detrius - dermots blog

A funny thing happened on the way to my redundancy.

Mon, 11 Jan 2010 10:28:04 +0000

The email when it came was brief and to the point.
"I would like to invite you to attend an important meeting this afternoon with myself at 1.30pm in Le Pole House, 4th Floor Boardroom"

The trigger was being pulled. After over 12 years and various roles in GE redundancy loomed. Not unexpected. Not surprising. Briefly shocking all the same. It had been coming for quite a while. Two rounds of large scale redundancies over the past 18 months. This was round three. Time to active the contingency plan. (Small bit of advice for the government when you suspect the shit is going to hit the fan then prepare a plan in advance. During a crisis is no time to start planning). So there was a plan. It involved taking time out full time to complete my PhD, adding to my lecturing and starting my own consultancy business to keep the cashflow running.

In many ways the impending redundancy came as a relief. Anyone who's connected to me on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or elsewhere knows that I don't talk about the day job. Despite what Mark Zuckerberg says privacy ain't dead. Briefly breaking a habit. Working in GE has for the most part been great. As a techie I've gotten to work on many great pieces of technology, run a lot of projects and worked with some outstanding people. Even when I disagree with the corporate machine there is always something to learn. And I've worked with some stunning people in GE. @clareconway is one example of what I'm talking about. I've had exposure to some of the highest levels in the business, had an MBA sponsored by the company, developed strategy, built systems that generated muliple millions in income, built systems that saved multiple millions in costs and had some fun along the way.

The past 18 months or so have been hard. Talking to a friend whose business is having things rough I compared it to the difference between being on an Atlantic convoy during World War 2 and being on the Titanic. In the former its tough, you're under heavy fire and there is hope of a good outcome, in the latter its a question of wondering if you'll go down with the ship or not. And its hard. Hard on those who have left the company, hard on those staying behind.

Shortly before news of my impending doom I came a cross the following 5 lines in a screenshot by @rowan_manahan

Follow your passion
Find playmates smarter than you are
Solve the important problems
Share your toys
Build tools
Make magic

It resonated with me. Sufficiently for me to print it out and stick it to on my desk. And a number of things I've done over the past few months - talking at Ignite, talking at Business Camp have been about those principles. And so has twitter.

I actively started using twitter about 15 months ago. My stats say 8697 tweets, 1021 followers, 693 friends, 349 favourites & 531 DMs. A lot of chat. I intended to write a blogpost called "the year of twittering furiously". Consider this a substitute. Twitter in that time has provided conversation, entertainment, enhanced TV viewing, real information, challenged my thinking, opportunity and fun. There's been @Tupp_Ed and live blogging TV. My twitter stats say over 250 of those followers I've had conversations with. (I hate the word follower can we just replace it with mate or something else).

Anyway on 7th November last picked up this tweet. I dropped Mark an email. Long story short I'll be working with Mark fulltime on the Global News project as COO/CTO starting tomorrow. There has been some planning and discussions over the past few weeks and tomorrow the big adventure begins

In case anyone has been in hibernation for the past few months the background to what I'm saying is here.

Last night on twitter I said "My last day in GE tomorrow after lots of years. My really big adventure begins Tuesday. You're all invited, 'cause you're all involved" I had replies from @conoro @PaulSweeney
@helentreacy @tnteacherTim @niamhyb @Mediaflash @stephencredmond @LaurenFisher @aquigley @maoiliosak @ @BrianHonan @donkearns all within a few minutes wishing me well. And a number of DMs to boot. So when I said you're all involved I was serious, hell you're partly reponsible.
And this is the blogpost that explains what I was tweeting about.

So here's to the blue skys ahead. The audio track to video to this explains my current mood.
The last few lines of dialogue are important too.

And to answer a question before its asked, I'm not planning on tweeting, blogging or facebooking the new role any more than I did the last.

On Depression

Wed, 06 Jan 2010 12:12:28 +0000

I hadn't planned this to be my first blog post of 2010 however Twitter kinda prompted this...

On Depression

I have a fascination with the mind and how it works. And I've dug fairly deeply on this from a research review perspective a few times. It's prompted by experience. A mentor and friend of mine in University has Manic Depression ( More commonly known now as bipolar disorder). I've know a few people with depression. And I've know a few people who've committed suicide.

There is nothing simple in a discussion of depression and won't attempt to simplify it by trying to discuss it. And not having had it I suspect that I'm as well qualified to describe it as I am to describe the experience of pregnancy - that is not at all.

I get some sense of what its like from people like Andrew Soloman who wrote "The Noonday Demon" and Kay Redfield Jamison who wrote "An Unquiet Mind" which details her experience with severe mania and depression, and "Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide". And a book I keep returning too for very many reasons "Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" which illustrates the fragility and power of the Human Mind.

On the treatment side the best books I've read are "Doctoring the Mind" by Richard P Bentall and Ivor Brownes autobiography "Music and Madness". ( RTE have a program on their Website on Ivor Browne which covers much of the core of the book at http://www.rte.ie/tv/wouldyoubelieve/ivorbrowne.html )

These work for me because they don't suggest any simple answers. Because there are no simple answers. There aren't even simple questions.

Why I spend €50 on Outvesting

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 12:14:25 +0000

A question was asked by omgtbh on twitter on why anyone would give €50 to Outvesting with no sense of return.

The questions specifcally were
"I don't understand #outvesting nonsense. Why would you give money to a business and expect nothing back? "

Brief background to what Outvesting is

Outvesting was largely inspired by the IQ Prize and the conversation around two blog posts, by Pat Phelan and Joe Drumgoole. While lots of figures were bandied about throughout the discussions the sum of €5,000 kept coming up as a baseline figure that a bootstrapping startup could do something useful with. It’s also the amount of funding received by Level 1 awardees at Social Entrepreneurs Ireland.

So why? I tweeted twice on this

"We can either moan about the darkness or light some candles. This is lighting a small candle"
&
"with a smart person like @eirepreneur giving a lot more than €50 in terms of time it didn't seem too much"

Is that it? Well yes and no. There is an element of social responsibility, mixed with curiousity mixed with experimentation going on here as well.

I'm serious about the lighting a candle v's cursing the Darkness piece. My Dad was a founder of the Carrick-on-Suir Credit Union many decades ago. Their motto was (and is) "for people not for profit or for charity". It was about bootstrapping a community through small savings and loans. Did it fix all the problems? No. Did it make a significance difference to the community, absolutely.

I'm also curious. I saw some of the twitter chat that started it so when James started the whole thing my thought was. "That is a great idea. And the cost isn't too much. Yeah lets give it a go"

I'm also interested to see if this will work. Its an experiment and it could be amazing or it could be an abject failure. Who knows. We'll learn from the experiment though. Ideally it'll lead to something else. What else might that be? I don't know. There is only one way to find out.

A confluence, an inflection point & becomming the most adaptable to change

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 10:27:17 +0000

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.” - Charles Darwin

As I complete work for an elective lots of things are happening to illustrate the importance of this course. It's why I think this area is both Urgent & Important. This isn't about technology, it's about shifting power structures and an altering working landscape that will continue to take shape for decades to come.

I think the smartest thoughts I've read on this are Ze Frank who commented on

"the inevitability of an uneven distribution of resources. I look at the events of recent years not as a flattening, but as a shuffling of places on the curve. certain things transition from luxuries to commodities, but new luxuries take their place"

The question for most people is where will they be in that shuffling. The course I'm running is about giving student an edge. That few inches that makes the difference.

A brief glance shows some of what's going on. Mark Little is crowdsourcing ideas for his new Enterprise on Twitter, as Rupert Murdoch is talking about shutting Google out of his sites. 1.1Million Irish people are on Facebook and 200,000 are joining a Fanpage complaining about the "Hand of Henri". Salesforce is validating Enterprise use of Social Software with new Chatter tools. At the same time Andrew McAfee published his excellent new book that has defined the idea.

So we'll combine ideas & frameworks. We'll work out how to be more innovative and how to save time, money and resources in this brave new world. We'll have guest lecturers, new ideas and new ways of working. My definition of success - this should be the highest impact course you take and should resonante with you for decades to come.

You give and you get. Give and take (or why I spent time playing around with Niall Harbisons Diagram)

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 20:09:57 +0000

As a background it helps to have read this post first.

Why I spent some time plaing around with Niall Harbisons diagram

There is a real danger of this turning into a mutual backscratching society Niall says nice things about me, I say nice things about Niall and so on ad infinitum. Behind that is something more important.

To understand why I'd spend time redrawing someones diagram I need to tell a few stories. I have been online in one form or another for quite a while (does undergrad years in UCD when I was using Vax terminals to browse Usenet groups and getting help on my final year project on Neural Networks from some of the luminaries in the field date me - yeah thought so). The air now feels similar to the air then, or maybe its how I'm more active now than I've been in quite a while. It doesn't matter something is resonating.

When I started in my first job (ESB or "the board" as its also known) I felt like someone has chopped off one of my senses without Internet access. So I set off to persuade the powers to be to get Internet access (I need it ergo the company should need it). Along my way I discovered a few important things. I started by getting some time in the office of the head of Planning & Technology section of the IT Dept. This gentleman was tasked with envisioning the future use of technology within "the board".

I described for him what the Internet was and how it worked. He was incredelous - people online answer questions for each other FOR FREE and don't even expect to be paid for it. He could not comprehend it. Not so much a gap in understanding but a yawning chasm. He said he'd have a think about it if I costed it and gave a demonstration to him. I set off to do that. It was in the process of costing it that I found out we already had a connection to the internet. It wasn't widely advertised and I found out who looked after it and persuaded them to grant me access. So my missing sense was restored. In the course of a couple of days I learned about generation gaps, culture differences and that clever people will sometimes just go ahead and do things and figure out the consequeces later. I also learned a lot about large organisations and how they work.

Over my few years in the ESB access to the Internet, along with cobbled together CompuServe access and access to some Irish bulletin boards was a great source of advice, programming tips and technical support as we build some cutting edge software. It was great fun. The unwritten rule was you give and you get. Give and take. Apparantly a lot of this is build into us in the nature of reciprocity around how our species works. The proper way the species works.

So how does this lead to changing Nialls diagram. Well I've been following Niall on Twitter for about a year now. I watched the development of Look & Taste, wondered where the hell he got the time to run with so many different initiatives (be honest Niall its like "The Prestige" there are two of you running around sharing the same name). In observing I've learned lots. From his blog posts, free content, attending one of the events his business partner Lauren ran for free etc. (Not to mention the flowers for Valentines that I won for posting a comment on Look & Taste. )

So I've gained a lot from Niall. When I saw the diagram I was intrigued. Yet something about it grated like a pebble in a shoe, something I couldn't put my finger on grated. So I talked to Niall and asked if he'd be OK with me having a go improving it. He sent me the link to Google docs. I messed around with it, then printed it out to play around with. I even took the approach of my kids in school and cut out all the pieces and moved them around on the page. It gave me a slightly different perspective on how these tools relate together. To be honest I only thought it a slight improvement on Nialls original document. Rather than waste time on a nice neat diagram I roughed it up with Sharpie and paper before emailing it to Niall. I didn't expect it to end up on the front page of the Simply Zesty blog.

Niall summed it up as "He just wanted to make something better for others to gain knowledge from." which is true. I have a ferocious need and desire to learn I enjoy learning & teaching. It was also about saying thank you and contributing to the pool. I also clearly have too much free time with 1.5 jobs, a PhD underway and 3 small kids. Its still important to contribute, to help others. That was the key lesson of my fathers life.

Over the past year as the country has walked off a financial cliff one shining beacon of hope is the online community in Ireland. I came across the following list that Rowan Manahan blogged about from the first TEDx in Dublin that goes to the heart of this (and I've probably been annoying lots of people with the list). It reads

* Follow your passion
* Find playmates smarter than you
* Solve the important problems
* Share your toys
* Build tools
* Make Magic

This is whats going on withing Twitter and other places in Ireland. Here people, often people who don't have or shouldn't have the time are there to talk to and give advice to and support those who are trying to do things and to build a better country. Over the past few months examples such as Outvesting, BizCamp, and many other shine a very positive light on what we can do when we want to. There are so many smart and helpful people around. It worth reaching out and contributing. You give and you get. Give and take.

Paging Ned Ludd

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 16:53:36 +0000

Sergi Brin concludes his Google founders letter with the words

When I was a child, researching anything involved a long trip to the local library and good deal of luck that one of the books there would be about the subject of interest. I could not have imagined that today anyone would be able to research any topic in seconds. The dark clouds currently looming over the world economy are a hardship for us all, but by the time today's children grow up, this recession will be a footnote in history. Yet the technologies that we create between now and then will define their way of life.

Think deeply on that last line - "the technologies that we create between now and then will define their way of life."

There is a lot of rubbish spouted about technology, that Facebook is making us less social, that Twitter is dangerous because its impluse based way of signalling interfers with our empathic brain which takes longer to process signals than social media allows. These are worse than nonsence, reporters picking information from scientific press releases and weaving a pretty tale out of air. Either way these stories are for the most part rubbish.

Brilliantly obvious, obviously brilliant or just very clever

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 17:12:01 +0000

The very clever Lauren Fisher of Simply Zesty has written a post warning that "Social media is not your marketing strategy".

So what says you? Thats obvious. Course it is. Everything smart is obvious when pointed out. Trouble is people often don't stop to think about the obvious. And what's obvious to one isn't necessarily obvious to all. The comment that at a social media conference "...and there were quite a few who had never heard of Google analytics, alerts or adwords" reinforces this. A bit like a fish not recognising that its swimming in water, sometimes the obvious isn't and needs pointing out.

The most important bit of the whole post is close to the end

To successfully become a consumer-centric agency you need to move away from ‘campaign’ thinking. This is a hard step to take, it is essentially what marketing has always been built on. But there is no point thinking in terms of campaign timings, when what you’re hopefully creating is a loyal community online. That community is not there to receive your your campaign messages when you’re ready to throw them. You have to keep the conversation going and, most importantly, be responsive to what’s happening.

The money quote bears repeating

That community is not there to receive your your campaign messages when you’re ready to throw them.

Kinda a summary of the Cluetrain now 10 years old and the nature of conversations. Bears repeating. And will need repeating.

Cloud Computing, Anais Nin and “What is the cloud Joxer, what is the cloud”

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 23:40:18 +0000

OK its taken a while to get around to a second post on the Cloud Computing Summit One thing that came up again and again is the definition of “Cloud Computing”. I was getting so bored with the definitions that it took a while for the penny to drop. It was Anais Nin’s quotation

“We see the world not as it is but as we are”

which I use frequently that underlined it for me. All the various vendors are looking at it from their view of the world. See this diagram for what I mean.

To a greater or lesser extent Amazon are following Microsofts old approach, called Developers and espoused here by Steve Ballmer

If anyone needed any more convincing that Amazon is a Software Company there you go. They see the world from the perspective of Software Developers. And they aren't tied to the existing legacy framework that Microsoft are embedded in. So while Microsoft have been worrying about Google, Amazon have carried out a flanking attack, not deliberately aimed at Microsoft but its had that effect.

Next piece of the puzzle. In an excellent defintion of Information and Understanding Richard Saul Wurman said

“To comprehend information…. you must uncover the structure or framework by which it is or should be organised; you must relate the information to ideas that you already understand”
Richard Saul Wurman “Information Anxiety

ave Snowden quoted Mary Douglas in more depth on this idea

So Organisations see things in relation to how they understand the world and how they experience the world. Underlying this point is something I came across from Dave Snowden at Cognitive Edge. He is quoting Mary Douglas (in an very important book)

it seems that whatever we perceive is organised into patterns for which we the perceivers are largely responsible...
As perceivers we select from all the stimuli falling on our senses only those which interest us, and our interests are governed by a pattern-making tendency, sometimes called a schema. In a chaos of shifting impressions each of us constructs a stable world in which objects have recognisable shapes, are located indepth and have permanence.
As times goes on and experience builds up, we make greater investment in our systems of labels. So a conservative bias is built it. It gives us confidence
Mary Douglas Purity and Danger 1966
Quoted by Dave Snowden Cognitive Edge

So we are biased to see things in certain ways and how organisations are structured reinforces our biases.

So lets look at this

Company Focus How It Sees the World

Amazon Developers From a software development perspective. Small Teams

Google Consumers "to make it simpler for people to share information and get things done together."

Microsoft Business see microsoft.com

IBM Big Business Left as as exercise :-)

The interesting think here is that there isn't one Cloud. There are many. Software as Service, Platform as a Service, Infrastructure as a Service. (Next up Service as an additional Optional Service).

Each approach is a competing philosophy of how this new enviroment will work and how it should work. The vendors (particularly IBM and Microsoft who have the most to lose here) would like to lock you into their view of the world and like to lock your systems and products and processes and services in there as well. (Not much has changed there I guess).

What's missing here is what is the customer view of the world. I think the vagueness of the Cloud and even the usage of the word cloud reflects that.

Of course there is Larry Elisons take on "Cloud Computing"

]

Its a funny rant and it conceals much that is changing. Amazon is proving that

Cloud Summit Bootcamp. A lot done. More to do

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 00:04:43 +0000

I started to do a big blogpost on the Cloud Summit. And I started to bring in all the tweets from during the day and start to edit and reform them.

That is a real waste of my time. I’ll do a straight dump of the hashtag tomorrow night and incorporate everyones comments.

Here’s a general set of impressions. The thoughts and the big idea and key things I picked up on from todays sessions.

Its coming and its big. How big. No one knows. There is a presentation from Gartner due tomorrow and there are lots of figures being thrown around. $16 - $46 Billion dollars per year. That’s one set of figures. Another is the estimated $7 TRILLION locked in enterprise computing system that all the cloud vendors would like to get their gruppy little paws on.

We are at an inflection point. Described as a “platform transitions happen every 15 years. This is one.” That’s nice because I’ve been saying that for about 10 years. In reality this transition is big. There was a nice point made in relation to private and public clouds. Stephen McGibbon from Microsoft referred to it as the “Horseless Carriage”. When cars were invented couldn’t distinguish them from what had gone before. He feels this is happening at the moment – our uncertainly is leading to confusing models in our minds.

There is a lot of Apples and Oranges comparisons going on. (Described by one as Apples and Pears). Amazon, Google, Microsoft & IBM have a different set of offerings, they have a different set of skills and they are approaching the problem from different directions. Is it the same pie they are attempting to eat or are there a number of very different pies. At the moment the offerings are differentiated, not sure for how long that will remain the case. There is a lot of figuring this out as you go along happening here. Pathfinding if you will and its interesting.

What role for corporates and their applications. For new organisations, build straight into the cloud. For new applications build onto the cloud. For old legacy applications its not clear that there is any business case for moving things. It if is it isn’t clear. The issues of security and integrity raise their ugly heads. Not hugely different to Outsourcing. What is different is the amount of data moving in and out of the sites. A gentleman from SAP suggested – Data will reside in the enterprise and the computing cycles will be in the cloud. There are a number of interesting hybrid models. The iPhone described as a mobile client for the cloud. The idea of a mix of thicker clients and the cloud which may be how a lot of this will go.

On a practical level a lot has happened in the last year. Lots of the technology and management problems have been solved or are well in process of being solved (believe CloudSplit will be entering this space). A lot of it now is about a business led discussion. There are still huge practical questions – dealing with latency, the whole area of message queues and a lack of standards and interoperability here. The point was made that the dream of mobile apps of 10 years ago has been 80% realised. But that gap between 80 and 100% has some significant consequences. People need to be pragmatic about what is possible and how they will adapt to the Cloud and the consequences of things going wrong in the cloud.

Overall I learned a lot on the bootcamp. Hoping tomorrow will be equally informative.

MBA Class Materials - While you wait for Blackboard

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 22:00:10 +0000

Readings for class 3 and the Powerpoints for class 2 & class 3

Please note this is a zipped file you'll need an unzip program like PKZip WinZip or WinRAR to extract.

Class3.zip

How Projects Really Work - More on Communication

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 09:55:17 +0000

I have a slightly different black and white paper version of this that is over 18 years old.

I have another colour version that is slightly different (missing the iPodalike bit) that I use in my teaching all the time.

Its funny because its true. This one was sourced from the Project Failures blog as reminded to me by darrengeraghty on twitter

If you want to know why this occurs then read the previous entry on this blog.

Wrong information is being given out on the web. or Communication Confusion, why context is everything and the cluetrain is correct

Sun, 23 Aug 2009 23:00:52 +0000

Lauren Fisher put up an interesting post last week on "The evolution of the message"

The only problem is that the theory on which its based - Shannons communication theory - is wrong. No I'm not suggesting Claude Shannon got his maths wrong, what I'm suggestion is that lifting the model from transmission of bits and bytes and applying it to human communication is wrong. And misses the key point about what human communication is.

The material below is lifted from part of an academic paper I wrote a few years back (email me dermot @ 10thmonth.net if you want a copy). Because of this it gets quite detailed. I tried to avoid doing this and wracked my brains for a way to simplify it without dumbing it down. And I didn't manage it. So in the end I've put in some judicious edits but left the text more or less as I wrote it. I will attempt to take Laurens piece and recast it in terms of some of the ideas below over the next few days, time permitting (and given that I've struggled for a week to get this out, time may not permit). [Actually rereading this I do need to write a different version of it and that will take some time]

So follow me down the rabbit hole.

The problem is that he (Shannon) is not talking about communication in any sence that we think about when we are communicating. He is talking about the transfer of information which is a mathematical concept and has some relationship to communication and its an akward relationship.

To fully explain this idea I need to start by taking a step backwards.

The Oxford English Dictionary gives a number of definitions for the word communicate, two of which evoke contradictory understandings. One is “to impart, transmit (something intangible or abstract)”. A second is “to succeed in evoking understanding”. We suggest that people frequently confuse these two definitions, conflating human communications with the signal processing problems of information theory . In doing this we forget that that in Information Theory the “semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem” [100], i.e. Information Theory is about the transfer of signals, not about evoking understanding. This problem arises because of “the Conduit Metaphor” of communication [89].

The conduit metaphor views communications as the transfer of an object through a conduit from one person to another. This implies a one directional flow, presumably sent once, although allowing for confirmation of its arrival, such as a written communication, fax, email, etc. Evoking understanding implies cycles of two-way communications, including confirmations of major points followed by clarifications and agreements, and elaborations of details. Most importantly, for our purpose, it also implies acknowledging one another’s histories and experiences, both shared and unshared. It implies that understanding is built in layers.

The one that got away

Sat, 18 Jul 2009 10:36:12 +0000

The latest student feedback forms arrived last week. Contrary to what students may think they are taken very seriously by both lecturers and program staff. One student really really hated my course and I’d love to know why.

I am in two minds about student feedback. There is a school of thought that suggests that uniformly good feedback is not itself uniformly good. And I have some sympathy with this. It can be dangerously easy to be populist in terms of what you teach providing more sugar than substance. One of the best lecturers I had when I did my own MBA (hello Tom) split the class down the middle. A number of the class absolutely hated him. His approach was radical and to my mind excellent. Then again I was happy to be swamped by the workload he gave us (and that was life pre children).

Ultimately feedback is a critical part of any course. The first time I taught (and yes while its called lecturing I think of it more as teaching than lecturing) I had some very beneficial course feedback. The midcourse review (which I undertook myself at that stage using SurveyMonkey) threw up some problems and led me to some significant changes for the second half of the course. Not a fun thing to undertake while in the middle of course. Official feedback at the end of the course confirmed this was the right thing to do.

Along the way you learn what works and what doesn’t work. And student feedback helps. Some of the things I attempted early on were a little too ambitious in terms of what can be accomplished in a few months. The feedback helped to evaluate and to change the course. Now I can tell during a class whether the material and the work is coming together. It is also useful to make sure I’m not deluding myself so the feedback helps here as well. I think feedback works best when the mindset is “Strong Opinions, Lightly Held”. It helps you constantly refine and improve and learn.

So to the latest feedback. Which was great. Two of my courses were the top ranked. A third slightly lower ranked. So a look through the comments which often provide great ideas. I dug out a few ideas from these and noted for some changes. It also let me think about some additional material which we won’t have time to cover in class and which will be useful to students so I’ll provide as extras.

Then I took a look at the raw scores. Which is when I spotted it. Questions are graded on a scale of 1-5. 5 being excellent, and 1 being awful (or more politely 'very poor'). Scored 4 or 5 across all questions for all students except for one person. Someone scored me 1 out of 5 across nearly all questions. Now this was one person out of 80 odd students or one out of 150 if I take other course earlier in the year. And I have no idea of why (the comments unfortunately don’t tell me). I’d love to know.

It’s really easy to dismiss an outlier. “Ah yes but everyone else loved the course” and they did. And I still want to understand why that single person was different. I’m not suggesting that this person is right. I think it’d be useful to have a chat to understand what the differences were.

Am I mad?

The Bord Gais Letter

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 14:00:03 +0000

The Bord Gais Letter.

The Bord Gais Letter

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 14:00:03 +0000

The Bord Gais Letter.