Monday morning, and I have a scheduled call where oceanographers from around the world will call in to discuss a research program or two. This is an idea from the oceanography senior director. He envisages round table chats about projects with lots of banter and push-back, the assumption being that ideas get stronger with lots of that. But mostly, he is used to working on single location projects where they did lots of that, and he found it rewarding. The downside of that is that these are bigger projects, which are dispersed around different locations with different cultures, and just because there is a room full of Americans (transplanted or otherwise) in a room on one leg of the call who are talking a lot doesn't make it a round-table banter.

In fact, these projects have been progressing on their own, and have been shared many times, and when someone has a mature project that has been going for a long time, there's nothing worse than someone who wants to tear it apart from first principles... every week. One might assume that there is some rigour in it by now, and perhaps at this point the delivery results are a good measure of it's success.

Anyway, I'm all for research that meets tough tests of its validity, but creativity also needs a bit of freedom to chase an idea without over management as well. The balance, always finding the balance.

This weekend I pulled up Final Cut Express (uh-oh, more google bait). Interesting stuff, but more on that at some point.