Cooperative Performance

I enjoy watching sporting events. When it comes to the major leagues, I prefer watching in person over the TV. The Super Bowl is about the only exception to that. Not that it wouldn't be fun to go to the Super Bowl in person, but that isn't likely to happen. That said, I prefer watching NCAA sports, because while they are often very, very good at what they do, there is a higher chance of something unexpected happening. You see more trick plays, fumbled balls, standout individuals, etc. I also enjoy watching my kids play on rec, competitive, and high school teams.

The competition drives higher and higher levels of performance for those who stick with it, while driving those out of the sport if they can't perform at the needed level. This is one of the negative aspects. What happens to those who enjoy playing for fun and fitness but don't like the extreme competitiveness?

I've been thinking a little about this recently and how music and art performances differ or are sometimes similar from a competition perspective. There are plenty of music competitions on TV - American Idol, The Voice, etc. And any tryout for a leading role in a musical or the solo at a concert is going to result in someone winning the exclusive part, leaving others to be an understudy, lower profile named part, or ensemble. The big difference, however, comes down to competition at performance time.

In sports, there is competition at tryout time and during performances. At each event, there is a winner and a loser; sometimes there is a ranked list of how well each person competed. In marathons and triathlons, even though there is a ranked list of times published afterwards, there is usually a good camaraderie among competitors, with positive words when crossing paths, which I have appreciated. Yet so often, the negative attitude towards competitors is part of the environment as an attempt to intimidate and break the concentration and confidence of the opponent.

While concerts and musicals do have to have tryouts, because we can't all be the lead, I appreciate how they become a community effort. Different theater companies share props, scenery pieces, and costumes and attend each other's performances. Individuals often perform with different companies. Everyone involved wants to perform at the highest level possible, but there are no losers. Even the actor portraying the villain gets an especially hardy applause if they did an excellent job making you hate them over the course of the show. Multiple bands can get together and have a combined concert.

In the gaming world, there are cooperative games, such as Pandemic, where the players work together to beat the board game. You win together or lose together, but there is no person or team on the other side. The better you work together, the better you perform.

I wish we had something like this for sports. Maybe that's what is missing currently from the sports world - a way to perform in a way that drives higher levels of performance without anyone having to lose in order to make that happen. That's the big question - how do we drive cooperative performance over competitive performance and still maintain the things that are good about sports?

MuseScore

Several years ago I was making a simple arrangement of a song, most of which was done using copy/paste and manually drawing things onto a photocopy of an existing piece of music. I found a free, open source software package called MuseScore, which was kind of difficult to get through the learning curve but seemed like a great tool in spite of my awkwardness with it. Over the years they have come out with several new versions of the software, and I have practiced with it quite a bit to where I'm much more efficient with it.

In addition to the software for writing and transposing music, it has a community which lets people share arrangements they have created with others. As the platform and community has gotten bigger, it has started gaining the attention of the music industry, and they have had to start charging to gain access to download the arrangements other users have made in order to have money to pay licensing fees to the original artists for making arrangements of their works. Some are upset with the system changing to charge for what used to be free. But the best part about it is still free - the software itself.

I think a lot of people were just using the community to download free sheet music, but taking it to the next level, using the software to create your own arrangements is the best part, because you learn to create something for yourself. I have learned a lot about music theory and about the instruments I have been arranging for by doing it myself.

Thanks MuseScore!

Jazz

I've been dipping my toes into the world of Jazz recently. The following is a list of classic or interesting albums that I've been working my way through, plus a link to my son's high school Jazz concert at the end.

• Time Out - The Dave Brubeck Quartet
• Ellington at Newport - Duke Ellington
• Ella and Louis Again - Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong
• Blue Train - John Coltrane
• Portrait in Jazz - Bill Evans Trio
• Jazz at Massey Hall - The Quintet
• Kind of Blue - Miles Davis
• King of the Tenors - Ben Webster
• Somethin' Else - Cannonball Adderley
• Golden Hits! - Sarah Vaughan
• The Blues and the Abstract Truth - Oliver Nelson
• Logan High Jazz Concert

Music

Much has been said about formulas for writing the perfect pop song or the perfect country song.

But sometimes, every now and then, someone comes along and blows those formulas out of the water to create something so new.

If that isn't Twenty One Pilots, I don't know what is.

My son and I were coming back from a hard-fought soccer game he played in, where they were ahead, the other team started getting dirty, and they ended up losing the game due to getting pulled out of their comfort zone and trying to keep up in the dirty game instead of just doing their thing regardless.

As stressful as it was, we listened to some Twenty One Pilots on the way home, and everything seemed to melt away. The funny thing is, the next week on the way to another soccer game, he listened to those same songs in order to get pumped up and focused on the upcoming game.

Rock? It's in there. Rap? Got it. Ukulele? Oh yeah. Ska? Check. Screaming? The best part. Synth-pop? Bring it on.

Their lyrics are like something from Simon & Garfunkel but for the modern day, with themes and connections mixed throughout and between albums. It's magic.

Entrepreneurship - Problem Statement

A problem is a bad thing, right? Not necessarily. If you're trying to get hired to do a project for someone or start up your own business to provide various products and services to people, you have a clear problem you are trying to address.

The biggest issue I see with problem statements is that they generally come across as solutions or tritely state that the lack of this specific solution is a problem. In theory, it is great to be positive and go right to what you recommend in order to make your communications as clear as possible, but if there's no established problem, then no one will be listening, no matter how polished the sales pitch.

You have to bring attention to the imbalance, tension, or pain that exists in order to be able to show that your recommended solution will counteract it.

The following is a list of questions to ask to help define the problem. Without knowing the answers to these questions, the attempted start-up business is doomed to fail.

• Context - when does the problem occur?
• Customers - who has the problem most often?
• Problem - what is the root cause of the problem?
• Emotional impact - how does the customer feel?
• Quantifiable impact - what is the measurable impact (units)?
• Alternatives - what do customers do now to fix the problem?
• Alternative shortcomings - what are the disadvantages of the alternatives?

Look at each question and answer them honestly. Hopefully, an entrepreneur has a passion for their business, but sometimes that passion can create a blind spot, where it's difficult to be honest with how good the proposed new product/service is. Include some other people in the process who are willing to be honest in answering the above questions.

If you don't know when the problem occurs or who it occurs to, stop right there. Your target customer needs to be clear since they are the ones you hope will pay you to solve their problems. Knowing that there is a problem is one thing, but knowing what is causing it is something else. A more elegant solution will be to address the root of an issue rather than just the symptoms.

People are emotional. They're also logical. Sometimes one side of the psyche wins out. Sometimes the other one does. How much better is it if you can make both emotional and logical pleas?

If you see a problem, chances are someone else does, too. Sometimes problems are small enough that the big players in the market don't find it worth their time to address the niche. As you look at the current alternatives to solve people's problems, consider what both works well and poorly about those current solutions. You need to be able to find something you can do that they can't (or won't).

There are various ways of implementing a competitive solution to a problem. Sometimes the first person to think of an idea becomes known, and the first-mover advantage is enough to carry them in front of others who come later. But more importantly, it is important to implement a solution that is difficult for others to copy. Creating the solution is a topic for another day, but it does start with understanding other current solutions clearly in order to figure out what they are doing wrong so that you can suggest a better way.

Great Teachers

I've been thinking recently about some of the great teachers my children have had. There have been many. There was the kind elementary teacher who would play guitar and sing with the kids and bring her dog in to visit as a reward. There was the history teacher who regularly traveled with the kids to a national history competition or the science teacher who did the same for a large science event. There's the band and orchestra teachers who share their love of music with a new generation of musicians. There is the English teacher who stepped up to make a school musical happen when no one else would. There's the one who runs the birding club.

Then there's our school system that has been traditionally built around core subjects that are not as relevant as might think they would be, given the emphasis placed on them. There is the push for measurements and accountability of teaching, learning, school quality, etc. This push at times results in an educational industrial complex where large centralized assessment companies sell their assessment services to school districts to help them measure student performance and then at the same time they also sell the key in the form of study materials that make it easy for teachers to teach to the test and give students the ability to perform well on the matching assessments.

Then there's the COVID-19 pandemic which has forced a harder look at what is or isn't important, what can be cancelled, what can be postponed, what should still go on, and so on. The big question is whether we will take advantage of the pandemic to undo the maddening assessment culture we have built and focus on what is really important. Universities need easy ways of measuring who to give scholarships to (GPA and ACT/SAT scores), but they have been willing to bend the rules and find other ways to reward students who were not able to take standardizes tests due to the pandemic.

What if we stopped focusing so much on some of the mostly irrelevant topics like calculus (relevant to engineers but not many others) and pushed more for creativity and travel and experiences and useful projects and actual skills? What if we pushed to teach our kids languages, cultures, how to serve others, and be generally good people? At some point there can and should be exposure to some topics that may spark a desire to go on and become a great scientist or mathematician, without forcing those who don't need those skills to waste time focusing on something they will quickly forget anyway.

What if we explored nature and performed music and built things?

Big Tech

The interesting semi-pejorative name I've been seeing thrown around in the political circles recently is Big Tech. I think there are some rogue marketers out there somewhere who are just having a heyday coming up with all the various ways to tear down others by labeling them negatively instead of using creative words to positively build up one's own brand. But this latest is a very interesting turn.

Social media in all its various shapes and forms is the tool many people use to communicate these days, especially if you're looking at groups of people who are united by a common interest but who may not have a normal face to face relationship. Early social media was a way for people who knew each other to keep in contact with each other. As social media grew and expanded, it became more and more a tool for people who didn't already know each other through family, friends, school, work, or otherwise to make connections. This was a powerful shift but also one that has been able to foment conspiracy theories and provoke actions that polite society might normally disapprove of.

As conspiracies and provocations have abounded, so-called Big Tech has been called upon or chosen of their own accord to start trying to filter illegal or inappropriate behavior. They have always tried to put themselves in a place of being a neutral communication channel who is not responsible for what other people use their networks for. As they have started to crack down on those committing illegal acts using their services, the call has started to appear for the need to take a few of the large, powerful technology companies to be split up a la Ma Bell. Such a breakup may be called for, but the breakup of AT&T's phone monopoly in the 80s is different than what we're seeing now.

Fox News reports on how Big Tech companies are helping to preserve data from rioters and other extremists who posted their activities online and are now trying to delete the evidence. The funny thing is that the article makes it sound like the social media companies are doing something special by preserving that data, but I've always taken it as common knowledge that social media companies never actually delete anything. If you say you want to delete something, it may make it invisible to you and others, but it's always going to be archived somewhere that it could be pulled up again if needed or for the company who owns your data to be able to mine and build your profile. If anything, that is more information about you, knowing that you posted something and then deleted it.

The main issue that people seem to have is that they are claiming that their rights are violated by having their hate speech or violence or otherwise illegal behaviors shut down. They think by breaking up these large tech companies who can currently limit social media behaviors or websites and app stores that host various content, the ability of any given company to lock out a law breaker or rioter will be diminished. The only other option they have is to move to dark web communication tools. How ironic that those who claim they are trying to do what is moral and right will end up having to hide underground as their misdeeds are published to the world.

Clickbait Unlimited

I wrote about this about almost two years ago, but clickbait seems to be ramping up if anything. I guess Google or whoever else is spying on my browsing habits knows that I like to watch Stranger Things, Mandalorian, Cobra Kai, etc. My issue isn't that someone knows I like those shows, because they are good shows and a lot of people like them. The issue I have is the amount of clickbaity articles being written about them.

I can't count the number of times I have seen a link to a story saying something about a new release date being announced for the next season of a show or that a new actor has signed on to play a certain character. You click into the story, and there is just a pile of garbage paragraphs saying something vague about how we don't know when the new season will come out but probably sometime next year and that we're not totally sure that actor is in the show but if they are then they are excited to see what character they are going to play.

So we've got a whole article written to say nothing more than that we don't know anything about the next season yet.

The other thing I have been seeing more and more of is the random cross-posting of the same old content over and over. An actor will post something semi-controversial or barely interesting on their Twitter account, and then it is screenshotted, copy/pasted, and linked to the post. At least that's what happens when there is a quick boring text post. But when there is a video or image or something that you really want to see, you'll see a full page article about how someone's performance at an awards show was bad or a famous person was acting rudely in public, you can click around forever and never find the actual video everyone is talking about.

I don't know if this is what we get for letting real journalism get eaten up by free news online. The actual newspapers are going under, being replaced by free material, apparently written by either AI bots or middle school students in third world countries to do no more than drive advertising and suck up personal information and habits.

New Normal

As the year 2020 hurdles along, I am reminded of what I thought was such a funny joke at a New Year's Eve party - something along the lines of where do you see yourself in a year and the punchline about not having 2020 vision. I don't think any one of us foresaw any, let alone all of this, from an impeachment to massive conspiracy theories in the political realm, the COVID19 pandemic and all the businesses/sports/schools being shut down with it, famous people dying (Alex Trebek, Eddie Van Halen, Sean Connery, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Regis Philbin, Kobe Bryant, and countless others), California and Australia fires, the monolith appearing and then disappearing in the Utah desert, racial unrest and riots, murder hornets, and who knows what remains with a month left.

How many of those things do we recover from? Celebrities die every year. There are always wildfires. People get sick. Social media is always on the lookout for the next big cultural talking point.

More importantly, how do we work together to build a new normal? Is it possible to come together like we did in the early days of the pandemic, before it seemingly permanently divided us? I hope we can roll into 2021 with a determination to keep the things that unify us and make us happy and healthy and leave behind the divisiveness and bickering. I see flashes of brilliance in between all the crazy, and I'm hopeful that this Christmas season can be an early start.

Small World

It's a small world. We've talked for decades now about how the world is becoming more and more flat. It's easier than it's ever been to communicate around the world. We're often more likely to be talking to someone in a different location than we are to be talking with the people in the same room as us.

Yet at the same time, there's always a little bit of a disconnect. There are always shibboleths that let us differentiate who really belongs and who doesn't. Who is the outsider vs. the insider? What are the things that we misread or mishear or otherwise misinterpret?

I was looking up information about the calories in some of McDonald's food on their website, and I saw the following:

I was totally surprised, thinking maybe McDonald's had expanded from the Travis Scott and J Balvin celebrity meals, and that they had gone out and set up a deal with Disney.

When I clicked on the large option and saw this, I realized my mistake, knowing there's not such a thing as Large World:

I was reading it as "Small World" "Famous Fries" when it should have been "Small" "World-Famous Fries". This wasn't someone trying to be tricky. It was just my mind playing tricks on me. It reminded me of an ad I heard on the radio not long ago for some event at the Utah State Fair Park. The funny thing was how the announcer strung the words together. Nothing would have sounded off to anyone unless you are local to Utah. I don't know how no one local caught it before the ad aired. Maybe they did, but it was too late.

The professional voice-over person lilted the words ever so differently than we normally do, calling it the "Utah" "State-Fair" "Park". Everyone has heard of a state fair. It makes sense that Utah would have a Utah State Fair, and we do. But it isn't the state-fair park. For whatever reason, it is the "Utah State" "Fair-Park". That is, the way we pronounce it, it doesn't emphasize that it's the park where the state fair is held (even though it is) but rather it's the fair-park for the state of Utah. Read that outloud a few times, switching between connecting the words State and Fair and then connecting the words Fair and Park. Utah State-Fair Park. Utah State Fair-Park. Say it enough times, and it sounds completely different and awkward, like you can tell the artist reading the script is definitely not from here.

Does it matter that they aren't from here? Does it matter if we can tell? There's always a way to tell, but I think it comes down to what we do with that information. Do we take the presence of an outsider as a blessing? Are we using diversity to learn and make ourselves stronger? Are we building on different experiences and making everyone feel welcome? Or are we xenophobic? Are we using the differences as a way to divide us and keep people out? Are we using dog whistles to secretly signal our intentions to our friends while keeping our enemies in the dark?

I hope we're making friends rather than enemies.

It is a small world, after all.