Book Club: Mormon Scientist: The Life and Faith of Henry Eyring

Mormon Scientist: The Life and Faith of Henry Eyring is the latest book I'm reading. Henry Eyring was a pretty remarkable scientist, garnering many of the most distinguised prizes for scientific contribution, and was a faithful Latter-day Saint. He spent a great deal of energy convincing people that science and religion are fundamentally different pursuits and can therefore co-exist peacefully.

The book is written by his grandson, Henry J. Eyring, who takes an interesting approach to detailing Erying's life. Rather than proceeding through a chronology, Eyring divides the chapters by attributes he might have gained from his forefathers.

Here's a quote from the book:

"The lesson of Henry Eyring’s life is that simple people, people just like you and me, can change the world. We do it a little bit every day. And we have the potential to change the world much more, if we can better understand and use our unique gifts."

Need a CIO? Grow Your Own.

In this post over at CIO.COM, Susan Cramm makes the point that the average I.T. professional who feels he is ready to be a CIO isn't ready at all. She makes a call to CIOs to inform their people that they need to get more "business experience" and to develop "senior level relationships."

Her charge is noble, necessary and terribly difficult. Many I.T. professionals lack skills critical to being successful in a C-level role. To many I.T. professionals, a vertical career track requires technical depth and specialization. Consequently they spend a disproportionate amount of time developing technical skills and not enough time on skills that would help them get into and navigate within the boardroom.

Skills like:

Communication. My department works on hundreds of simultaneous projects. In addition, we operate hundreds of different products and services continually. It's critical that we keep our customers and our management aware of what is going on in the shop. I plead and beg our engineers and project/program managers to write very simple, understandable status reports. It is a constant struggle. A member of my office reviews (and in the past has typically re-written) every one of them. We have a hard time talking without jargon and acronyms.

Relationship Management. When I worked in computer games at Microsoft I often had to "check out the competition" and so played an awful lot of games for a couple of years. I remember telling my wife, Lani, about this great new game called Everquest where you could meet new people, develop friendships and have fun together, all in a virtual world. She said, "Gee Joel. It sounds almost as fun as real life." Hmmm. Sarcasm. The fact is that relationships are easier on line than in real life. If things aren't going well, you log out or you just "block" the other person. You don't have to co-exist in a meaningful way--the biggest source of conflict is deciding who gets the +4 magic, +4 intelligence mace you picked up off a monster your party just clobbered. I know I.T. guys who get along socially just fine in on line games and who struggle to go out to lunch periodically with their customers. "I don't really have anything to talk about with them." "I'm too busy."

Business Acumen. Our shop is going through some growing pains this year as one of our focuses is on writing effective business objectives for a project. It's hard. Engineers think about solving problems very naturally. We don't always think about cost justification. Why does it make business sense to upgrade your application server? "Well, the cache is filling up and we're queue'ing requests. That's why." Upgrading may make all the sense in the world to a technologist who understands what's under the hood, but a business person might decide that the business consequences of not upgrading are acceptable in light of the cost of upgrade. This is particularly relevant at the Church where we have to take extra precautions to keep costs low. Many basic business skills like cost-benefit analysis, contract negotiation, and others are not even taught in computer science or information technology programs, and when those skills are taught, they atrophy in I.T. people who are not being required to use them.

In our department, we're taking steps to help our professionals develop these skills. I'll talk about those steps in the next post.

Royce

"Man has, through the richness of the intellectual quest, become more knowing, more clever and more skeptical. But we have not become more profound or more reverent. Nor have we found a way to put our learning in the context of the eternal."

Josiah Royce

You Have the Right to Remain Visible

How many of you would take your home computer to a public place and leave it running?

Or make a list of every web site you browse (EVERY WEB SITE YOU BROWSE) and publish it in the newspaper?

Would you write your credit card number down on pieces of paper and pass them around large groups of people?

We are engaged in the digital analogs of these things all the time, and most of us don't know it.

How many of you would take your home computer to a public place and leave it?

If you fire up a wireless laptop in my house you'll see four of my neighbors' wireless networks, all but one open to the world. I'm about as technical as the sole of an old shoe, but it would be trivial for me to hack into one of their computers and cause all kinds of problems: peek at pictures, read on-line journals, grab credit card numbers or snag on-line passwords stored in cache. Though I'm harmless, some are not. This type of cyber-tom-foolery happens regularly. Thieves drive around looking for wireless networks, discover them, break into them (usually trivially) and make off with the digital rewards.

Or make a list of every web site you browse (EVERY WEB SITE YOU BROWSE) and publish it in the newspaper?

If you think only you know the web sites you visit, think again. Your computer stores traces of where you go in cyberspace and, depending on the security settings on your browser, other web sites can get access to that data. Even if you're careful on your computer, the ISP you use to connect to the Internet can store that data. Some of them are even starting to sell that data--in a way that is actually pretty ingenious. Let's say you're up on a web site reading a review of the movie "Bourne Ultimatum." You might notice that the next web site you go to has an ad to rent or buy one of Matt Damon's other movies. This is possible because some ISP's are starting to provide data about the last place you browsed to the next place you browse and charging for that information. Read the privacy notice of your ISP carefully and I imagine that in many cases you'll find that you can't prevent it.

Would you write your credit card number down on pieces of paper and pass them around large groups of people?

If you send your credit card number over email or tell someone your credit card over the phone (land-line or cell phone) you might as well be writing it down on little pieces of paper and dropping them off a building roof into a crowd. Technology for "listening" to phone calls and "sniffing" emails on the Internet is basically mainstream. It's easy to rationalize, "Oh, I'll just do it this once," but the first time you find big charges on your credit card that you didn't make, you get serious about protecting yourself.

It's interesting to me that we can be so much more careful about protecting our non-digital assets, when our digital assets can be stolen or undermined so much more quickly.

I'd love to hear what precautions you're taking to protect yourselves.

Did You Know 2.0

This is an interesting/sobering/motivational video on YouTube which offers some interesting factoids to think about.

Internet Activity Around President Hinckley

The activity on the Internet surrounding President Hinckley has been huge this and last week.

Newsroom has an article pointing to some of the major coverage.

BlogPulse ranked "Gordon B. Hinckley" as the third most mentioned person in the blogosphere on the day after he died.

As of 11:20am this morning there were 170 groups on Facebook created in memory of President Hinckley. 29,038 individuals belong to the largest group which is called "In Memory of Gordon B. Hinckley." Over 90,000 people have subscribed to at least one of the groups.

There's also a new web site called HinckleyChallenge. This is an unofficial web site which challenges people to read the Book of Mormon in 97 days (in commemoration of his age when he died).

Finally, there is a great video up on YouTube where young people share their feelings about the Prophet.

New Web Sites for Two Church Presidents

In honor of President Hinckley's passing and President Monson's new assignment two new web sites were created to celebrate these wonderful men.

gordonbhinckley.com

thomassmonson.com

In addition, the MoreGood Foundation has also created web sites:

www.gordonhinckley.com

www.thomasmonson.com