Australia as a nuclear waste dump?

Today's Classic FM midday interview by Margaret Throsby was with Bob Hawke, though it was rebroadcast from last April.

One of his views is that Australia should offer itself as a dump for nuclear waste. While recognising that this would be controversial, it would generate valuable income for remote regions and facilitate the greening of world energy supplies. Apparently, we could offer world's best of stable geology and politics.
If it is accepted that an emotional response is not the only way to make sensible policy decisions, this would make for an interesting "economic" question. For all the faults of economic analysis, perhaps it is the only way to combine financial issues with local and international cost/benefit analysis, and in this case a large negative "feel-good" factor.

http://www.abc.net.au/classic/content/2015/04/06/4210403.htm

Sandy Miller and tough times at Margaret River

During a brief family holiday at Margaret River, we visited Miller's icecream shop on a farm north of Margaret River, built from a restored Group Settlement house. The shop includes a display of photos of the original land-holder, Sandy Miller, who emigrated from Scotland in 1932 at 19 years of age, to establish his dairy farm.
Sandy must have been the second wave of farmers, following the original Group Settlement times of the 1920s. By 1924, at least a third had walked off their farms.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_Settlement_Scheme

But still, times must have been hard, with much of the work done by hand - the days of shovel and axe. Only the lucky and the strong would have survived, and Sandy - and his wife, must have been one of the strong, which comes through in the photos.
The photos were  an interesting contrast with the families arriving in their four-wheel drives, to buy an icecream.
 http://www.millersicecream.com.au/

Successful teams not happy teams

From The Conversation, December 15th, 2014.
http://theconversation.com/when-colleagues-kick-off-or-why-a-successful-team-is-not-always-a-happy-team-35302

This story confirms experiences over the years with farm businesses. Successful family businesses often suffer from seemingly major personal conflicts. This conflict may help the business, even if not personal lives. This can make "succession planning" an oxymoron - nobody plans to enhance family conflict.

When colleagues kick off: or why a successful team is not always a happy team

By Mark de Rond Reader in Strategy & Organisation, Cambridge Judge Business School at University of Cambridge

Over the past few months, the sports world has featured plenty of news about enmity and spite among members of some of the most successful teams in sporting history.

In the recently completed Formula One motor racing season, the Mercedes team was riven by rivalry between Lewis Hamilton and teammate Nico Rosberg, but that didn’t stop them finishing first and second in the prestigious drivers’ championship.

Earlier this autumn, a new book by cricketer Kevin Pietersendrew headlines from its claims of bullying by teammates in the midst of some of England cricket’s greatest glories. And we learned in another new book that Manchester United midfielder Roy Keane head-butted goalkeeper Peter Schmeichel shortly before the team won a rare treble – the English Premier League, FA Cup and UEFA Champions League in 1998-99.

These revelations of teammate turmoil shouldn’t surprise. I’ve spent the last 15 years studying teams of high performers, usually by living with them full-time for sustained periods of time – including war surgeons in Afghanistan, biochemists in Oxford and elite rowers in Cambridge – and am consistently struck by the same observation: how dysfunctional and inefficient teams can feel from the inside, even if they are performing at the highest levels.

Highly strung

One might call it the “mess inside”. The tensions that swirl within any successful collaboration, be it in sports, business or elsewhere.

The mess inside reflects all sorts of tensions; between the need to co-operate and desire to compete; between the need to trust and a competitive environment that rewards vigilance, and between the efficiency forged by control and the need to give others a degree of autonomy – or “letting the boys play,” in sports parlance.

It is left to team members to find ways of navigating these tensions as best they can. It’s the stuff their playground is made of. The key to high performance is to find ways of managing these tensions creatively rather than destructively.

The temptation for many teams is often to suppress or otherwise negotiate tensions in the pursuit of harmony. After all, relational conflict distracts. It decreases motivation and good-will, raises levels of anxiety that, in turn, prevent people from thinking clearly, and can make consensus building difficult. It’s therefore understandable that many teams place a great deal of emphasis on harmony.

Too comfortable

The difficulty with this emphasis is that it can become a proxy for performance, particularly in the absence of a more robust measure. It may be difficult to tell on a daily, or even weekly, basis how well the team is performing, but we have a pretty good sense as to whether they are more, or less, harmonious as a team.

An over-emphasis on harmony can also foster an environment where team members are reluctant to challenge others for fear of being considered not a “team player”. And, occasionally, those who insist most strongly on solidarity may do so for fear of being found less capable than people have hitherto assumed. After all, one is much less likely to be challenged, and one’s weaknesses revealed, where the cultural expectation is “getting along” and “being nice”.

Finally, while there’s a popular assumption that the better people get along the better they perform, the evidence we have suggests that it’s often the other way around: team harmony isn’t so much a cause for success as a consequence of it.

For example, the late American psychologist Richard Hackman, in a cleverly designed study of 78 symphony orchestras, found that grumpy orchestras tend to outperform happy ones. Likewise, happier pilots do not also make for better team players. So Hackman warned against putting the cart before the horse: even if interpersonal difficulties can sometimes undermine performance, it does not follow that the best response to underperformance is to help team members fix those relationships.

Pulling in the same direction

So if harmony isn’t the magic ingredient to team performance, then what is? The answer isn’t straightforward, however, it is clear that two features of teams do appear to contribute significantly to higher-than-usual performance. The first of these is psychological safety: teams that provide safe spaces for frank and constructive conversation are far less likely to see people hide mistakes or illnesses, or self-censor for fear of looking incompetent. The second is that effective teams know precisely why what they do matters, and who it matters to, and are able to leverage this to socialise newcomers, to make tough calls, and to measure progress.

The Cambridge University boat crew might serve as a useful example. The club has only one constitutional reason for existence: to beat rivals Oxford in the Boat Race: an annual contest fought out on the river Thames since 1829. The crew’s focus is singular – and has allowed them to apply just one criterion when making decisions: will doing this help us win the Boat Race, yes or no? A version of this question, colloquially referred to as the Stephens Test among the rowing fraternity is: will it make the boat go faster? If the answer is affirmative, we do it. If not, we don’t.

Many organisations today are vastly more complex, if only because they serve many masters. Yet might it not be useful to try and – as a team – articulate an equivalent “test” to provide focus, to help build a sense of identity, and to help team members make choices?

It is this kind of approach that gives Hamilton and Rosberg an edge, whatever their personal relationship, and which pushed Manchester United to an unprecedented success, even if the captain felt moved to fight with his goalkeeper. While active dislike among team members can impair performance, I’d argue that a singular focus on performance – on what we are here to do, and why – is likely to be more remedial than any amount spent on ever-crazier, and ever-more popular, team building exercises.

General Hammerstein's wisdom

From today's Saturday Extra, and a Geraldine Doogue interview - a story that included General Hammerstein. Wikipedia gives the full quote, in his classification scheme for his men:

"I divide my officers into four groups. There are clever, diligent, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and diligent -- their place is the General Staff. The next lot are stupid and lazy -- they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the intellectual clarity and the composure necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is stupid and diligent -- he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always cause only mischief."

My two bob's worth is that it can be difficult to decide who is stupid and who is clever - perhaps it depends on context?

The story was part of a review of a new book - "Selfish, Scared and Stupid", apparently with discussion about how to work within the bounds of human nature, not against it. Perhaps including ideas along the lines of Daniel Kahneman's Thinking - Fast and Slow".

http://theimpossibleinstitute.com/selfish-scared-and-stupid/

No urinating in the bush

It seems official. Certainly it has been confirmed over a beer, now on two occasions.  Urinating in the bush is no longer to be tolerated. Apparently this is now policy for the Department of Parks and Wildlife, but also, mining companies have had the policy for some time.
No doubt, as well the normal requirement for a JHA, an Environmental Hazard Analysis has assessed this as being necessary.

A movie review to make you want to see the real thing

Over today's morning coffee, here is a movie review that makes you want to see the real thing.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/01/lasting-impressions

Like many a good Pommy movie, "The Trip" was one I discovered by accident, realised by the end of it how good it was, and have appreciated more as time goes by. Appropriately, I stumbled upon it on a plane trip back from the U.S.
This U.S. review of a sequel is well written in itself, and gives no warning that it is any less successful than its original, though another U.S. review (IMDb) only gives it 3.5 stars. Also, the Sydney Morning Herald only gives it 2.5 stars.
Maybe not everyone's cup of tea?

Are you a poor logician? Logically, you might never know

A great story about stupidity, from The Conversation
It was written by Stephann Lewandowsky, Chair of Cognitive Psychology at University of Bristoland Richard Pancost, Professor of Biogeochemistry, Director of the Cabot Institute at University of Bristol.

This story includes a clip worth watching, by John Cleese.

"It is an unfortunate paradox: if you’re bad at something, you probably also lack the skills to asses your own performance. And if you don’t know much about a topic, you’re unlikely to be aware of the scope of your own ignorance.Type in any keyword into a scientific search engine and a staggering number of published articles appears. “Climate change” yields 238,000 hits; “tobacco lung cancer” returns 14,500; and even the largely unloved “Arion ater” has earned a respectable 245 publications.Experts are keenly aware of the vastness of the knowledge landscape in their fields. Ask any scholar and they will likely acknowledge how little they know relative to what is knowable – a realisation that may date back to Confucius.Here is the catch: to know how much more there is to know requires knowledge to begin with. If you start without knowledge, you also do not know what you are missing out on.This paradox gives rise to a famous result in experimental psychology known as the Dunning-Kruger effect. Named after Justin Kruger and David Dunning, it refers to a study they published in 1999. They showed that the more poorly people actually performed, the more they over-estimated their own performance.People whose logical ability was in the bottom 12% (so that 88 out of 100 people performed better than they did) judged their own performance to be among the top third of the distribution. Conversely, the outstanding logicians who outperformed 86% of their peers judged themselves to be merely in the top quarter (roughly) of the distribution, thereby underestimating their performance.John Cleese argues that this effect is responsible for not only Hollywood but the actions of some mainstream media.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvVPdyYeaQU

Ignorance is associated with exaggerated confidence in one’s abilities, whereas experts are unduly tentative about their performance. This basic finding has been replicated numerous times in many different circumstances. There is very little doubt about its status as a fundamental aspect of human behaviour.

Confidence and credibility

Here is the next catch: in the eyes of others, what matters most to judge a person’s credibility is their confidence. Research into the credibility of expert witnesses has identified the expert’s projected confidence as the most important determinant in judged credibility. Nearly half of people’s judgements of credibility can be explained on the basis of how confident the expert appears — more than on the basis of any other variable.Does this mean that the poorest-performing — and hence most over-confident — expert is believed more than the top performer whose displayed confidence may be a little more tentative? This rather discomforting possibility cannot be ruled out on the basis of existing data.But even short of this extreme possibility, the data on confidence and expert credibility give rise to another concern. In contested arenas, such as climate change, the Dunning-Kruger effect and its flow-on consequences can distort public perceptions of the true scientific state of affairs.To illustrate, there is an overwhelming scientific consensus that greenhouse gas emissions from our economic activities are altering the Earth’s climate. This consensus is expressed in more than 95% of the scientific literature and it is shared by a similar fraction — 97-98% – of publishing experts in the area. In the present context, it is relevant that research has found that the“relative climate expertise and scientific prominence” of the few dissenting researchers “are substantially below that of the convinced researchers”.Guess who, then, would be expected to appear particularly confident when they are invited to expound their views on TV, owing to the media’s failure to recognise (false) balance as (actual) bias? Yes, it’s the contrarian blogger who is paired with a climate expert in “debating” climate science and who thinks that hot brick buildings contribute to global warming.‘I’m not an expert, but…’How should actual experts — those who publish in the peer-reviewed literature in their area of expertise — deal with the problems that arise from Dunning-Kruger, the media’s failure to recognise “balance” as bias, and the fact that the public uses projected confidence as a cue for credibility?Speaker of the US House of Representatives John Boehner admitted earlier this year he wasn’t qualified to comment on climate change.We suggest two steps based on research findings.The first focuses on the fact of a pervasive scientific consensus on climate change. As one of us has shown, the public’s perception of that consensus is pivotal in determining their acceptance of the scientific facts.When people recognise that scientists agree on the climate problem, they too accept the existence of the problem. It is for this reason that Ed Maibach and colleagues, from the Centre for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University, have recently called on climate scientists to set the record straight and inform the public that there is a scientific consensus that human-caused climate change is happening.One might object that “setting the record straight” constitutes advocacy. We do not agree; sharing knowledge is not advocacy and, by extension, neither is sharing the strong consensus behind that knowledge. In the case of climate change, it simply informs the public of a fact that is widely misrepresented in the media.The public has a right to know that there is a scientific consensus on climate change. How the public uses that knowledge is up to them. The line to advocacy would be crossed only if scientists articulated specific policy recommendations on the basis of that consensus.The second step to introducing accurate scientific knowledge into public debates and decision-making pertains precisely to the boundary between scientific advice and advocacy. This is a nuanced issue, but some empirical evidence in a natural-resource management context suggests that the public wants scientists to do more than just analyse data and leave policy decisions to others.Instead, the public wants scientists to work closely with managers and others to integrate scientific results into management decisions. This opinion appears to be equally shared by all stakeholders, from scientists to managers and interest groups.

Advocacy or understanding?

In a recent article, we wrote that “the only unequivocal tool for minimising climate change uncertainty is to decrease our greenhouse gas emissions”. Does this constitute advocacy, as portrayed by some commenters?It is not. Our statement is analogous to arguing that “the only unequivocal tool for minimising your risk of lung cancer is to quit smoking”. Both statements are true. Both identify a link between a scientific consensus and a personal or political action.Neither statement, however, advocates any specific response. After all, a smoker may gladly accept the risk of lung cancer if the enjoyment of tobacco outweighs the spectre of premature death — but the smoker must make an informed decision based on the scientific consensus on tobacco.Likewise, the global public may decide to continue with business as usual, gladly accepting the risk to their children and grandchildren – but they should do so in full knowledge of the risks that arise from the existing scientific consensus on climate change.Some scientists do advocate for specific policies, especially if their careers have evolved beyond simply conducting science and if they have taken new or additional roles in policy or leadership.Most of us, however, carefully limit our statements to scientific evidence. In those cases, it is vital that we challenge spurious accusations of advocacy, because such claims serve to marginalise the voices of experts.Portraying the simple sharing of scientific knowledge with the public as an act of advocacy has the pernicious effect of silencing scientists or removing their expert opinion from public debate. The consequence is that scientific evidence is lost to the public and is lost to the democratic process.But in one specific way we are advocates. We advocate that our leaders recognise and understand the evidence.We believe that sober policy decisions on climate change cannot be made when politicians claim that they are not scientists while also erroneously claiming that there is no scientific consensus.We advocate that our leaders are morally obligated to make and justify their decisions in light of the best available scientific, social and economic understanding.