100 MW please! Deal!

I really can't imagine how anyone trade with power on the stocks market. I mean it's easy to trade the stocks of a company, or a commodity, but how can someone trade something so intangible and yet is a kind of goods (as opposed to investments in companies) that one can use? Can I just simply say send me 10 MW of power tomorrow and here's 5000 bucks? Apparently they do trade power like they trade stocks, and the prices actually do fluctuate up to 5 min! Normally generator companies sell power at least one day in advance, but leaves a small percentage for sales up to 1 hr or even 5 min notice! Cheese, what else can humans trade? I wouldn't be surprised if someone actually trades sunlight in future.

Social psych today talks about group conformation. Pretty interesting (and reflective of my house). Darn! Instead of going into the cliched diffusion of responsibility theory, here's an alternative viewpoint why my house is so darn messy when everyone would certainly do something about it if living alone.
Social Psych says in a group, the individual work trumps (or takes precedence) over group work. If one were to choose between an individual work or a group work given a certain duration of time, one would tend to choose the former. This is because if the individual work is not done, it's a reflection of one's capabilities and the work will still not be done by the end of the time duration. However, this is different for group work, where individual efforts don't weigh as much. It doesn't really matter if one or two people in the team do not do anything. The work will still get done. And it's less of a reflection of individual capabilities. That being said, one can imagine the state of a house with 6 people living in it, as compared to one with 2 people.

So what is the remedy? Division of labor is probably a good idea, where each is given a unique task that is totally different. This gives a greater sense of responsibility and it's a greater reflection of the individuals in a group. Apparently that is not very so in this house. It has more of a unitary touch (disjunctive to be exact) where you only need a few of the best to bring performance up. Then again, everyone does do something in the house, just that the splitting of tasks is more of rotational disjunctive type as opposed to divisible type. Perhaps I should replace disjunctive with additive where every single person in the group contributes to the success of the group regardless of how much each contributes. hahah~ But obviously this success is not really there yet though. Oh well, anyways, anyhow... :) Just something to relate to classroom materials...

Talking about group conformation. The cause of the Challenger misfortune did have some links to group conformation. Apparently the engineers warned the decision makers not to fly when the temperature is below 53 deg F but they still made the decision (the day before of the actual flight) to fly, even when the temperature that day was 20ish deg F. Obviously some of the people on the panel did have reservations about that, but did not really speak up for fear of being expelled from the group or being different in the group. The result was the explosion of the space craft in 73 sec and killed all 7 astronauts, the biggest tragedy in space exploration then.

Yep... tt's it... time to work! see ya! Poc 342!!!