When you look up how to get more protein into bread, the internet seems to be full of tons and tons of useless and overly complicated recipes.
It’s not complicated. All you need to do is get some vital wheat gluten, which is a posh way of saying flour that has been washed and then re-dried to remove most of the starch, and substitute that for a percentage of your ordinary flour when you’re making bread. For our normal bread maker, which is an old Panasonic SD-258, we have a set loaf that we make. It makes a large loaf and consists of:
1 teaspoon of yeast 475 grams of flour 1.5 teaspoons of sugar 3 tablespoons of olive oil 1.25 tablespoons of salt 320 millilitres of water
That’s our standard loaf. We have found that if we substitute some of the flour with vital wheat gluten, it ups the protein content. But if you add too much, it makes the bread too chewy and the crust a little bit harder. We’ve found that simply using:
400 grams of standard flour 75 grams of vital wheat gluten, {or washed flour, whatever you want to call it}
Produces an awesome loaf. It is easy to cut, behaves well, and contains more protein.
Framing is a political tool, and we probably should not use it in IT, but everybody does.
Essentially, framing means using particular terms to promote a viewpoint or a way of seeing something. It happens all the time, and it is a perfectly normal part of communication. For a fuller explanation, I would recommend reading “Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate” by George Lakoff, which provides useful background on the subject.
You see framing frequently in corporate IT, but you can fight back against it.
When framing is being used against you, particularly when you are trying to get something done, you will often hear complex technical language or reassuring, almost fatherly terms misused. You might hear phrases such as “advisory board” for a group that is supposedly just there to help. But in reality, it may be a group of gatekeepers trying to ensure that nobody does anything they do not like.
You can challenge this by flipping the framing around.
For example, if there is an approval document, which is itself a positive and authoritative term, you can simply call it paperwork.
“We are nearly ready. We just need to complete the paperwork.”
This diminishes what another part of the corporation might describe as an advisory document, governance document or strategic approval document.
The ultimate version of this, which has also been used in American politics, is the phrase “permission slip”.
Suppose you are waiting for approval from a governance board inside a corporation, and it calls its document a “strategic approval document”, which makes it sound like something grand and unarguable when it might be nothing of the sort, but if you refer to it as a permission slip, you completely change the frame.
It stops sounding like guidance, responsible oversight and strategic governance. Instead, it becomes paperwork handed out to a child by someone in authority.
I do not advise doing this. It is not a particularly nice tactic, but you will see people use it against you. They will use overly grand phrases to justify their own work, while using diminutive words and phrases to describe yours.
I don’t even know the correct term for this, but my personal trainer and I have started to call this thing “body cheating”.
Body cheating happens when you focus only on the final goal. You complete the task in any way that you can, rather than use the correct technique.
And how does this work with fitness? Well, for example, you use poor form to reach a gym goal. Burn the target number of calories on a spin bike, lift a heavy weight, or score a hit in fencing. You achieve the result, but you do not complete the movement correctly.
This sounds stupid when I write it down, but I do it very often. However, I do not mean to do it. I just focus on the goal and make my body find a way to achieve it.
The purpose of this post is to warn other people who train in the same way. It is easy to believe that the end justifies the means.
This approach worked when I was in my twenties and thirties. It even worked during most of my forties. Not perfectly, but I still performed well.
However, it has caused problems in my late forties and early fifties.
In my case, my core is not particularly strong, and my hips are very inflexable. I compensate for these weaknesses with effort from my shoulders and large, full-body movements to produce the strength and speed that I need.
Now I am paying for it.
My hips are stiff, which makes my movements slower. My weak core has also contributed to several painful back problems.
My fencing becomes much worse when I am tired. This is particularly true when my core is feeling it. I try to compensate by bending forwards and hunching over. This changes my position and affects my aim.
I am now starting a period of remedial training. It will probably continue for at least six months. I must complete movements correctly and stop using my stronger muscles to hide my weaknesses.
As a result, performance has fallen in almost every area.
My spin-bike performance is poor because I cannot hunch over the handlebars. Fencing is suffering because I cannot use unnecessary effort to force each movement. I depend on muscles that I have not trained correctly.
Muscles that are my weakest link.
We cannot ignore them and return to using bad habits. We must train the weak muscles until they become strong enough to do their proper job.
This will be an interesting journey, and it will help me in the long term.
So this is a warning to anyone who thinks, “I do not need to use the accepted technique. I will do it in the way that feels best to me.”
This will undoubtedly be the flavour of the month across the internet, particularly on platforms such as LinkedIn. People will suddenly be saying, “Aha! AI isn’t saving the world. CEOs are seeing the cost of all that token usage and realising that they shouldn’t have replaced people.”
Yes, some CEOs will be receiving unexpectedly large bills, but there is nothing new about the underlying problem. It is the same challenge every corporation faces when assessing value for money and trying to understand the total cost of a decision before committing to it.
My favourite recurring example is the comparison between contractors and permanent employees. Taken as a whole, a good contractor does not cost more than a permanent employee, provided you pay a sane market rate and you get what you asked for delivery-wise. Permanent employees come with many additional and often less visible costs, including benefits, training, leave and potential employment liabilities.
This does not mean that one option is automatically better than the other. It simply means that avoiding consultants or contractors does not always produce the savings an organisation expects. A good consultant who delivers genuine value is as good a deal as a dedicated employee. {This is a shameless plug}.
The same principle has appeared throughout the history of business outsourcing. It may look inexpensive to outsource work to the cheapest available supplier in another country, but is it really cheaper if the result is increasing technical debt and creating remediation costs further down the line?
Going back even further, buying cheap tools may appear to be a cost-saving exercise. However, if they need to be replaced repeatedly, they may ultimately cost far more than buying the right tools in the first place.
AI is no different. Every generation falls for some version of the same promise. When something appears too good to be true, it usually is. Everything has a cost, and there is no such thing as a free lunch.
What we need to avoid now is another knee jerk reaction. AI is brilliant and is a major step up in what corporations do day to day. However, it is not a universal solution, and its costs go beyond simply doing the work and providing the necessary computing power.
Vast amounts of investment have been poured into AI companies, and those investors will eventually expect a return. One way or another, that is likely to mean that prices will rise and costs will increase.
So, we return to the same advice that finance departments have been giving organisations since time immemorial: look at the complete cost of a decision.
Do not ask only how much something will cost this year. Ask what it could cost over the next ten years. Consider the supporting systems, the people, the remediation work, the supplier risks and the potential cost of changing direction later.
Before making large-scale changes, take the time to understand what you are buying, what it will replace and how much the service is likely to cost over its entire lifetime.
As a deeply technical person, I have always slightly resented PowerPoint. It can feel like communication with extra steps, or like turning everything into a very basic “See Spot run” version of the world. That said, I am aware that, from a manager’s point of view, when they have so much information thrown across their desk, something neatly laid out and clear can make their job much easier.
However, I have recently been lucky enough to work with someone with significant accessibility needs, and I am now seeing PowerPoint in an even grimmer light.
Often, other forms of communication are asked to be converted into a PowerPoint slide for the sake of presentation, even when the email containing the original data is perfectly readable by everybody. Yet the expectation remains that it has to be fancied up before adult humans are considered capable of coping with it.
This has always struck me as slightly annoying and needless work, but it had never really occurred to me how much of a non-inclusive pain it can be for people with accessibility issues.
A lot of the templates people use for PowerPoint, particularly those from larger vendors, are designed with sheer beauty in mind. They are often created by professional designers, and they can look brilliant. But they can also be an absolute devil to edit if you are not fully able-bodied and a wizard with a mouse. They are often far more like works of art than practical means of communication.
I do appreciate how good a polished PowerPoint slide can look, and I do appreciate the clarity they can sometimes bring. But are they always necessary? Do we need to produce a beautiful slide rather than one that is merely clear, easy to edit, and suitable for communication?
So next time you are adding complex background images and hundreds of little dots to make a Gantt chart, have a think about how someone who only has voice commands would edit it.
