On Excellence
This is a sensible essay on the disconnect not only between science and media, but media and the ethos of accuracy.
http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/08/25/reddy.science.media/index.html
In some ways, it reminded me of another essay written by a scientist, one who most definitely has “learned to say no.”
I see this problem, and the related pandering of media to 10-second attention spans, as a symptom of a broader, cancerous socio-ethical malaise: abdication of excellence. What has happened to devotion to excellence in all forms of work?
This mass-laziness reveals itself in all manner of corner-cutting, large and small:
Shoddy craftsmanship in home-building (e.g., any leaky pipe or faucet in a house less than 10 years old)
Inattentive service from waiters and clerks
Software that has to be “updated” every week because it was programmed full of bugs and security holes in the first place
Entryways that are torn up and reconstructed three times in the four years since a building was completed
Parents not engaged in (and inquisitive about) the daily lives of their minor children
Any automobile that lasts less than 10 years
The federal government’s inability to account for $24.5 billion of spent money in 2003
Pricing inconsistencies between shelf label and scanner
Unfamiliarity of first-level tech support with a problem
A moldy peach in a supermarket’s produce section
Roads full of potholes five years after being built or rebuilt
Misspellings and grammar errors in newspaper stories or formal scientific submissions
Bricks in a new wall that don’t line up, or that have missing mortar
College graduates who can’t differentiate between “they’re”, “their” and “there” when writing a simple online comment
Professional forecasters who regurgitate model guidance (the fastest path to job automation) instead of analyzing and understanding the atmosphere
“Scientific” reporting distilled to oversimplified and grossly misleading sound bites
Look closely enough and you’ll see numerous examples of inattention to excellence, on a daily basis.
These aren’t new problems either, nor is my recognizing them a function of aging. I noticed and bemoaned them even as a teenager, watching those people my age (who weren’t already lost to gangs and hard drugs) talking and not listening in class, leaving cheese off the cheeseburgers at Jack in the Box, putting half the needed syrup into snow cones, and falling asleep on the lifeguard stand at the pool, all with no internal calibration or foresight into the impact of such behavior on their own futures. In my 20s, I read all sorts of sloppiness in English usage, grammar and punctuation in the Miami Herald and Kansas City Star, before I got disgusted with it and quit subscribing to each. Online news now is liberally sprinkled with shoddy composition and egregious violations of rudimentary English.
Yes, mistakes are human, a flaw common to all of us. That should not excuse us from their consequences! I expect to correct my own, and not make the same error again. I promise that nobody is harder on me, than me, about my own errors.
Don’t blame mass production or Wal-Mart or China or our demand for the cheap, either. That’s simple-minded and misleading. It is possible to have high-quality, excellent products that are mass-produced at low prices. Otherwise, none ever would occur at all.
If one pair of off-brand shoes happens to last five years, that shows that every such shoe could and should. If one scientific story is very well-written, it sets the example for all to be. If one Ford or Toyota goes 200,000 miles with no major malfunctions, why not any of the rest? If one poor kid from a roach-infested dwelling the inner city or the backwoods can succeed, despite the circumstances, so can any other.
We just have to demand quality, first from ourselves and then others, and hold people accountable for its absence! When you do discover excellence in someone or something, broadcast it. The world needs every example of excellence it can muster.
I know it’s harder to be excellent than not, and harder to notice one’s own errors and correct them. Perhaps folks just don’t care enough to bother. If so, what does that convey?
Don’t misconstrue me; excellence is not the same as perfection. Instead it is the fruits of the pursuit thereof, manifest as the highest quality humanly possible.
The solution to a systematic, pervasive lack of quality, such as I am witnessing, ultimately lies in each individual, in what I call the holy trinity of excellence: practice it when no one is looking, set an example of it in all you do openly…and demand it from everyone. As applied here, this means accurate, concise, engaging, well-written reporting and communication of science to the lay reader.
Consistent excellence in any person or service only exists where that person or service is held accountable at a peak achievement level.
It’s Getting Batty in the Garage
Right now, as I type this, a single little bat sleeps in our garage, right above the entry door to the rest of the house. It’s toasty in there (106 degrees F, same as the outside), so I hope it endures the hot day well and can head back out for tonight’s activities.
Donna thinks it’s cute, and David wants to name it. Of course, it’s not a pet, and they know to leave it alone. We hope the bat (which looks well fed) will fly right back out again tonight and continue munching on the many kinds of nocturnal bugs around here.
The bat doesn’t seem to mind all the people coming in and out, and the noise and vibration of the door opening and closing. It probably flew in and took roost this morning after Donna and I watched the Perseid meteors for a spell just outside the garage, with the door open.
Here in the country just outside Norman, Elke and I love our wildlife…except for mosquitoes, ticks and chiggers, that is. Those three types of pests can go straight to hell and burn forever! Otherwise, it’s fun to see the variety of birds, reptiles, amphibian and mammals that fly, crawl and run through our acreage during any given week or season.
We’ve spotted dozens of species of songbirds, including one ruby-crowned kinglet that insisted on fighting with his image in our bedroom window several days in a row. We have resident pairs of barred owls and red-shouldered hawks, each of which vanished for awhile (but later returned) after the 12 June 2009 tornado busted up a bunch of trees across our property last year. We hear the call of red-tailed hawks overhead by day and great horned owls in the distance at night.
Crows call out almost constantly during the day, including a very recognizable, longtime resident that sounds laryngitic. A pair of roadrunners roams the neighborhood, and seems to have greatly reduced the population of toads and tarantulas since their arrival. Still, there are some, as well as several kinds of lizards and frogs. Elke once rescued a clutch of baby thrashers from a huge bull snake that shimmied up a cedar tree in pursuit of a snack, and I’ve seen several other species of nonpoisonous snakes in our gardens. Pygmy rattlers and copperheads live in the area, though I haven’t seen any on our property.
Armadillos love to dig ankle-twisting holes in parts of our yard; and I have had to exterminate a few particularly destructive ones. We hear the warbling and chortling of coyotes, on almost a nightly basis, from our back neighbor’s quarter-section. His pond attracts huge flocks of geese and ducks that fly overhead often. We’ve observed a bobcat, twice, go into our garage to pursue mice; though it is a reclusive critter and seldom seen. I’ve had possums walk right by my feet at night (possums are so freakin’ stupid…how have they survived so long?), and various members of a family of raccoons raids our outdoor compost pen on almost a nightly basis for whatever we thrown out there that’s edible. We’ve seen plenty of rabbits and deer also.
Centipedes and scorpions are common; indeed, our cat kills a few scorpions in the house every year. Elke almost stepped on one barefoot the other night. And the variety of spiders around here is mind-boggling. Yes, that includes black widows and brown recluses, whose habitats we have learned well.
We’ve even seen bats flying — but until today, never roosting on the house — much less in the garage. Cool. The more bats we’ve got, the fewer we have of mosquitoes, moth parents of plant-eating caterpillars, and other annoying bugs. We ought to put up some bat boxes, now that we know they want to roost here.
Life Insurance Warning for Federal Employees and Military Veterans
According to this report by Bloomberg (a credible source):
If you are a federal employee and keel over, the FEGLI (the federal group life insurance) lump-sum payment is not up-front money, but a so-called “checkbook” tapped into a non-insured (by FDIC) account held by MetLife. A similar fate awaits the VA life insurance payouts for a deceased veteran. Risky, risky, risky…
If you are on FEGLI, you need to be aware of this and plan accordingly. For most of us, this would mean instructing our designated beneficiary to proactively write the full lump-sum “check” for the FEGLI payout to our own bank account, trust or other chosen account — ASAP, after receiving the “checkbook” from MetLife. This way, the money is held by your own estate or beneficiary, not MetLife, who
1. would earn more in interest and investment on your death benefits than they will pay out to your beneficiary (effectively profiting from your demise), and
2. aren’t FDIC-insured like your bank account. This probably is the most critical part, because your life insurance payout is utterly at the mercy of MetLife’s solvency, which has become a concern!
Even after sifting through the typical, journalistically formulaic, bleeding-heart anecdotes, and getting down to actual salient facts buried within, the article is worth reading.
The key part: “The federal government doesn’t even regulate the life insurance it supplies, via MetLife, to its own employees in a program called Federal Employees’ Group Life Insurance. As the VA does for soldiers, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management sends handbook to nonmilitary government workers — some 4 million active employees and retirees. The handbook says their life insurance policies automatically pay out death benefits in the form of a “money-market-account checkbook.” The 217-page handbook omits that the money isn’t FDIC insured and will stay with MetLife until someone writes a “check.” ”
Also troubling are the inconsistencies from OPM (Office of Personnel Management) and Metlife as the article discusses. Given their mixed messages and ambiguities, I wouldn’t trust either OPM *or* MetLife as far as I could spit ‘em. Again, your beneficiary or trust probably should cash FEGLI out ASAP into an insured account after you die. It’s the safest strategy for most of us under FEGLI.
Spread the word to your favorite military veteran or civilian federal employee.