Imparting wisdom, or something like it

Mark Victor Hansen’s seminars for writers are usually pricy, so I readily accepted a colleague’s invitation to attend a three-hour session free. The seminar was held in a hotel dining room packed with a diverse crowd, all ready to take visions from thought to print.

Some of them seemed like Hansen groupies. They laughed excessively at every stale joke (e.g, “I slept like a baby…woke up every two hours crying.”) and recited statements along with him. I felt a little creepy, like an investigative journalist infiltrating a cult of personality.

Free seminars usually conclude with sales pitches. I was prepared to consider buying a book, but I expected to pick up a few how-to pointers from the free part first. I was disappointed.

The best part of Hansen’s talk concerned the future of publishing: audiobooks, e-books, vooks, and mobile distribution, for starters. His proposition that the Livescribe Pulse Smartpen (pictured), which was developed as a note-taking device, could be a medium for interactive audiovisual books is fabulous. Hansen admits to being an investor in Livescribe.

Halfway through the session, I was still waiting for some how-tos.

Hansen offered inspirational aphorisms (“When you are your authentic self you are unstoppable”) and loads of anecdotes about traveling to exotic locales with his high-powered buddies.

He started to lose me early on by dragging out that moldy old legend about Walt Disney being cryogenically frozen, a doozy debunked by the best.

That he got the story about the Princess of Wales being assassinated by the land-mine cartel straight from Mohamed Al-Fayed did not diminish my skepticism.

And his offhand remark that one of his pals “owns the Yankees,” coming so soon after George Steinbrenner’s death, was shocking. (The buddy’s name was not Steinbrenner.) Perhaps he meant his friend was part of the group that bought the Yankees back in the ’70s. But the late Mr. Steinbrenner bought out the other investors years ago.

As the misstatements mounted, my confidence eroded. By the time the sales pitch came, there was little left. That the pitch was high-priced and “one-time only” made it easy to pass.

One of my notes says, “If you know the ‘why,’ the ‘how’ will come.” As Hansen said that, its seemed to make sense, or I wouldn’t have written it down. But now it seems inaccurate. I know why I want the lawn to look nice: so the homeowners’ association will stop leaving those notes on my door. But the hows of lawn-growing have yet to come.

That’s what teachers are for: imparting the how. But Hansen’s free speeches, it seems, contain only motivation. To get instruction, you must buy his products. But here’s the problem: If I can’t trust what he says, and his free talk doesn’t demonstrate an ability to instruct me in my weak areas, why should I buy the product? Maybe there are better ways to invest that money in my business.

As I walked to my car, I recalled a comment Hope Clark recently made in Total Funds for Writers: “…many people who take time away from the day job and family to attend a conference, won’t necessarily invest that same time in the writing itself.”

Those three hours would probably have been better invested in my writing. Ah, well, at least I got a blog post out of it.

The Pursuit of Happiness

Photo by Gayle Lindgren | stock.xchng

This Independence Day, I’m thinking about those who preceded us. The founders who forged a nation of laws, not men. The indigenous peoples who chose to fight no more forever. And the immigrants who came -- and still come -- yearning to breathe free.

My great-grandfather Harry came from England in 1922 and settled in Detroit. Being an auto worker in Detroit was better than being unemployed in Cornwall.

As much as I’d like to believe every immigrant longs to come to America because of the democratic foundation of our great republic, the simple truth is, many come because in their homelands, they were unemployed.

Amnesty is the flashpoint at the center of the immigration reform. Are we willing to forgive those who don’t have proper documentation? For years, I’ve resisted this idea. If Grandpa Harry could go through proper channels, so can others.

Arizona has drawn a lot of fire for its immigration law, even though it mirrors federal law. Kirk Adams of the Arizona House of Representatives answered concerns that "law enforcement can simply walk up to a person and say, "'Can I see your papers?'" in this article. An excerpt:

…officers can only attempt to determine a person's immigration status during "lawful contact," which is defined as a lawful stop, detention or arrest. Any "reasonable suspicion" can be derived only through the investigation of another violation or crime.

I cannot blame the huddled masses for pursuing happiness here, though I do wish they’d go about it properly. And if a person is suspected of one crime, surely it makes sense for the police to see whether he committed any prior crime -- including that of entering the country illegally.

But many illegal immigrants have been living and working here for years, with no other criminal charges against them. The Apostle Paul instructs us to forgive as we have been forgiven. Although complete amnesty seems excessive, I’m inclined to allow a path to citizenship for those without proper papers, if they’ll admit their wrongdoing and pay their back taxes.

The more I think about it, the more I become convinced that the problem isn’t the undocumented workers. The problem is the employers. Which is why I was pleased to see the Arizona law also targets those who do the hiring. If no one were giving undocumented workers jobs, they wouldn't be here.

We are a nation of laws, and the laws we have deserve enforcing. But the sentence need not be deportation for those who scrub our floors and pick our vegetables, even if they did jump our sea-washed, sunset gates.

Breaking out and splashing down

I want to give a Blatant Plug to P.A. Baines, the first member of the New Authors Fellowship to land a book contract. His Alpha, renamed Alpha Redemption, will be published this fall by Splashdown Books. At left is the cover art by Zoë Demaré, also of the NAF.

The fellowship grew out of the critique-partner atmosphere of last year's Marcher Lord Select contest. I post about once a month on the Fellowship blog.

Speaking of contests, my poorly named A Gift With Which To Serve was a runner up in the Novel Journey contest, apparently getting no help from a name change to The Prophet's Chronicle. The judges wrote, "Very good story. Initial set of characters needs work--tripped from the beginning, not realizing there were three different people on stage. A little smoothing out and this piece could be awesome!"

Slightly discouraging, because I thought I'd smoothed this opening out already. Ah well. The folks at my new, live-in-person critique group, Word Weavers, can have at it next month.

All about the money

Once again, the key theme coming out of a space industry discussion -- today it's a task force meeting in Orlando -- is funding.

Funding - or the lack thereof -- is the reason for the spaceflight gap. The shuttle and its replacement can't both be fully funded at the same time.

Several participants at today's meeting -- including self-professed geek MJ Soileau from the University of Central Florida -- said what we really need to keep our high-tech workforce employed is money. Soileau said UCF is submitting a grant proposal to fund work at the fabrication facility that was donated this week. He urged the cabinet members at the meeting to "grab it out of the stack and fund this sucker" so UCF can put people to work.

Whether you talk to people in workforce development, economic development, or high-tech startups, it all comes back to funding. The only way to retain Florida's position in the aerospace industry is to feed it money. That also happens to be the only way to maintain America's position in human spaceflight.

---

The NASA Railroad carried the last space shuttle solid rocket booster segments across the Indian River Kennedy Space Center. Six cars transported the segments to Titusville from the ATK solid rocket booster plant in Promontory, Utah. The booster segments would be used for shuttle Atlantis on the "launch on need," or potential rescue mission, for the final scheduled shuttle flight, Endeavour's STS-134 mission.

Image Credit: NASA/Kim Shiflett

Your tax dollars at work

We learned from the Florida Keys tourism council that tar found on beaches in the Florida Keys beaches "do not match the type of oil from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill."

To determine where the tar in question came from, the council tells us, "tar balls discovered on beaches at Fort Zachary Taylor State Park, Smathers Beach in Key West, Big Pine Key, Fla., and Loggerhead Key in the Dry Tortugas National Park, Fla. were flown by a Coast Guard HU-25 Falcon jet based in Miami to New London, Conn., Tuesday for testing and analysis."

Using a military jet to deliver tar to a lab? Have they never heard of FedEx? Did they absolutely, positively, need those results at the speed of sound?

It seems that ships passing through the busy shipping lanes near the Keys often shed oil. Still not a pleasant thought. But where the tar came from is secondary. Clean the beach first, then figure out who gets the bill.

About the Photo: U.S. Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer 3rd Class Patrick Kelley. The mobile offshore drilling unit Q4000 (near) holds position directly over the damaged Deepwater Horizon blowout preventer, May 18, 2010, as the drillship Discoverer Enterprise burns gas from a tube in the ruptured drill pipe.

Putting on the brakes

The guys at Planet Money interviewed a college professor who goes into detail about how automated market orders led to a self-feeding frenzy. Part of the problem is that when the New York Stock Exchange paused to see what was happening, trades moved to other exchanges where bids were lower.

After meeting with the exchange executives today, Securities and Exchange Commission Chairwoman Mary L. Schapiro is scheduled to testify at a House subcommittee hearing tomorrow about what the industry will do to stop this happening in the future.

SkyNet storms Wall Street

Yesterday's wild market ride -- in which stock prices fell into a "black hole" for a few heart-stopping minutes -- appears to have been caused by "black boxes."

Unlike an aviator's black box, which records what has happened, an investor's black box decides what's going to happen. Algos, or trading algorithms, allow investors to program computers to buy and sell when certain conditions are met. For more on algos, see here and here.

For example, if your box was programmed to sell Proctor & Gamble at $58, that would have been triggered yesterday at about 2:45 p.m. Off go however many shares of P&G you held.

Now imagine that happening across whole mutual funds, many of which are index funds that track the whole Dow Jones or S&P 500 indexes. That's how the whole market moved so fast in the same direction.

Thursday's dive seems to have been triggered by an error, but that error led to a series of computer-generated trades that fed into each other until they reached critical mass. The New York Stock Exchange -- which is responsible for less than a third of stock trades in the country -- halted trading briefly, and that seems to have been enough to stop the collapse before it could devour the entire S&P 500.

Buy orders may also have stopped the free-fall, and I would not be surprised if some of the same boxes that had sell orders at one price also had buy orders at a lower price.

Anyone whose black box sold P&G at $58 at 2:45 p.m. only to buy it back five minutes later at $54 made $6 a share today, when P&G closed at $60.

That math has some conspiracy theorists accusing traders of rigging the market. But I agree with Barry Ritzholtz here: There is no need for panic.

But we do need to keep an eye on those black hole boxes.