Taivo Lints Blog

A book by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler, from 2002, about how to keep up constructive dialogue in difficult situations.

A short and somewhat fragmentary summary:

Crucial conversations are those where the stakes are high, opinions are different, and emotions run strong. Such conflict situations trigger our natural fight-or-flight response (releasing adrenaline, increasing blood supply of the muscles and thus decreasing blood supply of the brain) which makes it difficult to keep calm and to keep up the level of mental activity that is necessary in complex communication situations. To keep the dialogue constructive in spite of this interference, we should learn and practice a set of supportive skills.

Focus on what you really want, honestly, for yourself, for others, and for the relations. Think about how you should behave to best reach these goals. Now, is your current behavior consistent with your true goals, or maybe your motives have quietly shifted into defending yourself or trying to win at any cost? If you have managed to keep, or to bring back, your focus on your real goals, then is this also clearly understandable to the communication partners, or maybe your behavior tells a different story? Learn to notice when the conversation turns crucial. Learn to monitor the behavior of yourself and others, and, most importantly, the level of safety in each participant. When somebody feels unsafe, they will either start fighting for themselves or close up, which both stop the constructive dialogue. To maintain the safety, make sure that you all have some common (possibly higher level) goal in mind and that you honestly work toward that goal, and also keep up mutual respect, no matter how different the opinions and personalities. If the other participants do not engage in constructive dialogue, do NOT blame them -- it is your responsibility to try to create an atmosphere where they will become more and more open and constructive.

Separate facts from interpretations. Find out and discuss explicitly how the participants interpret their observations about the issue under discussion. Be ready to change your interpretations in the light of the new information and ideas you get from others. Find alternative solutions that everybody agrees on, even to those problems that initially seem to have only two mutually exclusive ones. Honestly apologize for your mistakes, but do not apologize for your honest standpoints. Fully explain why you have the opinions and standpoints that you have, but never try to force them upon others -- forcing tends to automatically create counterreactions, even if your ideas are indeed the best (but never assume that they are before finding out the others' viewpoints as well). Beware: if your belief in your ideas is very strong, you might not even notice that others get the feeling that you are forcing those ideas upon them -- pay close attention to your tone of voice, posture, talkativeness, aggressiveness. Calm down and give others enough time to explain their views, too.

If there is a decision to be made, make sure that everybody understands the process through which it will be made, and that decisionmaking is a separate process from the dialogue (which is the process of finding out and discussing the information and viewpoints that the participants have).

In the book these ideas are, obviously, presented in a more systematic and detailed way, and there are more of them than listed here.

The only thing that slightly bothered me about this book was the feeling that it could have easily been condensed down to half of its size -- some of the ideas were getting a bit repetitive and diluted. On the one hand, repetition with variations is surely helpful for better understanding, but on the other a concise presentation might maybe make it easier to imprint the information into the memory.

But overall I found this book very educative and would recommend it to almost everybody, because we all have crucial conversations on a daily basis -- with our families and friends, with our coworkers, bosses, clients, opponents, and so on.

More info at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0071401946

Note: The version that I read was not the English original, but a translation into Estonian, named "Otsustavad kõnelused": http://www.raamatuklubi.aripaev.ee/Book.aspx?ID=7d0ffb84-00ed-47eb-b392-a5fb4be3a42a

Science fiction books by Peter F. Hamilton, originally from 2004 and 2005. Or, actually, it is one story (occasionally referred to as The Commonwealth Saga) split up into two physical books just to keep things manageable, because the total page count for the paperback edition is around 2400.

As the Publishers Weekly has put it, the book is an "intelligent space opera". If you're looking for science fiction novels that have considerable philosophical depth and explore the essence of the Universe beyond imaginable to an ordinary people, then you might find the Commonwealth Saga not particularly attractive. What it does offer, instead, is an enthralling story of a time period in 24th century when the future existence of human (and some other) societies is put in jeopardy. There is no single main character but many persons whose stories get intertwined at some point or another. In addition, the area of space involved is huge: the Intersolar Commonwealth consists of hundreds of planets interlinked with wormholes. Nevertheless, Hamilton somehow succeeds in creating quite a coherent reading experience, and the grandiosity of the world and the plot is smartly conveyed through personal stories of people whose personalities and ways of thinking are easily understandable to a 21st century reader.

For me, these books were so captivating that it was hard to stop reading and put them down in the evening. I even intentionally delayed starting with the second book because I wanted to get some other things done as well and it would have been very difficult to allocate enough time for other tasks when immersed in such a "space opera" (by the way, in case you're wondering, I do NOT watch soap operas from TV; the "intellingent" in front of "space opera" is exactly ment to draw attention to the fact that it is not a soap opera in space).

So, in conclusion, I highly recommend these books.

More info at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0345479211/ and http://www.amazon.com/dp/0345461673/ .

A book originally from 1998, updated in 2001, about microorganisms that live in extreme environments.

The topics include:

• The main things an (Earth) organism needs (energy, liquid water, etc.).
• An overview of Earth's extreme inabited environments (hot springs, cold places, deep seas, deep terrestrial subsurface, deserts, very salty waters, places of extreme pH, oil).
• The main molecular mechanisms to cope with stressful (extreme) conditions.
• Practical usage of knowledge derived from extremophiles in biotechnology and medicine.
• Relevance of extremophile studies to the hypotheses of what is the correct (real) family tree of life.
• Gaia hypothesis.
• Possibility of, and search for, the life elsewhere in the Universe.

It is an easy & pleasant to read popular science book that still retains some of the harder scientific contents (especially the most relevant parts of molecular biochemistry), which I think is a good approach (um, after reading comments at Amazon, I would rephrase that as "easy & pleasant for scientifically minded persons who have already encountered a few biochemistry texts earlier in their life" :D ). The author Michael Gross, though currently a full time science writer, has been an active scientist in the field of extremophilic microbiology.

More info at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0738204455/

A book by Ricard V. Solé and Brian C. Goodwin, originally from year 2000.

The cover gives an impression that the book is a discussion about what life is, but this is not the case. Instead, it is a good and relatively easy to read overview of a large number of tools and approaches that are often referred to as complexity science. There are deterministic chaos, emergence, criticality, self-organization, patterns in excitable media, entropy, Ising model, information theory, renormalization, self-similarity, sand-pile model, metabolic networks, genetic networks, cell differentiation, reaction-diffusion systems, biological clocks, neural nets, phase transitions, ant colonies, nest building in social insects, biodiversity, ecological stability, viral quasispecies, catalytic chemical networks, evolution and extinction, stock market fluctuations, urban growth, traffic models, etc.

As the page count is around 300, the book obviously doesn't go into great details of every concept, neither does it always have all terminology explained, neither is there a coherent overarching story. Thus I don't know if it would be a good reading for somebody who has never heard most of the presented ideas before, but for me it is a good collection of notes that can be used for sparking inspiration and for quickly remembering the key concepts, the details of which should then be looked up from other sources. So, in general I like it.

More information at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0465019285/

and if you have access to Wiley InterScience, then: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstract/97519452/

A book from 2006, with a slightly misleading title. Actually it is only about Particle Swarm Optimization and Ant Colony Optimization, plus introduction to optimization and Evolutionary Computation in the first parts of the book. But as of PSO and ACO, it is a very clearly written and thorough review work -- there are 667 references.

The few more general sections occasionally seemed to me somewhat less substantial. For example the comparison of Particle Swarm Optimization vs. Evolutionary Computation quite strongly tries to separate them, while for me it seems that although it is very practical to have these different approaches, many of their underlying principles are overlapping quite heavily, if suitably interpreted (e.g. the trajectory of an individual in PSO should be compared to a trajectory of a generational family chain of parent-child successions in EC, and an explicit test should be done about whether such rules of EC could be found so that the trajectories would be similar to PSO, or vice versa. I haven't checked it, but at least reading the book didn't convince me that the check would fail.).

I would recommend the book to people who are seriously interested in Particle Swarm Optimization or Ant Colony Optimization. Those having a more general interest in swarm intelligence might find the book a bit limited in breadth, but flipping through it might be useful nevertheless.

More info at book's homepage: http://si.cs.up.ac.za/