Month: July 2020

My 12 books for 2020, so far.

Its almost the end of July and I have already managed my annual target of reading 12 books, helped along by the lockdown and the resultant lack of other things to do, plus reduced need for travelling every day.

I thought I would share my list so far along with some comments on each book:

Compassionism by Kavitha Chahel

A book looking at “Helping Business Leaders Create engaged teams and happy people”.   An easy book to read but I will admit I don’t feel I took much from it.  It felt very superficial but this may just be me.   Not one I would recommend sadly.

 

The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle

“The secrets of highly successful groups”.   I took more from this book than from Compassionism plus found it mentioned concepts and theories I had an interest such as “Kaizen” which made it reasonably interesting to read.   I would however say there are better books available on organisational culture.

Start with why by Simon Sinek

“How great leaders inspire everyone to take action”.    There were lots of things to take away from this book including mention of Money vs. Value, the tendency to consider what is easily measurable as being important and also the need for trust as part of organisational culture.   It was very easy to draw parallels with schools and other educational organisations.   This is book I would definitely recommend.

Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman

This one was a book I was re-reading after some time.    Quite a heavy book to read in places but overall an excellent book with some important concepts around the need for Emotional intelligence in the world we live in.    Given the pace of change, and pressures to meet targets and other performance measures, I think a focus on our emotional understanding is only becoming more important.

Blink by Malcolm Gladwell

I generally like Gladwells books so expected to like this.   I did.    A book looking at how our intuition and unconscious decision making can often steer us in the correct direction and how we can often confuse “information with understanding”.    I feel this book is a good balance alongside the likes of Factfulness which focus more on data and figures, on information, for decision making.   A strongly recommended read.

Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek

Another Sinek book for the year.   This book is similar to Start with Why however in my view focusses more on the individual whereas start with the why felt more from a team or organisational level.   I liked the concept of “Destructive Abundance” which appears to draw some parallels in Factfulness.   Could having more “stuff” lead to undervaluing what we have and/or seeking protect it in such as way that we isolate ourselves from others?    This is a book I would happily recommend.

The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt

This book also mentions abundance but as a “paradox of abundance” rather than the “destructive abundance” used by Sinek.   I found this book to be quite an interesting exploration of ancient wisdom and how it compares with modern science, including where they converge and diverge.   The main thing I took from the book was the importance of balance and how things are seldom A or B, but in fact are about a balance of A and B.

Reaching down the rabbit hole by Allan Ropper & B.D Burrell

A series of stories about people who have suffered serious brain injuries or illness impacting on the human brain, all written from the point of view of the doctor seeking to solve the puzzle of their illness and to cure them where possible.    This book wasn’t really what I expected in its content so although I read it fully I don’t feel I enjoyed it or took anything from it.    It may be a good book but didn’t really align with my reading interests so is not one I would recommend unless the subject content is something which interests you.

I’m worth more by Rob Moore

An easy to read book, but superficial as a result, a bit like Compasionism.    When I read books like this I feel they are a little like “self help” guides in that they put everything in very simple terms where things in this world are seldom simple.    I really like books that make me stop and challenge my views and assumptions which this book never did.   I would steer away from this one.

 

Life 3.0 by Max Tegmark

I really enjoyed the subject matter of this book, looking at Artificial Intelligence and how things might evolve beyond the human race, but with only the occasional nod to the Terminator films and the human race being exterminated by vicious automated systems.   This book opened my eyes to looking at the potential for AI and for the evolution of life, beyond the horror stories.   Now I have used the phrase “healthy paranoia” on a number of occasions in relation to my views on cyber security however this book introduced me to a new phrase in “mindful optimism” which I believe is the ideal phrase when looking a the potentially positive implications of technology and also of educational technology.

Factfulness by Hans Rosling

What is a lot of your thinking, which is largely intuitive, about the world we live in is wrong?   This book was very interesting in using data to prove that a lot of our thinking regarding the world isn’t supported by hard data and that if we look at the hard data we might be more inclined to be more positive, albeit there is still lots of room for improvement.   I very much enjoyed this book as it did challenge my thinking.  It was also a good book to pair with Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink which at the issue the other way, suggesting instinct is more useful than we give it credit.    This is a book I would strongly recommend.

Enlightenment No by Steven Pinker

This book is similar in topic and coverage to Factfulness, so it was good reading Factfulness and then progressing on this.   I found lots to take away from the book, although found it a little heavier reading, especially in some of the later chapters, when compared with Factfulness.   I liked the opening discussion of entropy in relation to the world, and how energy has to be expended to create order out of natural chaos.   I also liked the discussion of bias.   “When one’s nose is inches away from the news optimism can seen naïve”, hinted to the availability heuristic and how reporting of disasters, terrorism, etc via the news can colour our view as to the world we live in.    This is definitely a worthwhile book to read, however if I was to choose I would pick Factfulness rather than this, just for being marginally more accessible and easy to read.

 

Recommendations

So, if I had to recommend three books from the above, they would be:

  • Blink
  • Life 3.0
  • Factfulness

This provides some discussion of the distant future and AI, via Life 3.0, plus two differing views on the current world and whether to take a numbers based, or intuition based approach.

 

 

 

Huawei: National needs vs. World Internet

The recent issue of Huawei 5G equipment in the UKs 5G infrastructure highlights the challenges of the internet and technology, which often cross international borders, but where the services and hardware is produced by companies which exist clearly within the borders of countries and therefore potentially within the influence of their governments.     There is a clear tension here between the services provided to the internet and the companies providing them.

The Huawei case is very much about internet security.     The implication is that Huawei could be influenced by the Chinese government who could then leverage the Huawei equipment installed in foreign countries telco infrastructure to gather intelligence, modify or filter communications or otherwise impact on the operation of a country through control of its communications systems.    This all seems quite logical.   Who would want a foreign government to be able to exercise power of their infrastructure?

The issue for me here, is that the technologies, either hardware or software, have to be created and then developed and deployed from somewhere in the world.     Apple devices, Microsoft Windows, Facebook, Google, all have to come from somewhere and in doing so could be influenced by governments or political powers within that given location.   So, the Huawei argument from the perspective of a UK citizen, may equally be matched by Chinese concerns over Apple from the perspective of a Chinese citizen.     Looking to the US, there is even some precedence for being suspicious with Kaspersky, which I note are a Russian firm, highlighting in 2015 that the NSA, a US intelligence agency, could “implant spyware of hard drives to conduct surveillance on computers around the world”.

Technology and technology services are used internationally whether that is a Dell laptop, Dropbox cloud file storage or newspaper website.    Often, these products or services may use components from other organisations, such as Seagate hard drives in a laptop, or Google Analytics or Facebooks share and like buttons on a companies website.   This further complicates things.   The devices, services and components are all used without consideration for international borders.     Yet we live in a world where international borders exist, where governments may have a stake in technology companies or may have influence.  The risk of influence exists.

One solution to this is to block and to ban.   China block Google and YouTube for example, and now it looks like the US and UK are banning Huawei.    Meanwhile in Russia they are testing their own national internet system separate to the “real” internet.    This may be the direction governments increasingly pursue, to block, ban or to create in-country copies, but for me I don’t see how this will work.    In China VPNs provide a solution to circumvent blocks while I am sure Chinese semiconductors/microchip are already in so many of our devices in the office and at home.   If the service or device works for users, it will find its way into use no matter what governments choose to do.

The answer for me is an acceptance of the complexity of this predicament and that countries will have their own personal motives or ends that they wish to encourage.    It is, in my view, a lose-lose situation.     Leave Huawei in place and allow for the risk of Chinese influence or remove Huawei which will likely result in counter moves by the Chinese plus, assuming they are seeking to exert influence via technology, them targeting other parts of the world wide internet infrastructure and services.

All we are left with is a risk-based judgement, which is what I believe must have been taken here.    The risk of counter action, Chinese influence over other parts of the internet and additional cost of changing supplier including removing existing Huawei technology must have been judged to be less than the risk created by Huawei technology within the UKs core or edge network.  My worry here is the potential for bias in the decision making.   As Pinker(2018) points out, “people are poor at assessing probabilities” so “if two scenarios are equally imaginable, they may be considered equally probable”.   Potentially the probability of destructive Chinese action against the UK may have been over estimated.   As such the preventative action taken in blocking Huawei may be excessive.   Or maybe it isn’t!

And if you want to take this whole discussion a stage further let’s consider how companies might now influence the world.   Take for example Facebook which, if it were a country, based on users it would be biggest in the world.    What if we accept that it to may have motives and ends to its is actions, beyond simply providing the Facebook platform?    Google, Microsoft, Apple, Twitter, etc, may all be the same.   But that is possibly for another post.

 

References:

BBC News. 2020. Huawei 5G kit must be removed from UK by 2027. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-53403793. [Accessed 16 July 2020].

CNet. 2015. NSA planted surveillance software on hard drives, report says. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.cnet.com/news/nsa-planted-surveillance-software-on-hard-drives-report/. [Accessed 16 July 2020].

Pinker, S., 2018. Enlightenment Now. 1st ed. UK: Penguin House.

TechCrunch. 2019. Russia starts testing its own internal internet. [ONLINE] Available at: https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/26/russia-starts-testing-its-own-internal-internet/?guccounter=1. [Accessed 16 July 2020].

World Economic Forum. 2016. If social networks were countries, which would they be?. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/04/facebook-is-bigger-than-the-worlds-largest-country/#:~:text=If%20Facebook%20were%20a%20country%2C%20it%20would%20be,it%20each%20month%20-%20around%201.9%20billion%20people.. [Accessed 16 July 2020].

SharePoint Online

I have been pushing ahead with Office 365 in school for a few years focussing initially on email and OneDrive before moving on to Teams and OneNote.   I didn’t give SharePoint online much of a look, until I started looking at alternatives to the often-pricey Learning Platforms or Virtual Learning Environments used by many schools.

I am not a fan of VLEs and haven’t been for many years due to the fact rather than being interactive and part of learning they often end up being little more than a repository of learning materials and resources.   It isn’t the nature of the VLEs as a repository that bothers me but the significant cost, often related directly to student numbers, which they command.   I recognise that many schools have them and need to continue to offer a nice and easy way for students to access resources ideally in a nice visual way so with that in mind I went searching for an easy solution.

Initially my thoughts alighted on MS Teams, as we use Office 365 heavily, but I felt teams is more a collaborative space for discussion, collaborative working, etc, rather than a repository of resources, plus Teams lacks the visual presentation side of things.     It may be important to demark which online spaces are for collaboration and which are simply sources of materials hence I thought this another reason to avoid using Teams for this purpose.

So, I arrived at SharePoint.   I was a little trepidatious initially as my previous interactions, albeit a fair number of years ago, with a locally hosted SharePoint installation had me remembering it as very fiddly and complicated.

Where SharePoint online is concerned these concerns quickly disappeared and I found myself identifying the below positive features:

  • Its simple to use. Training staff to create pages and build sites therefore takes little of the limited time that is available.   Yes, there are limits on design, layout, etc however this means the sites created simply work and display correctly across different devices and platforms.  In my eyes this is an acceptable limitation.
  • Its easy to integrate into Teams; I can make a SharePoint online document library appears as a tab in a Microsoft Teams so teachers can simply open the team and drag and drop files in, with these then appearing on the SharePoint site, via the appropriate document library webpart, for students to access.
  • Its flexible and scalable; I can use one site or many interlinked sites as is defined by needs, easily adding additional sites as required.
  • It supports several integrations with learning tools such as FlipGrid and Quizlet among others.
  • Its included within Office 365 licensing so offers a saving on commercial VLEs.

I am not saying SharePoint is perfect but with limited effort a site or series of sites can be created to act as your repository for learning materials, all without the significant cost of a VLE.