Everest latest disaster

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/08/everest-accident_n_5291159.html

Did teamwork fail in this case? Or was there a lack of leadership? Or can we attribute this disaster to just bad luck?

Bad luck seems to play a considerable role in disasters at Everest, and from the class it seems that ‘luck management’ should be a mandatory skill before attempting to scale the highest mountain in the world, and yet these accidents keep happening.

Blame me for being for India, but what about fate? Beck Weathers should have died in the storm like Namba, but he didn’t. Fischer shouldn’t have died – he’d done this several times, but he fell sick and died. What do we attribute this to?

“Going Streaking”

One thing that Mike Berger brought up in the last assignment when we were studying mobile applications that encourage behavior modification was the idea of streaks. I remember with CodeAcademy (which has plenty of problems, but does a few things right) how it encouraged me to not break my streak. I’m just learning git and how to use Github, I noticed that it has the same feature, and incorporates a simple but clear visualization of your work. While Github isn’t directed towards behavior modification and this may incentivize certain users to push too many small commits, it’s also a compelling way to track yourself and keep at a project.Screen Shot 2014-05-07 at 6.04.30 PM

Collaboration Without Feedback- Changing Online Possibilities

Something I’ve been fascinated with this semester is the Twitch Plays Pokemon phenomenon.

Screen Shot 2014-05-05 at 5.28.00 PM

 

 

 

 

 

Twitch Plays Pokemon (http://www.twitch.tv/twitchplayspokemon) started out as the original Pokemon Red game, a single player game from the 90s built for the GameBoy. An emulator of the game was hosted on the Twitch website, and accepted commands (A, B, Start, left, right etc) from a text entry box that any users could connect to. As such, it was a single player game run by thousands and thousands of concurrent players; somehow, despite thousands of “trolls” and an inability to directly plan gameplay, the users won the game after 16 days.

I’ve studied the game as part of my work for Social and Organizational Issues of Information, and it is pretty remarkable. It shows what can be achieved without any mechanisms for feedback- for instance, users don’t know whether there command got chosen or not for any “move” (e.g. if the character moved left, was it because they typed “left” or because of someone else). And the likelihood of any single user having an impact on the actual gameplay is minimal. Yet hundreds of thousands of people played.

We’ve talked a lot about these issues in a variety of ways, from gamification to peer pressure to the build/fight/unite framework for getting teams to achieve their utmost. But I think we can learn two things from Twitch Plays Pokemon.

First, that online forums for communication and collaboration are still new, and we haven’t yet reached the limits of their designs. While enterprise knowledge exchange systems, wikis and peer annotation seem like they have been around forever, in fact they are just some of the first developments for online collaboration. People will continue to develop more and more creative ways for online socializing and online collaboration, and these tools may ultimately be more effective for changing behaviors or achieving extraordinary results than anything we have currently designed. We should continue to push the envelope with what is possible.

Secondly, Twitch Plays Pokemon lays out some of the assumptions we bring to the table when we think about collaborative achievement as part of a team or social group. The system affords no feedback to users, no leaderboard, no positive reinforcement. It is bare bones. However, users still flocked to it. The likely cause is threefold- first, that it was an unique system, second that the game chosen had a particularly enthusiastic fan base, and third that it gained significant media attention. Whatever the reasons, it shows that when evaluating how to achieve extraordinary results (I consider a hundred thousand people defeating a single player game without speaking to each other directly extraordinary) we should be willing to consider the absurd.

Personal Accountability for Team Performance

In a team environment like on a NBA basketball team, it is easy for personal laziness (especially on the defensive end) to be hidden underneath the overall team’s results. Some players focus only on offense, where stats are more easily seen on the box score. On the flip side, people who go all out and fight for every possession may not be properly recognized — these plays have a great effect on the team’s performance, but may not show up on in stats (which most people pay attention to). The Washington Wizards have a bulletin board tracking “hustle plays” per individual to try to track, recognize, and reward players who pay attention to the little details of every play on the court

The Pelicans have a similar board, and the player with the most “hustle points” is reportedly allowed to use the coach’s suite for the weekend to use however he likes.

Infinity in our Pockets.

For those of you who thought the “Focus” exercises for the course app, check out these pointers from Medium.  I was looking for distraction tips during finals week so I could spend less time on my phone and computer and more time on doing my work and spending time with my family as a result.  The idea is simple: remove everything from your phone that is unnecessary; anything with a stream, anything that is a search engine, and take out the email.   I thought the most resonating point he made was: “I can’t have infinity in my pocket”.

I am pretty frightened to do this, but for finals week I might give it a go.  Just typing that makes me nervous.  Anyone have any suggestions for infinity-addicts?

ARTICLE HERE: https://medium.com/life-hacks/80f8d525b0d8