Exercise your brain by solving problems for Innocentive

Over the past few years, I've entered a few Innocentive challenges. What's Innocentive, you say? I'm glad you asked. It's an intriguing concept, a company that wouldn't have existed 10 years ago. Basically it's a clearinghouse for "challenges", where companies post problems that they're facing, and ask for "solutions".  A reward is offered for the best solution, usually between 5 and 10 thousand dollars, although sometimes much more, depending on the complexity of the challenge.

To best illustrate the kind of problems that are posed, let's take a look at some of the current challenges:

– Technology to Enable Packaging Flexibility
The proliferation of various consumer beverages plus increasing retail customer demands for unique pack and pallet configurations requires flexibility in the beverage bottling plant.  The goal is to find a partner with equipment solutions that enable secondary and tertiary package configuration flexibility with minimum manual processes and setup time.

– NASA’s Balance Mass Challenge: Using “Dead Weight” on Mars Spacecraft to Advance Science and Technology
NASA is looking for creative yet practical ideas to find a dual purpose for Balance mass (“dead weight”) that is jettisoned from Mars landers like the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) to balance the spacecraft during entry and landing.

– Capturing Institutional Memory and Knowledge 
The Seeker desires suggestions and best practices for knowledge management in a corporate setting. As employees age and retire, valuable knowledge is often lost.  In addition, with the realities of today’s workplace, employee turnover needs to be expected.  How can a company proactively capture institutional memory and knowledge, and make sure that it is not lost?

– Detection of Buried Explosive Hazards From a Distance
The Seeker desires novel approaches to detect buried explosive devices from a moving vehicle.  Finding and neutralizing hazards from previous wars is one of the hardest, long standing challenges facing Humanitarian Demining (HD) organizations.

I'm currently working on the challenge "Capturing Institutional Memory and Knowledge". It's actually been a long-standing interest of mine, and the lack of good processes for knowledge sharing has been a continual frustration at the places that I've worked. So I feel I'm pretty positioned to propose some reasonable solutions to this challenge.

One of the frustrations I've had with challenges is that the details are so skimpy. The basic problem in the challenge I'm working on (knowledge sharing and management in corporations) is huge, there are multiple books written on the topic and consulting companies that specialize in this area. So it seems that potential solvers would be more successful if there were more details about specifics that need to be addressed. This has been the case for previous challenges as well.

I've written up two potential solutions so far, and am working on my third. I haven't actually won anything yet, but the potential is tantalizing! And making money by winning something like this would be so much more satisfying than getting a regular paycheck.

Avoiding unproductive web-surfing

For me, it's always been a challenge to avoid unproductive, time-consuming web surfing - reading news sites, social media sites, online forums, etc. The problem is not with a little bit of web surfing. It's with going to a site that frequently has great content - for instance the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, certain online forums - and getting interested in things.  Then clicking on links, and finally getting sucked down a rabbit hole, coming up for air a few hours later, fully informed but with hours gone from my life that could have been used more productively. Or at least, not staring at a computer.

The problem is that often, I glean some information that's actually interesting and relevant. For instance, the name of a company that sounds like a great potential employer. It's this pattern of intermittent reinforcements that's so addictive - it's the same force that propels people towards gambling problems as well.

In the past I've installed Chrome extensions (such as StayFocused, etc) that give you a whole framework to make sets of allowed and restricted websites, and set up time ranges of "free time" and "restricted time". And that can work. But it's such a complicated structure that it takes up too much mental space.  I also experimented with ideas like, "only go to the time-wasting websites while standing at the kitchen counter". Or, "only while walking on the treadmill". These can be useful as well, but still - there were just too many rules and thus loopholes.

So finally, I came up with a rule that's drastic, but extremely simple. My rule is this:

No time-wasting web surfing anytime before 9:45 PM. 

And that's it.  No combinations of  various Chrome extensions to limit web surfing, "only while standing" web surfing, no surfing while walking on the treadmill, etc. These were various rules that I tried to combine to limit time-wasting web surfing. Too complex, too many loopholes.

So far it's worked very well. I've been keeping it up for about 3 weeks now. It's a very simple system, and not hard to comply with. I found Gretchin Rubin's blog post Are You an Abstainer or a Moderator? very helpful. She said this insight, this division between Abstainers and Moderators, came to her after reading a quote from Samuel Johnson, "Abstinence is as easy to me as temperance would be difficult.”

In this case, I'm not a complete abstainer, but this satisfies my need for a "bright line" rule - a rule for myself that's very clear, that doesn't require any interpretation.

I found another essay by Paul Graham fascinating. It's called The Acceleration of Addictiveness, and is about how things are becoming more and more addictive (i.e. food, the internet), and the ways in which we as individuals and as a society combat this. Interesting stuff.

End of summer round-up

Our family summer, packed with experiences, is now officially over! The kids went back to school yesterday. It's nice to have some good long chunks of free time now, as opposed to engineering a few hours occasionally.  I quit my contract at T-mobile when the kids got out of school in late June, to have some time for the trips we planned this summer.

My mom visited for the first time, we really enjoyed having her and she enjoyed seeing us, and seeing lot of sights in Seattle.

Our visit to the Boeing factory

While she was here, we had Peter's birthday party at the Somerset Recreation Club pool, which worked out well. After my mom's visit, we spent a few days at a hotel in Astoria, Oregon. Great little city, a good place to stay to see the sights in the area. The main sight is Fort Stevens, which I always love because of the setting and all the old ruined military buildings.

Bike ride along the Columbia River

Then we had our friends the Delebecque family visiting our house from Geneva, and later traveled together to Yellowstone National Park with them. It was really enjoyable, and the kids also got to practice their French. Kenny was speaking with them quite well towards the end of the week, and Peter was starting to speak again, but understanding most things.

There's a buffalo in the background here, on the right

After Yellowstone, Eric and Kenny went straight to Oshkosh, Wisconsin, for the "Great American Fly-In", which is a big general aviation event. They went with Eric's friend Roger, and really enjoyed it - Kenny in particular collected tons of swag, which he treasures. While they were gone, Peter and I picked a lot of blackberries in a vacant lot nearby, went swimming a lot at the pool, and also did a camping trip to Deception Pass.

Playing on the beach at Deception Pass

After a week at home, seeing some friends, we took another trip, this time following the Columbia River, starting in Richland (great hotel, right on the riverfront), where Eric was able to take a tour of the Hanford Nuclear Center. Then we drove along the Columbia River, spending a night in Umatilla, and one in Hood River. The area is definitely not a huge tourist attraction - there's plenty of wide open spaces! I enjoy that occasionally, though, going to places that are not as popular.

Preparing to battle the thousands of spider webs draped around the Twin Sisters peak area

In complete contrast to that trip, we next went to Disneyworld. This was a long planned trip for Eric's parents' 50th wedding anniversary. It was an experience - huge, all kinds of things to see, all kinds of rides and attractions. It was sweltering, temperatures in the mid 90's and very high humidity, and the crowds were heavy, but the kids loved it.

At Disneyworld

I had the kids do some "homework" over the summer - mainly writing, on the blogs I set up for them specifically for this purpose, to practice both their typing and writing skills. They were always reluctant, but I had them do it before they got screen time, so it generally worked out.

Swimming was always on the agenda on warm days - and even some rainy days. We joined the Somerset Recreation Club, which has a pool and is only about a 4 minute walk from our house. On sunny days it was pretty full around 4 in the afternoon, but on rainy days (it's heated, so it was warm enough to swim even on rainy days), we were sometimes the only ones there. I swam laps for the first time in a long time. The kids hadn't learned to swim very well before, because they didn't go swimming regularly in Geneva. But here, since we went swimming so often, they improved tremendously even without lessons. So, now they can both swim across the pool. It was also a great place to see kids they knew from school, without having to specifically arrange a playdate.