Evan Short 247.155

Preamble. Teams are an important part of working in this modern day and age and remote teams are becoming more and more common in many sectors of work. I left a great team at my previous job but we we not that much more than the competent dregs of the IT department who sat in the same room. Quite often our work had no crossover with each other and if a question was fielded to any one of us that was outside that person's scope of work it would get redirected to the correct person or team. I see now while we were a team in name we weren't a team at all in practice. We did have a great boss and leader though, he would task us with things that fit our skill sets and sometimes with others to challenge us, he focused on development in a very transformation type style; he encourage us to deepen and widen our skill sets in directions that were interesting and rewarding. In the Beginning. Our team came together with a very juddering start. The process by which one can form an online

Cassini's last words In the past week a great tool of space science shared it's final contributions with earth before plummeting to it's demise. The great tool in question was the Cassini spacecraft which had orbited Saturn since 2004 and had also delivered the Huygens probe to the surface of one of Saturn's moons, Titan. After thirteen years of relaying data and images of Saturn and it's moons the craft took a few lower altitude orbits before finally crashing itself into Saturn itself. The decision to destroy the craft was to protect many of the planet's many moon environments (thought to possibly be habitable) from biological contamination. In the beginning Work on the Cassini mission began in 1982 with the European Science Foundation (ESA) and the American National Academy of Sciences looking at possible collaborative efforts which eventuated in a NASA and ESA shared mission to send a probe (Huygens) to Titan and an orbiter craft (Cassini) to collect

Two's company, three's a team Around two months ago after a few brief and flailing attempts at forming a remote report team on the Stream forum I finally was able to connect with four other people who became the report team I work with. Sadly, within the first week one of our members went silent and seemed to slip off the face of the earth and then another member left, albeit this time with communication, around two weeks ago. Thankfully the remaining two members and myself have been working well together, getting through the initial tasks of setting up a basic team structure and beginning our survey. There are advantages and disadvantages to remote teams Having recently worked in a small but effective IT team, where on occasion members would work from home, I understand the benefits of having the flexibility to work remotely but also the pitfalls and hindrances that can arise when members are not physically present in the office. One benefit can be the ability to focus on

Vaccination in Vacation Town As I mentioned in my last blog my family and I have just come out of a few weeks of concurrent household illness; to be honest the whole island has been sick, even the main pharmacy on the island has a huge chalk board out the front of the shop showing how many flu vaccinations they have left to offer, each day the previous day's number is struck through and the updated count of jabs is written on. As per the last blog: the irony is not missed on me. The problem with my position paper topic: I have a folder full of research all backing up having strong vaccination recommendation policies, mandatory vaccination policies and how in the absence of either or both of these things communities and micro-populations such as schools can have outbreaks of communicable diseases. My problem is that I'm yet to find anything credible (be it from an ethical, medical or scientific standpoint) that speaks to the other side of the argument. I worrying now

Summarising the debate The last few week's attempts to study had been beset by horrendous sickness; my own, my wife's, our child's and guests from New Zealand we had hosted at our house. So now, whilst trawling through studies into the efficacy of flu vaccines and whether any herd immunity can be attained in an immunised population, I find myself chuckling at the irony of my situation. The issue at hand: So as fraught as the wider debate around vaccination itself is and with my position paper topic being quite specifically about mandatory vaccinations as a school/pre-school enrolment requirement I decided to delve into research around the efficacy of mandatory vaccination enforcement for school attendance in other countries. I was hoping to find data on vaccination uptake, contraction incidence and school participation (i.e. were children home-schooled more as a result) in populations where mandatory vaccination policies were initiated. What I found: I

Finding and reading relevant literature Having read over the position paper topics two weeks ago I was instantly drawn to the option to argue for mandatory immunisation of children prior to enrolment in a school or pre-school. Having an almost three year old daughter who has been in full time day care since she was six months old my partner and I are acutely aware of the impact her day to day environment could have on her health. I am staunchly pro-vaccination as none of the concerns the anti-vaccination material I read had any truth or carried any weight after further digging, we did look into a few initially worrying statements but these fell flat in the light of proper research. That said, I am attempting to approach this assignment with an unbiased start point as best I can. I began brainstorming for my position paper using the two column approach given in the "How to write a position paper" PDF but quickly realised that I didn't understand the argument aga