Negative Feedback

Recap: a spirited morning rehearsal for three following last night's show.  Also, some useful discussion this morning about group operations: how to address subtle musical dissatisfactions in a way that is not deleterious to sensitive band mates?  

At Microsoft, the powerful idea of 'feedback' is built into the annual review system.  But in all human interactions, the party delivering the feedback must adapt and find a creative way to deliver feedback so that the receiver will be able to receive (and perhaps act on) the message with minimum stress and damage.

In B.C. Kuo's Automatic Control Systems class many years ago, I learned that it is actually negative feedback that enables a simple engine or filter to maintain itself within a stable system.    In my class, we used v1 of his book.  Amazon is now selling the 7th edition:

I believe the useful application of negative feedback in physics and in human relations is more than a poetic coincidence.   In both physics and human relations, it not easy.  Much like the sometimes-counter-intuitive equations and math that describe stable control systems, simple errors in how we deliver feedback can sometimes manifest the opposite of what we are actually seeking.

BTW, B.C. Kuo was one of my most inspiring professors at University of Illinois, and his class was one of the highlights of my EE education.   As strange as this sounds, for me, the universe seemed to sort of 'snap into place' during and after his class.   I'm sure the universe itself did not change much at all during the span of that class.  But my perception of how life operates certainly did.

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Song of the Day

Sign Error - Vocal Version (5.6M mp3)

never said it would be easy
why you always seem so busy
why you always seem so busy
never said it would be easy

I burned my hand in the hottest fire
I wrapped my heart up in your barbed wire
traded my map for a faint desire
gave up my soul-o to sing in your choir

why you always seem so busy
waiting for you makes me dizzy
waiting for you makes me crazy
why you always seem so busy

minor mistakes back at the beginning
slammed on the breaks when my horse was winning
sold out my savings in endless spending
pulled out rolled into a spinning ending
I was climbing your word tree when your leaves came crashing down on me
raked your words into one big blurb and sent all your sentences to the curb

rhythm in these repercussions
drowning without deep discussions
reading underneath your headlines
dancing all around your land mines
aren't you aware of what we've invested
do you not care what we've just ingested
how can it be you are not interested
can you not hear what is being suggested
it's hard to chew this residue and half-baked plan and grand break through
it's hard to trade in what I feel for bland mark land shark spew

conclusions here are all contracted
decisions here are all distracted
surprises here are all pre-sorted
desires here are all distorted

why do you always seem so busy
waiting for you makes me dizzy
waiting for you makes me crazy
why you always seem so busy

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Photo of the Day

 
Paul, Chuck, SB, Lee, photo #12 by: David LaVallee.

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Word of the Day

del·e·te·ri·ous
adjective

1. having a harmful effect
2. injurious

[From Greek deleterios, from deleter, destroyer, from deleisthai, to harm.]

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