and satisfying as a “new” way to get to work.

Apple and AT&T on Buying a New iPhone: ‘Bring Your Tent’

Posted on June 14, 2008
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Neither Apple nor AT&T are making any arrangements for customers to preorder at least a portion of the new iPhones (3G) that will be placed on sale July 11. This is a sad, smug policy at both companies.

What Apple and AT&T are saying is, “The only option you have is to come early on July 11 and, maybe, bring your tent if you want to be successfully early.”

This isn’t just a smug policy, but an arrogant one, on the part of both companies. Consider the faithfulness of Apple or AT&T customers who have been planning for an iPhone, waiting for the new model, and now have no firm idea as to when they will actually be able to acquire one.

A company makes an announcement, as Apple did this week, that a new product will be available for purchase on a given date. But if it’s a wildly popular product, like the new iPhone, such an announcement means nothing in terms of when the product can actually be obtained. For would-be purchasers who might take the initiative to preorder, if preording were possible, no recognition is given nor arrangement made.

So for people, like myself, who have been waiting to build an iPhone into our businesses or acquire one for some other personally urgent purpose, there is no recourse but to bring a tent and set it up outside an Apple or AT&T store in the wee hours of July 11. That’s what Apple and AT&T appear to be saying and, what’s more, don’t appear to care: “Thanks for all those years of faithful use of our products, guys, but get in line.”

This is particularly annoying on Apple’s part, whose stores are widely scattered, involving lengthy drives in a lot of cases. But it’s corporate relations at their worst by both outfits.

Distilling Meaning Beyond User Names and Passwords

Posted on June 8, 2008
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Having just provided my user name and password for the umpteenth/squared time, I’m led to ponder an important question about the Internet: are we missing out on meaning as we scramble for access to the wealth of information available in cyberspace?

This is an important concern, because it’s not just user name and password, but usually a couple of more pages asking for my name, address and answers to key questions (key to the asker, anyway) before a new business/instution/utility can verify my existence and agree to send me e-mails. In this case, as usual in one way or another, it’s an important list to be on, because I’m being supplied with iPhone updates. It’s usually some important update or other (and of course we need to keep our software updated as well) that keeps the access forms appearing on the screen, but there are few, if any, distillations of the meaning in it all.

It seems we have to find ways to slow down, while continually applying for access to all the information that’s now available without a bus ride and a library card – the way I had to get it as a kid.

The question of access vs. meaning is truly important. It could well account for the befuddled state of our nation, and maybe the entire world in terms of climate change and other matters requiring elusive global consensus. Meaning is far deeper and more valuable than access alone. It’s not provided by a user name and password, but by pondering what all the information available to us actually means. How do we do that in a way to develop a meaningful consensus about what’s important to us as the world’s peoples? Don’t ask for my user name and password on that one.

We need to slow down as we are swept along by a rising tide of information – welcome but mystifying until we find ways to distill meaning from it, meaning that can be readily shared. Blogs are part of the answer, but look at how many of them there are! So a part of the solution is also part of the problem; this is a cycle we need to break. By going slower, even as we surf farther and faster.

Explaining TMI from Afar a Bad Idea

Posted on June 5, 2008
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If a corporation’s facility causes a disruption in the lives and tranquility of people living around that facility, shouldn’t the corporation be in the midst of those people, helping to sort the situation out for them?

This is the principle, actually, behind the opposition to moving the media center – the point for releasing and receiving information – for the Three Mile Island nuclear power station. Exelon, the plant’s new owner, wants to move TMI’s media center from just outside Harrisburg, 12 miles from the plant, to Coatesville, Pa., 62 miles away.

It’s convenient for Exelon to group TMI with its other two Pennsylvania nuclear plants, Peach Bottom and Limerick, and have one media center for all three. But it’s not relational to the people living around Three Mile Island, nor the news media serving them. TMI is the farthest of the three plants from Coatesville, over in Chester County.

These concerns would arise most obviously in a General Emergency at Three Mile Island Unit 1, however unlikely that might be. TMI-1 houses the remaining operating reactor on Three Mile Island. Its sister plant, TMI-2, was shut down by the 1979 accident there, that actually was a General Emergency.

It’s for reasons of access and the clarity of information and relationships that Mayors Robert Reid, of Middletown Borough, and Stephen Reed, of Harrisburg, oppose moving TMI’s media center to Coatesville. And there’s some ambiguity behind the nod of approval the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency (PEMA) has given the pending move. PEMA says its endorsement reflects a consensus among the five TMI “risk” counties – Dauphin, Cumberland, Lancaster, York and Lebanon – that it’s okay to move the media center from Harrisburg so long as there’s a media outpost at TMI itself. But it’s highly unlikely that Exelon would be hosting the news media at TMI’s Training Center auditorium during a General Emergency just across the highway – a time of “actual or imminent substantial core damage or melting of reactor fuel with the potential for loss of containment integrity…”

Nobody has seriously considered the impact that new, truncated forms of social messaging – text messages, instant messaging and tweets – might have on the subtleties of radiation releases and nuclear power terminology. They would be unlikely to be a calming influence.

Principles of good risk communication, as taught for years by experts like Professor Sharon M. Friedman, of Lehigh University (who was a consultant to the Kemeny Commission that reviewed the TMI-2 accident), call for being present in the “tangled web” (as Professor Friedman calls it) of fear and confusion that would quickly form around another nuclear power accident.

“Given the stakes, we have to get this right,” Professor Friedman says as the nuclear industry moves to start a needed, long-delayed round of new plant construction.

A corporation’s convenience wouldn’t count as much as emphathy and compassion for the citizens most directly affected by an accident. (If an evacuation should ever be ordered in the communities neighboring TMI, Mayor Reed would evacuate all of Harrisburg, even though only a portion of the city would be in the official impact zone.)

It would be one thing for Exelon to be communicating from Coatesville on television. With the facilities it has provided, that could be done – once the media trucks and cars arrive there. It’s another thing, however, to be personally close to the people and officials who would be caught up in an emergency beyond their reckoning.

Exelon’s request to move the TMI media center to Coatesville is pending at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. It should be refused, on relational grounds.

Seven Fulbrights Reinstated; 600 Other Awards to Go

Posted on June 2, 2008
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Fortunately, when word got out of the seven rescinded Fulbright grants to students in the Gaza strip, U.S. and Israeli officials were either so embarrassed or appalled that the grants to study at U.S. universities were reinstated, The New York Times reports.

Provided they pass security once again (they had already been thoroughly evaluated to receive the Fulbrights in the first place) these seven students will be headed to U.S. campuses. But coverage of this incident has disclosed the fact that 600 other Palestinian students with grants to study in various countries abroad are still marooned in Gaza.

Maybe some tutelage in diplomacy and opportunity should still be given to the Israeli and other officials who can’t seem to grasp how exposure to the world is an antidote to radicalism, providing the world offers its welcome.

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