May 2004 archive

Flooding, Tornados and Adding Topsoil by Mulching Your Cuttings

I served on setup for my church today. We meet in the Boys' and Girls' Club of Porter County here in Indiana. The usual setup guy was on vacation, well-deserved. He commutes to Deefield for his job right now, which is an hour forty-five there and almost three back. Like me, he's seen some terrible unemployment. He's a "salt of the earth" type of guy, running the setup and tear down of our church stuff each week for over a year, mostly a thankless job. After doing it for a couple of weeks, I have developed a strong appreciation for his work. He drew up layouts for storage and has lists for what goes where in what order. A lot of the setup gets done by relationship: he calls someone and cajoles him into getting to the Club by 7:00 on Sunday morning, and staying an extra hour or more afterwards. it's usually guys doing the heavy work and women doing the coffee and food, interestingly; we're not entirely sex-roled but I'm not sure that I would want most of the guys in this church making coffee, at least since I gave up taking it with a fork. The work has to start so early so that the garage band that leads our singing can practice. I followed my work with greeting people at the door, something I am surprisingly uncomfortable doing.

Apologies for Spam Comments

I apologize for the terrible offense of those comments. I've put up with the gay porn, straight porn, sexual health products and mortgage spam. And this definitely got me pissed off.

I've updated DeSpam and hopefully that'll take care of it. What is interesting that out of 27(!) spam comments, each came from a different IP. I'm wondering if they weren't using a variety of zombies, computers that are not well protected and have been compromised, running these hellspawn's apps to get out their damned message -- and, no, I am not swearing; I mean that curse. I may just hunt down their server and run a few zombies myself and bring down them and their backbone.

That just really has me pissed.

Things I'm Wondering About As I Sit Here in a Coffee Shop, Three Hours From Home

I'm sitting here in the wonder that is Panera South Bloomington (not to be confused with Normal, so nearby) and pondering the various issues of my life. As usual, I'm taking them in no particular order, which also explains why I never number them: numbering implies a rank order at least, and there is just everything all at once.

The job with BIG continues. I'm a bit frustrated because I'm ready to get down and start implementing a variety of neat things. But that's not how life works here. They'll have me on for about four months before I start working on implementation with them. "Don't be hasty" isn't just a Hobbit's motto. Huh. They're much like hobbits in certain ways. A polite people, with a healthy use of drink that doesn't go overboard, a general love of things other than work, an "all us is equals" mentality, and of course giant hairy bare feet. Oh, wait: that's in the book. But since the last movie came out on DVD this week, I'll just insert the hairy feet onto the good people at BIG. Which makes it so much more relaxing to think about them, as the sit at their round desks buried in the ground, their feet comfortably up, leaning back on their chairs smoking pipes of tobacco. Certainly do have a complex weave of culture there. The effect of having such low turnover rates.

I'm not all that happy but it pays the bills. And I get to do research and read, something I love. Next up is finally learning Object Oriented programming. Nah!

"A Learning Curve Primer for Software Engineers"

L.B.S Raccoon (really) has a great article in the Proceedings from the 1996 ACM SIGSOFT Conference. Best way to get it? Use the ACM Digital Library. What? Not an ACM member? Get thee behind me!

(Which always reminds me of the old The Door cartoon of the devil cutting in line at the movies. The response from they guy he's cutting in front of: "Get thee behind me, Satan!" Ah, the wonder that was the Door, back before they sold out to The Man.)

Raccoon describes the basics of learning curves &#em; they go down and start at the top, so you actually want them to be as steep as possible to get back to parity and start process improvement. He points out that all people learn. If you create a stable process, people will continue to improve it on their own. It's just what we do. Of course, that's incremental improvement and you may actually hit a bottleneck that needs removing before it gets much better. He covers these problems, too.

All in all very good primer on learning curves and how they apply to the ROI for software, and how learning curves explain good management practices for software development teams. Never take people off a team, since they are just beginning to understand the project. Projects always bog down at the end because it took that long for the developers to figure out the project and they just realized what it really takes to do it. We all go through this unconsciously (or perhaps simply unconscious).

Making Software Correct By Design

Jesse Poore, the U of Tenn professor, is interviewed by ACM's Ubiquity for his recent article in IEEE Computer, "A Tale of Three Disciplines... And a Revolution". Poore talks about how if we made correct specifications, our software would work. While I agree that software should not fail as often as it does, I think that he misses the point about software not doing what the user wants it to do, which is simply a problem of needing to create and add-on, like with your house. You don't know it until you live in it for awhile.

Anyway, he makes a useful point. There's no good reason why software should be as bad as it is, and testing should be to show how defect-free something is, not to catch errors.

Also of interest is his tale about Harlan Mills:

The way he told it to me, when Mills was an IBM Fellow he was touring a new fabrication facility that had "clean rooms" with only so many parts per million of contaminants, workers in bunny suits, airlocks, and so on. They were boasting about how high the quality was and how high the yield was. Then someone says, "It's too bad you software guys can't produce software of high quality." Mills said, "If we spend as much money up front getting the design right as you guys do, and if we spend as much money on the process keeping impurities and errors out, as you do, we'll have the same kind of quality and yield in software."

Very interesting.

John Kerry to Speak At manasclerk's High School

Really.

J, you may remember your fair time in our school system before you abandoned us for sunnier climes. Indeed, John Kerry, democratic candidate for president, is speaking at my high school's commencement. As a one-time valedictorian who has only been to one reunion, I have to say I feel more shock than awe at this. Of course, as my old man points out, "Of course, the fact that the event occurs on the border of two must-win states had nothing to do with Kerry's advisors requesting that he speak. "

On a final note, my dad closed with a remembrance of his father-in-law's take on the seriousness of our commencements back in the day. "At least GWB will not suffer through the indigity of a BHS commencement." Indeed.

Now everyone play the game of figuring out which plaques in the school bear my name.

Working With BIG

I'm still working, even though they were seriously not liking the write-up I gave them last week. I've refocused and I think that I will be delivering value. I'm helping them learn how to teach people to teach themselves, more or less. One of the current strengths is that they understand the mainframe environment so well that they have created reams and megabytes of information specific to their shop. You can do that if you stay on the same platform for 25 years. Problem is that the Web world requires you to network outside your organization. It means reading (they're an oral culture) and asking questions of people outside your organization. I do indeed believe that if one of their programmers had posted a question to a USENET group or such, he'd been fired.

There's a lot to do. I'm pretty drained from the full day of looking at new articles. There are several interesting ones on IT Professionals (called ITPs in the literature, I kid you not) and how they do professional development. JMMJ, my dear pal but not the godfather of my nonexistent children, would probably take heart to some of it: most people do not get formal training. However, apparently the average for IT professionals is 30 hours per month of informal professional development (asking questions, reading sites, reading magazines, talking with others you know). That's shy of one quarter, but not by much. It's an interesting figure.

BIG, of course, uses a much different standard since they didn't have to read as much. They learned in depth about things rather than a lot about stuff that wasn't currently useful. So I'm helping the training group figure out how to teach people to learn in the new environment. It's fun: like teaching your mom how to use a Macintosh.

Of course, you've never tried to teach my mom how to use a Macintosh. It's 2004 and she's still not online.

More Random Thoughts Building to a Discussion About Community

I've got something building up that has to do with the very substance of Community. I don't have the connections yet, so I'm just going to pile up individual ideas until they seem to point to some conclusion. Very irritating, but I'm not yet to where I can get my hands around them enough to make a real argument.

In no particular order, here's some stuff that affects my view of community:

• For the most part, asking "Why?" is stupid when dealing with your bad habits, abnormal behaviour or depressive thinking. Why? does very little to help you. You only get benefits from changing the way you think and act. In contradiction to our therapuetic culture where you must first explore why you hate your mother. It doesn't work, it takes too long and it gets you thinking like a victim and ruminating on you rather than doing something.


• Action is action.


• There may be something to the idea of "bad breeding" that my mother used to talk about. I'm sure that it has racial overtones, but she only used it to describe whites who were deviant. Having grown up as a poor white (my grandmother once told the tale of praying for food because they legitimately didn't have anything to eat, something I always thought my mom made up), she looked down on those who were behaving in ways that would embarrass her.
  
  Anyway, the idea that some people come from "bad blood" seems to have some validity. Twins raised apart seem to have the same propensity for criminal behaviour. Adopted children with criminal biological parents are much more likely to be criminals that people without criminal parents, even when they are raised by the opposite adoptive parents. Environment seems to only play a part in attempting to manage the biological leaning.
  
  As offensive as this seems, there may be something to the idea of judging persons by their "bloodline", by how their parents and grandparents behave. In order to overcome this, social organizations such as churches must create structures to work with these people who have a propensity towards crime and help them overcome their "natural impulses". I'm not sure how that plays out.


• Postmodern thinking is more than likely not constructive and a result of the navel-gazing that psychology created. It's interesting that so many of the core beliefs of psychology are not supported. Thanks to Martin Seligman's What You Can Change and What You Can't.


• 
  As people were liberated from their traditional ties to spouses, families, neighborhoods, workplaces, or churches, they thought that they could have social connectedness at the same time, this time the connections being those they choose for themselves. But they began to realize that such elective affinitites, which they could slide into and out of at will, left them feeling lonely and disoriented, longing for deeper and more permanent relationships with other peoples — From Fukuyama's The Great Disruption, pp. 15, currently on deep discount at Barnes & Noble (and in hardcover!)


• Taken all in all, Victorianism may not have been as bad a time as it is made out to be. It also wasn't a dreamland, either, but let's get real and see the good things that that period of "repressiveness" offerred.


• Human beings cannot create society in places where the world is constantly changing. Think Bosnia and Somalia. You need stability in your society for some time in order to build up social capital, the trust built through long-term interchanges, that can lead to a democratic society.


• Stability through force normally only produces temporary compliance and not social capital. Remove the coercive force and the society will return to its hateful state. I don't know if there's an answer here, but it means that making a community is very difficult. As the US is discovering in Iraq.


• You overcome "resistance to change" through coercion or through creating a different process by which change may or may not be achieved. You can have either control or cooperation but rarely both.


• "There are no facts; only interpretations." — Is anyone else uncomfortable with Christians basing their thinking on Nietzsche? Will it not lead inexorably to "God is dead"?


• All systems are not equal. You can indeed judge moral systems and societies. Does anyone really believe that Rwanda or bin Laden have moral systems that are equal to Sweden or Ottoman Islam? There are indeed universal norms that humans can use to judge between systems of thought.


• Trying to find the basis for most important parts of our society leads you to rejecting them. Maybe a very few are capable of getting to the bottom of things like familial love, caring for children, being honest in one's dealings, etc., but I doubt it. There's something to be said for "God said it, I believe it, that settles it!" in these cases. Don't pooh-pooh ten thousand years of civilization's evolution ust because you don't get it. This is the hubris of High Modernisn, which I have discussed before.
• 
  
• Community cannot be created by force of will. I don't know how community happens but the best anyone seems to be able to do is create the atmosphere for it.


• That being said, there are some elements that you have to have if you want community. First is that you have to spend time with each other. A lot of it. Intense experiences of working together or living together (even weekend retreat or camp experiences) demonstrate this truth: those who go bond in a way that would take months or never at home.


• The biggest correlation of you and your friend is not that you believe exactly the same but that you have spent a lot of time together. Interestingly enough. You may be able to be friends with almost anyone if you spend enough time with them. That being said, having two incompatible cultures would mean that you would quickly separate after returning from a fake environment, such as a retreat. There has to be some places for you to share.


• If you want to be hospitable, you have to have clear boundaries on your community. If it is easy for people to come and go, you will never have a community out of which you can offer hospitality.


• Hospitality and welcome require outgroups, those who are not your group. And perhaps those who are not welcome. The Christian and Jewish scriptures talk about out groups at length. Christian writers actually talk about "you shall not even eat with such as these!"


• Divorce is almost never good for the children. It always takes a toll on the kids. "Not in front of the children" and "We're staying together for the kids" are actually good things to do to demonstrate your love for your kids. I know that this is not easy and I can think of several cases where it would seem to be almost impossible but well, you can't escape the numbers: kids get damaged by ivorce.


• Groups have magic numbers: other numbers are instable. I'm not sure if this is some Strange Attractor at work or not, but there do seem to be some ranges that are much more stable than others. Perhaps this is related to the "finding" (at least commonly referenced "fact") that churches will stop growing when they are 80% full.


• Being in community with others means giving up some of my individuality. There is no way out of this. Ever seen a Liberterian Movement? Of course not: liberterians can't get together because their too individualistic. You must be willing to find indentity within the group.


• You will never agree with everything that your group adheres to. Unless they don't adhere to much. It is probably better to have broader values that include more (to a point). Yes, I know the importance for having strong beliefs: I'm simply suggesting that we need to recognize that we may only have a piece of the full picture (as a new friends recently suggested to me).


• Just because you create emotion-telling does not mean that you create community.

Reflections on The Church After Reading Fukuyama's The Great Disruption

How infinitely sad it must be for those who claim to know Christ but refuse to get along with his affianced. So many of us live as if the church matter not to our own salvation, provide no compfort nor solace. Sure, The Church, the Church Invisible, we claim to participate in with all our hearts. But can we know the Church Invisible without the struggle, the dirt, the grimy love and warmth of the Church Visible, that place down the street with the irritating woman who thinks that her tunafish casserole is tasty, or the overintellectual man who bores us all to death trying to show us how smart he is, or the Batson boys whose parents think nothing of their tearing through the church like demons on their way to a bake sale, or the pastor whose sermonswe find boring, the music we find unworshipful because it is too modern or too swaying or too Bach-y or too staid or in a foreign tongue... You know the one, the one that you won't go to.

How can we call ourselves Christians, followers of Christ if we refuse to join under the authority of a local congregation, making their children our children, their orphans and widows our own to care for, their celebrations ours? The church is a wretched place, full of hypocrites and anti-intellectuals, people who treat other people wretchedly, who don't value you like they should. Which is great, since there's room for one more and your name is on the spot.

John Kerry: Leading Supporter of manasclerk

For whatever reason, blog.johnkerry.com has become the leading referring site for The Power Struggle.

Kill me now, I've become politicized.

I'm sure it's for my insightful comments on Christian faith that has drawn their attention. I can't find the link, but I think that it is buried in a comment. If someone finds it, let me know.

Stability: America's Enemy

J sent this link to me today. The author argues that in pursuing stability as a diplomatic goal, America has turned its back on its anti-imperialist values, propping up reprobate regimes of rascals for American businessmen when it should have been supporting the anti-imperialist freedom fighters. There's more than a little righteous indignation at our doing so, and I always appreciate when the good thing to do is shown to be the practical thing, too.

And it would have been in America's business interests in the long run, too.

America's finest values are sacrificed to keep bad governments in place, dysfunctional borders intact, and oppressed human beings well-behaved. In one of the greatest acts of self-betrayal in history, the nation that long was the catalyst of global change and which remains the beneficiary of international upheaval has made stability its diplomatic god.

From "Stability, America's Enemy" by Ralph Peters, Parameters, Winter 2001-02, pp. 5-20.

Hierarchy vs. Emergence

I would like to make the argument that hierarchies are emergent phenomena.

One of the things that has bothered me with the several "postmodern" discussions about organizational life has been the disregard for hierarchies often expressed by them. Flat oranizations are superior to hierarchical ones, they say, because inforrmation and knowledge flows more freely between equals. I agree that information and knowledge flows better between equals but I do not believe that this makes flat organizations a good idea.

A truly flat organization would not have a CEO. A flat organization is an "association" in Jaques's terminology. When businesses decide that they do not need a single leader (CEO or Chairman) but are run by democratic vote, they will be Flat Organizations. Perhaps companies that are employee-owned can be flat. I doubt it, having worked in an employee owned firm. I preferred working in the Owner-owned firm that had open accounting.

I believe that hierarchies form spontaneously. Hierarchy is nothing more than an evolutionary development. The question is whether something else should supplant it.

This is not necessarily an argument for bureaucracies. However, we should note that they did not suddenly appear in 1890 in the German states. Bureaucracies had been deployed by the Romans and the Macedonians, the Persians and the Babylonians, created by the Chinese, the Indians, the Middle East and the Native American peoples (who may have invented it multiple times).

Organizing for Success

I've been thinking about how many things have to get done right in order to any of the projects that I am working on to be successful. I'm show surprised that anything ever gets accomplished.

There has to be a better way.

If societies can evolve into complex structures through emergent whatevers, why can't information systems?

Amazing Spider-Man, Then and Now

I've been reading the Spider-Man collections. I used to buy Spiderman, back in the early 1980s. I bought from about issue 184 through 214, then sporadically later. I missed the Venom thing, the marriage thing, the Clone thing. Great Horny Toads! What were they thinking when they did the clone thing? (For those who don't know, some wiseguy whose name shall never again pass my lips decided to have a storyline where we find out that the Spider-Man we now know is really the clone Spider-Man from all the way back in issue 40 or so. Really dumb idea, even by comics standards.) I remember the issues of What If?... where they asked the sterling question "What if Peter Parker's clone had lived?" It was all in all a decent story that showed how ridiculous it would have been if they had used it in their regular storyline. I think that the above-mentioned editor must have read that issue and taken a shine to it. Anyway, after getting the story of Spider-Man's uniform becoming a real entity (Venom storyline, which many Spidey fans liked, I not being among them) and then suffering through the "It's all been a dream!" of the clone story, we then got a new, non-clone, revamped regular Spider-Man who wasn't Ultimate. Unfortunately, the powers-that-be at that time decided to give the writing job to Howard Mckie, who quickly gave us "Mary Jane divorces Peter Parker!" Like we needed that much reality. People left the title (again) in droves (again). Enter J. Michael Straczynski. For those of you who don't follow comics, you may only know Straczynski from Babylon 5, the five-year science fiction series that he created and produced. He started writing comics after Bab5 ended, authoring single issues as well as two well-received and well-executd series: the unfinished Rising Stars and the much better executed Midnight Nation. Straczynski set about restoring the greatness of the Spider-Man title through complex storytelling and new ideas. And, of course, he has one of the finest illustrators in the business working with him, John Romita, Jr. Romita shows just how much he has grown as a storyteller in Amazing Spider-Man. Other artists read his stuff to see how it should be done, calling him the best comics storyteller working today. And perhaps he is. But I think that working with Straczynski lets him shine. The best thing that I can say about Straczynski and Romita? When I read Amazing Spider-Man, I forget to look and see how they do it, to observe their craft. I get so caught up in their characters, in their story, that I forget to watch their storytelling. I don't lose myself in that many tales these days: for whatever reason, I get a bang out of seeing how it is done even though I can't do it myself. But with Amazing Spider-Man I'm just there for the ride. Plus, I feel like I did when I read the Stan Lee / Steve Ditko Amazing Spider-Man years ago. Something about Straczynski & Romita reminds me of the later Lee & Ditko work, the fullness of the characterizations, the weight of the world weighing upon Peter Parker, his tenaciousness in light of adversity. Skip the Mackie issues, just as Marvel does in its numbering of the Amazing Spider-Man reprints. Start with Coming Home and move forward through the 500th Issue celebration (in Happy Birthday, which lived up to the hype) and on. Then slip back to the Marvel Masterworks Series for the original Lee/Ditko color issues from the 1960s.

Marvel Masterworks: The Amazing Spider-Man, Volume 1 Marvel Masterworks: The Amazing Spider-Man, Volume 2 Spider-Man: Coming Home Spider-Man: Revelations Spider-Man: Until the Stars Turn Cold

Carlisle Butcher Shop

That's my grandfather, the man with only a ninth grade schooling who, by the time he passed away, had read Bacon, Darwin, Plato, Aristotle and the occassional Baptist bible book. He ran the butcher counter at the coal mine's company store. You may recall the old song:

You work sixteen hours and waddya get?
Another day older and deeper debt
Saint Peter don't you call me, 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store

The song is pretty accurate, for some folk at least. Granddad went to work in the mines in ninth grade (he may have finished that year, though) when his daddy got injured. He died later that year. Coal mine accident. Coal miners didn't have a long life expectancy and folks attached to union men probably fared worse than usual: my great-grandfather's cousin was a leader in the Matewan revolution, and that's where my family is from, albeit back before anyone called it Matewan and we were fighting over someone's bride and/or a pig. Granddad must have been keeping his nose clean during those years before his mom remarried. Since he and his brother had to support mom and three other brothers, he had a good reason to.

You Got To Be Churched

Back when I wrote my rant that that earlier diatribe about my own people of faith, Adrian Warnock from the UK sent me a couple of very gracious comments and emails. Adrian is a psychiatrist at a pharmaceutical company who also works as pastor, making him a very busy man. In his free time, he advocates the local church among Christian bloggers (such as here), who seem almost uniformly disgusted with living in community even while they crave authentic Christian fellowhip, worship and life.

I was going to send an email to him and ended up writing more than I intended. So, I'm posting it an edited, extended version here and sending him a more personal thank you. Always nice to see personal mail, you know.

I guess I can't escape the feeling that I cannot truly know God's grace except inside the fellowship and authority of a local community of believers. Perhaps it is not true for everyone else. I can't know but I suspect from scripture that we are cut off when we abandon coming together.

I appreciate [Warnock's] voice in this: there are so many Christian bloggers who have abandoned the church, I suspect mostly because of situations that they themselves create. At least, this was my situation. In fact, I remember the defining moment of my life, when I began to think of my congregation as my church. My wife and I had returned to a church in Chicago after living in Brussels, and I returned bitter, waiting for the church to serve me. One day, we were invited to greet people around us (a very American version of passing the peace of Christ) and I did not want to greet anyone. I did not want to get to know the couple who sat in front of us all the time that I never talked to. I wanted to get through church and go home.

"The Church Our Mother"

In his recent book, Ancient-Future Faith: Rethinking Evangelism for a Postmodern World, Robert E. Webber discusses the role of the ancient ideas of the faith, those articulated in scripture and in the Church Fathers, the great leaders of the church during its first centuries who worked out much of our doctrine and creeds. While he makes the common mistakes in postmodern discussions—the revolution in science is nonsensical except in a much more nuanced sense—but his discussions of theology and the problems of the American evangelical church experience have much worth pondering.

In a discussion of the importance of the church, that local community within which Christians participate the Church Eternal, Webber provides a lengthy excerpt from John Calvin's Institutes:

But as our present design is to treat the visible church [read: local congregation] we may learn even from the title mother how useful and even necessary it is for us to know her; since there is no other way of entrance into life, unless we are conceived by her, born of her, nourished at her breast, and continually preserved under her care and government till we are divested of this mortal flesh and "become like angels". For our infirmity will not admit of our dismission from her school: we must continue under her instruction and discipline to the end of our lives. It is also to be remarked that out of her bosom there can be no hope of remission of sins or any salvation.

Interesting Comments

Allow me to direct your attention to the comments listed in the Recent Comments section. Mostly because Michelle of People Fit said that I had a good grasp on Jaques's ideas, which is such a great compliment, especially coming from an OD consultant using RO as the basis of her work. But J also has some great comments, which I am trying to get around to replying to.

The job here at BIG is fantastic: I talked about using Positive Deviance (of Jerry Sternin fame; search The Power Struggle for him for more, because I'm too tired to create the link) and my client got very excited. Sure, I'm going to bring in ideas from the industry, but they are not stupid. Unlike most of the other consultants to them, I actually think that they have a great culture. They just got stuck in what made them wildly successful. The base culture though is what will make them profitable again, what will turn IT around.

I love their stories, stories about running into the President of the company at Kroger or Lowe's. "You don't understand what it means to see the CEO of a multi-billion dollar company pushing his own cart," one of my clients said. "In India, where I'm from, even a small company owner does nothing on his own. He has servants to move his spoon from here to here on table in front of him!"

That's what is going to keep them great: powerful stories of real people, of us all being part of the same community. This is the type of people I want to help see how great they really are.

BIG Problems

I started my work with BIG Insurance Group, or BIG. And although I have not finished Cryptonomicon, I can still relish the self-referential acronym.

BIG has hired me to help them think about training, to move towards a Continuous Learning Environment. I bring several prejudices and presuppositions from my previous work with them. I'm probably going to have a preliminary recommendation by the end of the week. Right now the work is two weeks on, then one off as they move to a new location in another complex, and then I'll be doing one week on, one week off until December. That means that I will have to obtain another client to pay all my bills that I have accumulated since last year.

The work excites me. I get to do cultural analysis and research training methods and techniques in the financial services industry. In the back of my mind, I have begun to think of some of the conferences that would be ideal for them to participate in and what types of industry groups would help BIG get more exposure to the industry solutions. They have been pretty isolated for about 50 years so getting them out and off to conferences will be a chore. Maybe I will recommend that they sponsor a SIG within their current industry groups to talk about IT issues. Most of them are pretty common and not within antitrust violating space: I can't see how talking about moving from mainframe or what solutions from vendors worked will break Sherman. But I am not a lawyer and I don't play one on TV.