When a team jointly develops a depiction of the causal aspects of historical events, and how those led to their current situation, they need to be aware of the effect that their own beliefs can have on their depiction of these events.  - Robert Jervis

Narrative and story-telling can be powerful psychological influences within group settings. We are 'wired' to desire to have our individual experiences become a part of our culture's folklore, and respond to the compelling stories of others in such contexts: Read more »

I grew up on a 130 acre dairy farm in western Pennsylvania (which has been converted into a golf course for reasons I'll outline below). While my father owned and managed the farm, he was very proud of doing things 'the right way', and he taught us all, through his example, about the importance of being good stewards of the land, our equipment, and our animals - our 'means of production'. He also taught us a lot about what it takes to deliver results under significant economic pressures, and with a lot on the line. Read more »

I had a chance to tour the Kennedy Space Center just before Thanksgiving, and was able to provide input and ideas in pursuit of an updated CAPPS contract for NASA's new Constellation program. The completion of the $130B International Space Station's construction is in sight, and is expected by 2010. Unfortunately, the originally planned life of the station only envisioned operational support through 2016, so the ISS's long-term role and cost-effectiveness for scientific research is uncertain, and has been significantly reduced from original plans. Read more »

This is how I spent over half my weekends and evenings from early April until early October, 2007, trying to get Vista to work as advertised. I had decided to upgrade to Vista in late February, shortly after it was formally released after a long and difficult series of public betas.

I didn't enter this decision lightly; although I was migrating to Vista for the capabilities that they were marketting - improved security and performance, and its digital media handling features for music, video, and photos - I knew such releases usually have some problems. Despite this, I was expecting the new Windows Media Center features to be reasonably mature, since this was effectively their third generation release and a key part of their strategy to place Microsoft software into the middle of home entertainment systems, a potentially huge growth market. Read more »