Scientific Ink

Author: Dunrie

  • Internet Marketing Start to Finish, the book!

    Last fall and winter, several of us at Pure Visibility embarked on a book-writing project. We wrote a book proposal, including an outline, a justification for why our book was different from what was available, and including a sample chapter. And our proposal was accepted! With amazing help and gentle encouragement from our editor at Pearson/Prentice-Hall, we worked through early, rough chapters to later versions of these chapters, to obtaining permissions from clients and media outlets to use illustrations, to final copyediting and tweaking.

    And now, the book is going to be in my hands…anyday now. And I could not be more excited.

    I’ll write more later about the book and what’s in it. Right now I just want to celebrate a little with this announcement.

    Internet Marketing Start to Finish: Drive Measurable, Repeatable Online Sales with Search Marketing, Usability, CRM, and Analytics
    Internet Marketing Start to Finish: Drive Measurable, Repeatable Online Sales with Search Marketing, Usability, CRM, and Analytics

  • Ashes to new roots, and a blessing

    Spring has arrived in Michigan, and this is a good thing.

    It has been a rough winter, personally. January was particularly grim. I lost my dear friend and mentor Beverly Rathcke, we lost our long time cat companion Floyd. So it was good to start digging in the garden, always lifts my spirits and grounds me in the present.

    We participated in the Global ReLeaf of Michigan tree sale/fundraiser by getting a few bare root trees and shrubs. I got them last weekend and we put them into the ground that very morning. And we sprinkled a little of Floyd’s ashes under each one and urged him to help them grow!

    That was last week, and that felt good.

    Well today it turned from lovely to perfect. At her death, my friend Beverly had given some statues to me. And today we retrieved her garden Kuan Yin from her back yard and brought it to our garden. Now Kuan Yin sits overlooking the springwater pond that Dave and his dad retouched last spring. The garden is graced by love now with the ashes of a beloved pet and a gift from a beloved friend in the form of the Bodhisattva Kuan Yin.

    A blessing.

  • Social Nation and Social Quotient

    Social Nation
    Social Nation

    I love books and am a complete sucker for tests that allow me to measure myself and gain insights into how I might be more effective and happier at work. I’ve taken the Strengthsfinder, Myers-Briggs, DISC, and more. I received an advance copy of Barry Libert’s Social Nation: How to Harness the power of Social Media to attract customers, motivate employees, and grow your business. It seems to encapsulate a fair bit of good thinking/common sense on social media. From my perspective, what makes it interesting is its summary combined with “custom” feedback in the form of its online test.

    The Book

    Libert starts the book by outlining how the spectrum of necessary skills for business is extending beyond the physical and intellectual into the emotional and social. His argument is mastery of the entire spectrum is becoming necessary, and his book is designed as a primer on entry into social community building.

    So, after I received my custom evaluation (see below), I went on to review the 7 principles for building my social nation and 10 pitfalls to avoid.

    Both of these are summarized and available from the Social Nation Book website resources section, so I won’t reiterate them fully here. I very much appreciated Principle 3: Mind your Online and Offline Manners, which include behavior guides such as “pretend you’re offline” when thinking of what to share. No one wants to hear me droning on and on about my cat in person, so I probably shouldn’t do it on my facebook page or twitter stream. And, I should refrain from saying something curt or even nasty in email or on a message board just the way I would if that person was sitting across from my at a conference room or dinner table. Good rules to follow.

    My Social Quotient

    According to the social quotient on SocialNationBook.com, my three top strengths are: transparent, adaptor, and collaborative. I mostly agree. The full descriptions of each of these strengths are available at the end of the test and in the meat of the book. They are well named, so I won’t repeat those definitions here.

    I tend to think I’m quite transparent, and I feel like my emotional nature plays immediately across my face, but I am also a quiet person, so sometimes people have a hard time getting to know me. And, I can be socially awkward (shy…) and so retreat to silence when I get overwhelmed instead of opening up. I don’t really have many fears about social sharing websites, though that sentiment is not always shared within my household, so I’ve had to become more thoughtful about what I personally share to respect that I’m not a solo actor.

    The adaptor description from the test seems to fit with my Arranger Strengthsfinder theme, someone who enjoys being flexible and responsive to dynamic situations. I’m a project manager at work, and enjoy making plans, and then really enjoy changing them to fit new information. And, I see things from multiple angles simultaneously, empathizing with different people and looking for the best win-win-win outcome. I can vacillate when that way is not clear. For a project manager in particular, I have an uncharacteristic easy-going personality and outlook.

    And, I completely agree I’m a collaborator. I found being a solo ecology researcher (my PhD training) to be draining and hard. I very much prefer working in a team and taking advantage of diverse skills and perspectives. And, I sometimes make the mistake of discounting my own wisdom or intuition in favor of the perspective of people around me.

    Does the fact I liked the online test best mean I prefer the parts that are ABOUT me? ;).

  • Rest in Peace Beverly Rathcke, Thank You!

    My friend and mentor Beverly Rathcke passed away on Thursday, January 6, 2011. She died comfortably at home in Ann Arbor after a short illness.

    Beverly was my faculty advisor for my PhD dissertation in ecology, and in that role she helped me think critically and write clearly. Yet, she fostered more than my scientific interests, she recognized and encouraged the creative artist in me, pushing me to explore my interest in and talent for photography. We attended music and dance concerts together. And, she catalyzed the transformation of my perspective and thereby my life by introducing me to my meditation practice, Siddha Yoga Meditation.

    Her beautiful Old West Side Ann Arbor bungalow served as a gathering place. She brought out the gourmet chef in all of us, as we competed to offer potluck contributions that could stand beside hers on the dining room table. She invited others to cook, drink, dine and dance in her home, and was always grateful when someone wanted to clean up the piles of pots and dishes created during a collaborative cooking event.

    Cooking paella
    New Year’s Eve, December 2006. We made paella in Beverly’s kitchen. Yum!
    From left, Dave, Victoria, and Beverly (foreground).

    She lived a full and enthusiastic life and had, in my opinion, a good death, on her own terms, surrounded by devoted friends. I was honored to be with her and her friends in the days preceding her death as she slipped from consciousness. During the last few days I have met friends of hers new to me, and I have been impressed by her good taste. May I be as fortunate in my friends and in my passing. I feel so grateful to have known her.

    Beverly Rathcke's students from the 1990s.
    Beverly Rathcke (center, in blue), surrounded by her University of Michigan graduate students from the 1990s and their families.
    Taken at her retirement party summer, 2010.

  • Travel off-season, a fall trip to Greece, part I

    I flew to Athens earlier this month, to meet a college friend who was on a business trip. She was speaking at a medical conference, and I came only for the sightseeing and the food. Her trip was a couple of days, constrained by work obligations on either side. I took the whole week, figuring if I was going to travel that far, I should make time to explore.

    It wasn’t high season for tourism, yet everyone told us we had exceptional weather. So I think we lucked out – not too many crowds (though we heard many many languages other than Greek) yet shirtsleeve weather.

    I spent most of the week in the Athens area, walking in the pedestrian areas near the Acropolis, visiting some of the more minor museums, saving the top of the Acropolis and the National Archaeological Museum for when my friend arrived later in the week.

    The people I met in restaurants, stores, and on the street all had more than enough English to make my trip easy, and many positively beamed when I offered up the most basic conversational niceties in Greek, such as hello/goodbye (Yassas), good morning (Kalimera), or good evening (Kalispera).

    And the welcome was almost infallibly gracious. For instance I saw a beautifully coiffed, expensively clothed businesswoman in Constitution Square stopped at the pedestrian streetlight help a pair of Asian tourists struggling with a map. She looked like she could have been going to the Parliament building across Syntagma Square to serve in some important government office, and there she was, helping a couple of disoriented tourists locate where they were on their map.

    I experienced such a warm playful conversational spirit there – many of the really touristy street restaurants have barkers out front to engage passers by and invite them in, but honestly they seemed happy enough for a little repartee (“maybe later” was enough to disengage without rudeness on either side, and once “why not?” when parried with “I just ate!” made me and the barker laugh), so it wasn’t annoying but kind of fun.

    I was humbled to hear all of the conversations in English by non-English speakers, German, Scandinavian, French tourists speaking in English to the Greeks in the restaurants and hotels, and the Greek staff responding in English.

    Given that tourism is Greece’s #2 economic driver, after shipping, I expect that the spirit of welcome may be there year-round. Perhaps since I went in the off-season, I received more, as it was undiluted across a throng of other tourists.

    I had a wonderful time and was in tears in the airport. I told the gate agent that I didn’t want to leave, and she looked at me sweetly and said I could always come back.

  • Comfort in shared experience, even of grief

    I am grateful for Great Writers. They connect us to each other, connect us to ourselves, through voicing what is glimmering on the edges of our consciousness. By expressing these things, they bring them into focus and validate them.

    grave
    Grave, taken in Ellmau, Austria

    My father has been gone for over a decade now. When I was a child, he “left” me once before when my parents divorced, so his death was a second loss of him. After that first loss, his commitment to me was clear. And somehow that experience of commitment continued after his death.

    At the time of his death, I felt that the handful of people that would lay down in traffic for me had decreased, never to be replaced.

    Although I do not feel his presence now in a specific way – we don’t hold conversations, he doesn’t haunt me – he is with me now in some ineffable way. I experience that his love for me has expanded and envelops me, like a warm coat.

    So, I was interested to read just that experience described in a recent New Yorker article on Roland Barthes’ mourning for his mother. In William C. Carter’s Marcel Proust: A Life, Proust described the trajectory of grief to a friend this way:

    “You will know a sweetness you cannot yet conceive. When you had your mother, you thought a great deal about the days when you would no longer have her. Now you will think a great deal about the days when you did have her.” Once [his friend] has adjusted to “the terrible experience of being forever thrown back on the past, then you will feel her gently returning to life, coming back to take her place again, her whole place beside you.”

    That’s my experience. I was angry as he was dying, I fretted about his poor health and poor self-care, focusing on our impending loss. And now, after the initial shock, over the years, I have felt his presence, his love, expand again in my consciousness. Perhaps a trick of the mind, a self-comforting chimera, or maybe simply this is what adulthood feels like. No matter how this happened inside my head, I am thrilled to see it is not only my experience, but the experience of others, captured by Proust.

    Even in the loneliness and isolation of grief, there is union or communion across the separation of time.