After many years of blogging, and consistent with my desire to move toward retirement, we have ended the Insights blog. Thanks to Doug Bedell for his years of blog support.

Endeavor Retires After Anticipating the Future

Posted on September 23, 2012
Filed Under Government, Technology | Leave a Comment

Endeavor and its Astronaut crews were stars alright. A NASA photo distributed by the Associated Press shows the space shuttle, atop a NASA 747 jumbo jet, flying over the Hollywood sign as it approached Los Angeles International Airport on Friday. There, Endeavor will be prepared for a 12-mile road trip to the California Science Center, where it will go on permanent display.

Friday’s flight from Edwards Air Force Base in the Mojave desert came after Endeavor tallied 123 million miles in 25 trips into low-Earth orbit. We all can recall some of those launches in straight-up blasts atop a carrier rockets. The last one was on May 16, 2011 with Endeavor under the command of Mark Kelly, the husband of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. Endeavor replaced the Challenger shuttle which exploded during liftoff in 1986.
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Bill Bryson’s ‘Manual’ on Creation

Posted on September 14, 2012
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We’ve always been pleased to have Bill Bryson’s 2003 book, A Short History of Nearly Everything, in our library, and now we intend to set about reading it cover-to-cover. That resolve comes after revisiting Bryson’s engaging treatment of “The Reverend Evans’s Universe” near the book’s start.

You won’t find a more engaging introduction to the truly awesome death of supernovae far out, very fortunately, in the universe. Nor will you find many other places (including, however, the works of John McPhee) that offer such helpful clues to engaging technical writing. That’s right, technical writing can be at least somewhat engaging, without ceasing to be accurate, informative and helpful.
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Automate Your Writing? Not Really, but Here’s a Useful Indicator

Posted on August 16, 2012
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Here’s a throwback to awareness in the present that technical writers – indeed, anyone who writes seriously – might appreciate. Wiley Brooks on the Business2Community site reminds us of Rudolf Flesch’s algorithm-based readable writing tool. Drop in a body of text, press the button and get your score for clear writing. Wow!

Flesch, Brooks notes, was a lawyer and refugee from Nazi Germany who “earned a Ph.D. in English at Columbia University, and then became a prominent professor there.” He’s pictured here.
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Eureka! Solid Planning and Performance Returned Us to the Moon! Is that Any Surprise?

Posted on August 8, 2012
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We know of a guy, typical of many, probably, who didn’t think it was smart for NASA to make a movie of Curiosity’s Mars landing before it was actually accomplished this week. “It is beyond my limited capacities,” he wrote, “to understand all that went into building and sending the vehicle on its 154 million mile journey. Then, to choose a never-tried, highly complex method of reaching and lowering the vehicle to the surface of the planet is a definition of insanity. Except they did it.”

Indeed so. That meticulous planning and procedures should work in the riskiest of settings isn’t so surprising, if you plan for the riskiest of settings. It’s all in your vision – in this case, NASA’s vision – and the care you take to accomplish it. Technology is controllable, even from a mind-boggling distance, if you plan and execute to make it controllable.
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The Coming ‘Contextual Age’ – Technology Will Be Tracking Us

Posted on August 5, 2012
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Robert Scoble describes the new book he’s working on with Shel Israel as though it will be a little scary, and that’s a credit to the authors’ sensibilities. For the dawning “Age of Context,” Scoble’s announced title for the book, is definitely at least ominous.  Various electronic devices which, one by one,  most of us prize will be tracking and reporting on our locations and who knows what else. (That’s where the scary part comes in.) It sounds like it will be an age of observing, and a rather personal one.

The new age, as anticipated by Scoble on the Business Insider blog, will be “topped” by wearable computers like Google Glasses and various beaming cell phones. (There’s likely a smaller iPad coming, too – this fall.) Data bases in the “cloud” will be storing whatever they collect, maybe forever.
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Olympic Competition Enhanced By the Gear Involved

Posted on July 27, 2012
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Enjoy the London Olympics over the next week, but recognize that they’re not absolutely “fair” in terms of achieved technological advantages, any more than the rest of sports, down to the Little League level.

Craig Chamberlain on the Phys.org blog writes that competition in sports is as much between the scientists and engineers who produce athletic equipment as the athletes themselves. “In sport,” says Rayvon Fouché, a historian of technology at the University of Illinois and a former cyclist, “there’s very little incentive to play fair, and there are huge incentives to try to get an advantage.” The real distinction, he adds, is between legal and illegal advantages. Fouchè is working on a book about sports technology and the future of athletic competition.
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Mind-Mapping as a Research and Retrieval Tool

Posted on July 19, 2012
Filed Under Communication, Technology | 1 Comment

We’re all adept note-takers, but we’re not necessarily adept note-retrievers. While computers encourage note-taking and data-collecting, they don’t necessarily make the retrieval of collected data a joy. Technical writers can testify to that.

The retrievability of information has to do not only with our computer’s storage whims, but with our own brains. We like patterns and relationships, not simply stuffing material away, even in electronic form. That’s why I’m big on the filing technique known as mind-mapping; it’s a great organizing and retrieval tool.
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A Writing Blogger Who Has It Right

Posted on July 13, 2012
Filed Under Communication, Technology, The Writing Life, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

Friday the 13th has turned out to be my lucky day, in a tradesman’s sense, at least. I’ve just come upon John Graham-Cumming’s blog on technical writing and it’s great to have discovered a kindred spirit who reaffirms what little I thought I knew about writing.  To the fullest.

Graham-Cumming is a British computer programmer and writer. His pointers are right on the mark: Practice, Read, Listen to Editors, Think about writing, Think about the reader, Plan and Dream. That’s it, and it’s plenty.

Writing is a discipline, but a hazy one. There are explicit things to do, yet inspiration comes first, and that’s where the dreaming comes in. Technical writers have it over their more creative colleagues in this respect, because their material is relatively “dictated,” it’s permissible parameters are clearer. Yet writing well always involves reflection and rededication, whatever the subject assignment. Hence the dreaming factor.
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Aatish Bhatia: A Young Chronicler of Science

Posted on July 10, 2012
Filed Under Communication, Technology, The Writing Life | Leave a Comment

Just as blogs are providing new outlets for journalism so, too, are they producing a new generation of science writers. We’ve come upon one of them, Aatish Bhatia, creator of the blog Empirical Zeal, and he’s someone to follow. It’s a gift to explain complex material clearly and colorfully, and Aatish has that gift. Here, he’s featured by Scientific American. 

Even when he’s not writing about colors, as he is in his post “Crayola-fication of the World: How we gave colors names, and it messed with our brains,” he’s writing colorfully and clearly, as in “What it feels like for a sperm, or how to get around when you are really, really small.”

Aatish says his gift for chronicling science comes from growing up in a home where his father is a journalist and his mother a writer. “To a large extent,” he adds, “my interest in science grew from reading popular science.”  For how many others of us has that been true?

His “gateway book” was Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman. “It made my eighth-grade self realize that interesting people actually chose science as a career. That opened the door to a lot of other popular science authors. It became a bit of an obsession but to a large extent, these books guided my career interests.”
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Good Communication Matters Most

Posted on July 6, 2012
Filed Under Business, Communication, Technology | Leave a Comment

What does it take to get on in the world if you’re a technically inclined person? Why, knowledge of your theories, equipment and processes – that should be obvious, shouldn’t it? Well yes, but it’s not the heart of the question. There lies something else – the ability to relate well to others and to communicate well. (It’s like a dentist who does excellent root canal work but neglects to explain to the patient beforehand what the cost will be and why.)

Dennis Owen and myself at Encore Technical Resources have known that good relational communication matters most for some time, even before our years of working together at the post-accident Three Mile Island Unit 2. (Dennis was a recovery engineer and I was the communication manager.)

And here’s a Penn State instructor emphasizing anew the primacy of good communication in technical settings. Myron Hartman teaches biomedical engineering technology. He gives his third semester students a questionnaire that asks them   to rank the skills an entry level technician needs.

He lists them as “troubleshooting electronic components, computer skills, people skills (verbal), communication skills (writing), equipment function and operation, and clinical application of medical equipment.”
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