Matinee Movies on Our Desktop Screens

Posted on February 20, 2012
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Recently, I took our grandson to a special Saturday morning showing of an early John Wayne  western movie featuring Gabby Hayes. The film, as it happened, was 68 years old and the sound had deteriorated, making a complicated plot difficult to follow. (But my grandson loved Gabby Hayes, who played a stage coach driver.)

Duncan and I, it turns out, could have stayed home and watched a vintage movie on my desktop computer screen with possibly greater impact. I say possibly, because my home office isn’t a movie theater. Even so, this full-length Superman movie that I’ve stumbled upon on YouTube is pretty gripping, partly because of its flawless sound. Yes, a Superman movie from 1951 plays better at home than the 1943 John Wayne epic did  in the theater.

That, it seems to me, says a good deal about the Internet and the stand-in world it’s been creating for us. You can be seduced into spending increasing amounts of time on the web, and not only on social media. It’s all out there – movies, lectures, concerts and e-mail besides. Two years ago, Google-owned YouTube passed two billion video views per day. And there are now more than 24 hours of video uploaded every minute to the site.

It’s a little scary to realize that “alternative reality” can be embodied in your computer. Superman quelled the Mole Men from underground in the movie, but can we resist our own fascination when technology delivers past, or present, delights so reliably on desktop, or even laptop, screens? We’d best be alert to how alternative reality has been creeping up on us, and leave time for the real world to keep moving us ahead. – Doug Bedell  

Quality Principles As Living Ideals

Posted on February 13, 2012
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Question: We have such great tools to make things better, so why do we feel in such a funk? A dismal question like this can apply on any given day to the state of our nation or our workplace, if we’re fortunate enough to have one.

Steven Ouellette is a quality manager and process engineer who is also an incurable optimist. He addresses our dire question of the day with methodology to produce a more upbeat answer than we ourselves may have at hand.

“I’m no self-help guru,” Ouellete writes in a Quality Digest column, “just a process engineer. But I do think we need to change something about our collective software. We live in an age of man-made miracles that would have astounded even our recent ancestors. Yet, as the great modern philosopher Louis C.K. says, “Everything is amazing, and nobody’s happy.”

So what do we do, rebuild the factory? No, make it work better and more reliably, by using proven methods, not raucous rhetoric.

There’s still a big role for the quality movement and the methods it uses to produce noteworthy results. Like, Ouellette advises, measuring inputs to forestall worrying about outputs. That’s the latest iteration in a journey that began with the work of W. Edwards Deming, Joseph Juran and Arnold Feigenbaum in Japan in the 1980s.

“It is what it is,” isn’t an acceptable answer to the dilemmas of our times, Ouellette feels. We join him in that. We’ve seen too much good accomplished when people determine to do things differently.

“Habits of thought have real consequences….How can something as ephemeral as an idea or thought in one person’s head – nothing more than electrochemical cascades in an isolated bone container – have any effect on reality? And yet it does.”

Read Ouellette, get acquainted with his methods, share them with friends and associates and see where they take you. It’s likely to be to a better place than you might have imagined. – Doug Bedell

Clarity Produces a Rush, Whether It Survives Or Not

Posted on February 7, 2012
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Here’s a lady who understands a prime component of good technical writing, or any writing, for that matter:

“What all the (technical writing) disciplines share in common is a need for the writer to communicate effectively within the perspective of user need from the document, and to have a strong awareness of good ways to enhance the message through visuals and good use of white space.”

The sentence, by Christine Lebednik on the Street Articles site, is a trifle awkward in terms of what a user needs from the document he or she is reading, but it gets to the two essentials of good technical writing: tight, clear expression of why the document exists (a means to a given, safe end), and ways to enhance it with illustrations and white space.

Christine isn’t in technical writing any longer. When she was, though (prior to the bursting of the IT bubble in 2001-02), she was most familiar with the fields of aviation, medical and pharmaceutical writing.

Our colleague, Dennis Owen, notes that there are many other settings in need of good technical writing. Start by looking around your house, or out the window: “IKEA furniture? Someone had to write the assembly instructions. Component stereo or flat screen TV? Someone had to create the connection and installation diagrams. Smart thermostat? Hell, mine has an entire booklet (and it’s still hard to program). Car? The owner’s manual is a serious example of technical writing. On and on…”

In short, needs for clearly expressed instructional guidance are all around us in our technologically grounded civilization, and some are met more effectively than others. (I’d like to send the writer(s) of the instructions for our videotape/DVD player/recorder, and the designers of its remote controller, to the stocks.)

In this vein, a little extra creativity doesn’t hurt now and then, though it’s often hard to get it past the ultimate editors. Dennis recalls how he once did a technical report “on nuclear plant applications of auto ID technologies: bar codes (there must be at least a dozen different symbologies), 2-D bar codes (a huge amount of information in a tiny space), RF transponders, and so on.

“We think of bar codes as being a modern invention, but in researching the topic I found the South Korean flag. Have you ever noticed the little bars on the flag?…they are bar codes! They’re called trigrams and encode a whole bunch of information about nature, virtue, family, seasons and more. (See the Wikipedia article on the South Korean flag.)

“I thought this was really cool and put an interesting historical perspective on the technology. So I wrote a sidebar in the report on the topic…boy, was I proud of how I wove this into a highly technical report. Alas, the editors cut it as being irrelevant…but at least I’ve never forgotten the topic.”

So, it’s likely, would many of the report’s readers have retained a little whimsical information if they had had the opportunity. But, in technical writing, the editors are iron-fisted.

Yet, Dennis observes, “When I write something that’s well thought out, clear, and concise I get a rush out of it. I enjoy looking back and saying, “Damn, that’s good.”

“I believe it is completely analogous to an artist stepping back from a painting and admiring how he exactly caught the essence of something.” And so it is. – Doug Bedell

Expect to be Writing and Diagramming on Tablets

Posted on January 26, 2012
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Apple’s education event in New York City this month had striking implications, not only for high school and college students and their teachers, but for technical writers as well. That’s how we see it anyway.

Written and graphic communication and learning, it’s clear, are going to become increasingly tablet-based, especially iPad-based. To glean the possibilities, we invite you to watch the video on iPad learning that Apple has posted on its website. You’ll be wowed by the fluidity and currency that can be added to texts and illustrations by formatting them as idocuments. (You’ll need to use Apple’s Safari browser, though, it’s the only one the presentation plays on.)
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Procedure Writing for the ‘Masses’

Posted on January 9, 2012
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On ffeathers, one of the technical writing blogs we visit, a question’s been raised about whether comments should be allowed on documentation pages, from, we presume, just about anyone in an organization, and maybe customers, too. Sarah Maddox, who presides over ffeathers, is a technical writer for Atlassian, an Australian software company.

So here we have another example of the web’s ability to promote an international discussion. The question of who might have access to documentation these days becomes wider than when paper, or a personal computer file, was the medium of expression. Atlassian produces its product documentation on a wikki – it happens to produce Confluence, one of the leading wikki software packages.
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People at Work on Challenging Tasks, For Free

Posted on December 30, 2011
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How many people does it take to get a job done smartly and efficiently? Well, that depends on the job, the method applied to doing it and what’s available as an affordable level of pay or other compensation.

But suppose you have a truly massive job, like digitalizing all the world’s books. And your computers can’t recognize all the words on older, faded pages? There’s not enough affordable people power available for doing an epic piecework job like that, are there?
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Writing to a ‘Cloud’

Posted on December 12, 2011
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We’ve been accused occasionally of writing on a cloud, but writing to a cloud is something new in the annals of technical writing. The term refers, of course, to writing to an offsite server that functions as a supposedly eternal storage hub and allows ready access from anywhere to you and your colleagues or clients.

The “Cherryleaf” blog, like many other web-based scribal centers, notes that, “There are a number of reasons why a Technical Author might want to use a cloud-based application.”They’re “inexpensive, allow new authors to get integrated quickly, facilitate collaborative authoring and allow for third-party groups to log in and make minor edits.”
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Freakonomics: Insights For Our Times

Posted on November 23, 2011
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Encore’s Dennis Owen is a fan of Freakonomics podcasts, web broadcasts of insights from Stephen J. Dubner and Stephen D. Levitt, the authors of the best-selling book of the same name. “I like the range of things they address and the human behavior aspects of their programs/topics,” he explains.

That’s like Dennis. He has a wide-ranging curiosity and enthusiasm for engaging quirkiness and offbeat creativity, the kind of insights you find in abundance on the Dubner/Levitt Freakonomics blog. For example, they use the vagaries of football to examine the question, “Is Momentum a Myth?” On the Freakomics site, they have a podcast video devoted to the subject that concludes: “The truth is that you’re bound to get a wild 32-point-comeback once in a while, just as you’re bound to get a streak of 10 or 12 heads too. But just as the physical world cannot escape gravity, the statistical world cannot escape what’s called ‘regression to the mean.’ Those wild streaks, as fun as they were, have very little bearing on what happens next.”
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A Mac (and a Lisa) Helped Build TMI’s Safety Culture

Posted on October 9, 2011
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Along with all the tributes to Steve Jobs, and a virtually inexpressible sadness at his passing, comes a memory of the first Macintosh I encountered, and quickly came to love. At the time I worked at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Station, where I was the post-accident communication manager. That was not long after Apple Computer introduced the Mac early in 1984.

We were preparing to defuel the damaged reactor core and to restart the undamaged companion reactor. Permeating all the activity at TMI in those days was a renewed commitment to quality, to absorbing the lessons of the Unit 2 accident and building a strong safety culture. Employee communication was important to that end, and helping to improve communication was the Mac’s role.
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Professor Friedman Appraises Another Nuclear Accident

Posted on October 3, 2011
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Sharon Friedman, professor of journalism and a communication stalwart at Pennsylvania’s Lehigh University, has now analyzed the news coverage of the world’s three major nuclear power accidents – Three Mile Island in 1979, Chernobyl in 1986 and Fukishima this year. The coverage of TMI, she notes (dispassionate professor that she is), “was called abysmal”. It improved somewhat for Chernobyl and, with the Internet a major factor this last time, “was much more extensive and much better in many cases because of the emphasis on explanations and background information and the visual and graphics capabilities of a number of media organizations.”

Yet, in a current, magisterial article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Professor Friedman remains dismayed over the overall quality of nuclear coverage, especially on CNN (which has the most time to devote to it), and troubled by the fading presence of newspaper reporters on the “nuclear beat” (which was never large to begin with).
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