March
Iain Banks on Rough Flights
Friday, March 9, 2007 3:41 PM (permalink)
I fly a lot. It used to bother me, but over the years I have managed to shake off all the unreasonable bits of my fear of flying. That doesn't mean I don't have a doozy every now and then. Takeoffs and landings never bother me--it's the clear air turbulence that you are neither climbing out of or descending through, but are stuck with that usually gets me reaching for those little bottles (once, chardonnay; now, Advil).
There is some amount of turbulence on every flight, and maybe 1 in 10 gets pretty rough. Those no longer bother me. But about once every five years, on average, if you fly as much as I do you get one that makes you want to find religion. They say that a Boeing 747's wings are designed to flex to an almost vertical position before they fail; I had one flight where I swear I saw that happen. After such an experience, you can either never get back on a plane again (don't have that option) or decide that if you can fly through that, you can fly through anything (a more sensible response).
Still, someday you may get one of those flights. I just finished reading The Business by Iain Banks, and was struck by this passage, which sums it up exactly:
"The flight was horrific. We got there; we got to Siliguri, but it was pretty damn frightful. One of those flights where you contemplate death and terror so closely that no matter what happens, even if--when--you arrive safely, the you that got on the plane really hasn't survived at all; the you that gets off is different."
Love that.
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Using Tinderbox for Qualitative Research
Thursday, March 8, 2007 3:23 PM (permalink)
Three months, 13 cities, three continents. Now that that is over with....I can get back to blogging. One thing I am sure to blog about is why you shouldn't take any of my advice on productivity, when I can't even manage to post to my blog for three months just because I spent a few nights at the Marriott instead of in my own comfy bed.
One topic I meant to get to was how I use Tinderbox to drastically cut my workload for qualitative research projects. I was reminded of this by Mark Bernstein, who wondered if anyone did, in fact, use Tinderbox in this fashion. In my case, one of the projects I did over the past few months was a coast-to-coast qualitative research project for a large public broadcasting concern, which spanned over two months in more cities than you can count on one hand. In this project, we did focus groups in several representative cities, then packaged all the data up to draw some conclusions about media usage, lifestyles and consumer behavior.
The day this project ended I had to drive to Georgia for another client, then fly off to London to give a presentation. As a result, I had very little time to go back over the data (or watch the films of the groups over and over) to distill my thoughts and draw conclusions to deliver my analysis within a reasonable time frame. Tinderbox was immensely helpful here, serving as both my "institutional memory" for both client and project, and as a remarkably efficient way to create, group and identify clusters of notes--and people--to get to the insights that the groups had to offer.
Since then, I have promised Mark I would write something up about this, since I think a lot of folks (not just researchers) could make use of Tinderbox in this fashion--really, anyone who needs to make sense of hundreds or thousands (gulp) of notes to boil them down to succinct, cogent insights and conclusions would also find this method useful. So I will get to it, honest! I am waiting eagerly for the next version (3.6) of Tinderbox, which promises to make this process even easier with the inclusion of a new "sets" feature to provide an intelligent 'tagging' functionality. Sounds wonky, I know, and I don't mean to turn this into a 'tech' blog, because it isn't. However, if you've ever had to take five hundred cocktail napkins and turn it into a ten-page article (which is how I roll, dog) then I guarantee this is more helpful to you than it sounds.
Who knows, maybe I will try to get it on the agenda at this conference, if they would take a poor, un-Ph.D.'ed slob like me.
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