Absence Makes the Communications Flow Better

You've heard the knock on virtual teams. "Our team will communicate better when we are all together." Obvious, right?

Not so fast. It turns out that a small team communicates best when one - and only one - member is situated at a distance. At least that's the conclusion of a paper entitled: "Subgroups, Imbalance and Isolates in Geographically Dispersed Teams," in a 2008 article in Organization Science. 

Michael Boyer O’Leary, of Boston College’s Carroll School of Management and Mark Mortensen, at MIT’s Sloan School of Management studied 62 six-member teams split between locations in the US and Canada. Configurations of the teams included all 6 at one location, 5 at one location and 1 at the other, 4 at one location and 2 at the other, and 3 at each location.

Contrary to conventional wisdom the configuration with one isolated member and five members at the other location performed better even than the completely co-located team. Apparently the isolated member provides a focus for the other members of the team to schedule and coordinate communications. The authors speculate that a 'novelty effect' could be in play or that "one person wouldn’t be a threat to the rest of the team."

The worst configuration was that with two members separated from the other four. The two bonded with each other but not with the rest of the team.

MIT Sloan Management Review.

PS. As an independent consultant who frequently operates as an isolated individual in a distant team I found this study particularly encouraging.

Light My Fire

 Every kid has that moment of excitement when he focuses the sun’s rays through a magnifying glass on a bit of leaf and it starts to smolder. Imagine the exhilaration of the scientists at Lawrence Livermore's National Ignition Facility (NIF) each time all of its 192 ultra-powerful laser beams are focused on a tiny deuterium-tritium filled capsule causing it to implode. In one such experiment recently, the yield of neutrons reached nearly a thousand million million neutrons (1 x 10¹⁵) setting a new record for neutron energy yield at the NIF.

For the first time "the yield was significantly greater than the energy deposited in the hot spot by the implosion," said Ed Moses, principal associate director for NIF and Photon Science.

Establishing a self-sustaining fusion reaction – ignition - is now one step closer. These experiments underpin the primary mission of NIF to provide experimental insight and data for the stewardship of the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile. Demonstrating ignition is the first step required to permit fusion energy to be used for civilian energy production and for weapons validation that avoids underground testing.

Developing fusion energy could be a revolutionary moment in human history. Today’s nuclear power plants run on fission, not fusion. Fission reactions produce large volumes of radioactive by-products and wastes that remain hazardous for thousands of years, creating a storage problem. Fusion is preferred over fission since it produces almost no radioactivity, releases more energy per gram of fuel, and is a self-terminating reaction, so fusion reactors can’t melt down like fission reactors have. Also, since the energy release per gram of fuel is so great, only about 200 kg of fuel is needed to supply the energy equivalent of all the oil consumed in the US each day. Commercial applications are still ‘decades away’ according to most observers, however.

https://www.llnl.gov/news/newsreleases/2013/Aug/NR-13-08-04.html?utm_source=buffer&utm_campaign=Buffer&utm_content=buffer3da5a&utm_medium=twitter#.Uht3pWQ1btU

Cosmic Cedar

Tree rings are frozen environmental records. Unlike many other historical data that are averaged over decades or even centuries, tree rings grow in distinct individual annual segments. These segments are indicative of the environment the tree experienced during a specific year. In general, more favorable conditions of moisture and length of the growing season result in wider rings. Tree rings of multiple trees growing nearby are closely correlated, and their ages can be cross-correlated with carbon-14 dating techniques; tree rings can be tied to specific years.

It has recently been discovered that rings from cedar trees grown on Japan’s Yakushima island show an unusually high content of the carbon-14 isotope in rings formed in the late 8^th century. Carbon-14 in rings from a specific year (775 AD) jumped 12% from the prior year, which is 20 times the normal variability of C-14 due to solar modulation. High C-14 levels have been found in contemporaneous samples of European and North American forests. The high C-14 levels are believed to have been caused by an extremely intense burst of radiation, still of unknown origin.

Studies of arboreal growth patterns are important for the determination of climate history as well as of the impact of cosmic events on life on Earth.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v486/n7402/full/nature11123.html

THESIS

     “Acquiring preemptive knowledge about emerging technologies is the best way to ensure that we have a say in the making of our future.” — Catarina Mota

My goal in this blog is to discuss emerging technologies and new insights that may impact our future.