7 replies, and no one actually addressed the problem the OP mentioned: distractions. Maps distract you more and not less.
Failing to solve the problem is not cleverness. All of you think you're being snarky by being morons.
Um, maps are hardly distracting if used as described in the comment you're responding to: before going somewhere.
My rule is to wear gloves when test driving a car or shopping for a replacement radio. After all, 4-6 months of the year, I'll be wearing gloves when I climb into the car in the morning. Radio, heater, and all important controls need to be operable.
Unfortunately, there are almost no replacement radios that have real buttons and knobs. That's one area where the auto manufacturers get it right more often than the gizmo vendors.
That information has proven quite helpful in my home states (CO and NE).
Usually I'll vote against a judge if more than about 15% of attorneys recommend "Do Not Retain" (or 10%, if the the judge gets poor marks for impartiality). For borderline cases, first I'll look for mentions of the judge in news stories. If I'm still undecided, I'll vote against retention. Why? The vast majority of people vote to retain all of the judges, so even really bad judges stay in office. By voting against retention, I will amplify the votes of any voters who happen to know about a problem with the judge.
Here's one reference in the literature about the technique (co-authored by the same guy featured in TFA):
Ehleringer, J.R., Bowen, G.J., Chesson, L.A., West, A.G., Podlesak, D.W., Cerling, T.E. (2008). From the Cover: Hydrogen and oxygen isotope ratios in human hair are related to geography. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(8), 2788-2793. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0712228105 (geolocation based on oxygen isotopes in hair)
Notice that isotope analysis indicates that a person was or was not in a set of regions at a given time, as in "possibly Texas or Florida." So it's better at narrowing down a list of possibilities than at pinpointing someone's travels. Or as the NOVA story says, it's a "a starting point" for an investigation, not a smoking gun to show off at a trial. (At work, I get to play with some of this stuff, blasting microscopic objects with laser beams and analyzing the atoms that fly off. How fun is that?)
Entitled “Agile Undercover,” the first report from Hoda and her colleagues demonstrated conclusively that Agile development teams were failing to communicate with their customers — not just occasionally, but mainly. And in order to ameliorate the impact of these failures, teams and their companies were making active, intentional efforts to keep customers in the dark about their development practices, including their schedules of deliverables.
...
“Teams are very keen on pleasing their customers, and it’s hard for them to bring up issues with customer collaboration,” Hoda tells me. So to keep the customer at bay and out of their hair, development teams hire or appoint a customer proxy. An ambassador, if you will. Or, to be more truthful, a sales associate.
The second article, Is Teamwork Dead? A Post-Agile Prognosis, looks more at the dichotomy of "team success." Culturally, when we "win," we tend to give credit to the team ("Gosh, it wasn't just me...") but when a project fails, there's an assumption it's one person's fault, even if we don't look for a scapegoat. Making a team more than a bunch of people in the same room is a special skill, and one that Agile methodologies rely on — remember the part about self-organizing teams? "Though they may not go about this process consciously or intentionally, individual group members employing Agile for the first time, Hoda’s team found, tend to adopt one of six roles," Scott reports, such as mentor, coordinator, and promoter.
See if the research agrees with your Agile experience."
No, according to the cited article, 1,200 deaths per year (initially, then declining year to year) occurred because of more people driving rather than flying "attributable to the effect of 9/11."
"Two primary reasons explain the 9/11 effect on road fatalities. First, the 9/11 effect may capture the fear of flying.
We are each entitled to our own opinion, but no one is entitled to his own facts. -- Patrick Moynihan
