[Video Link] Keep OSHA away from this amazing 115-year-old box factory that runs on steam power. Lots of pulleys, belts, gears, and other fast-moving machinery that look hungry for the hands and arms of careless machine operators (the folks in the video look like they know what they are doing it). The video itself is terrific. No music or narration to compete with the mesmerizing sounds of the machines in operation. (Thanks, Bob!)
    
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Whites who kill blacks in Stand Your Ground states are far more likely to be found justified in their killings. In non-Stand Your Ground states, whites are 250 percent more likely to be found justified in killing a black person than a white person who kills another white person; in Stand Your Ground states, that number jumps to 354 percent. [link]
You can be a committed A-player executive, a good parent, an attentive spouse, and a healthy person with time for community engagement and hobbies. How on earth do you do all that? Stop juggling and start integrating. Begin with a clear view of what you want from — and can contribute to — each domain of your life (work, home, community, and self). Carefully consider the people who matter most to you and the expectations you have of one another. Then experiment with some minor changes and see how they affect all four domains over a short period.
If an experiment doesn't work out in one or more areas, you can make adjustments or put an end to it, and little is lost. But if it does work out, it's a small win. Rack up enough small wins, and you're well on your way to a life that's less stressful and more productive.
Skeptical? Many people are when they first hear about this approach. But time and again, I've seen business professionals use it to find the greater harmony they're seeking. Working with Harvard Business Review, I've created a free interactive assessment test to help you identify misalignments between the amount of time you spend on one area and how important it is to you. The test also incorporates how satisfied you are, generally, in each of the four areas. Your results will highlight gaps between your values and your actions and ways to get started addressing those gaps. Click here to get started on the assessment.
One of the best ways to address the incongruities that may surface via the assessment is to structure an experiment focused on improving your well-being and performance in all four domains of your life. The assessment results will provide more detail on how to get started, but to show what an experiment can look like in practice, here's a story of a Target executive I worked with who experimented his way toward improving his well-being and performance.
David is a VP accountable for a multibillion-dollar P&L. (His name and title are disguised.) For years, he felt a relentless tension between the domains of work and home, as many of us do: "I spent most of my waking hours at work," he explains, "and I always shut down from work at home." But keeping things separate like this hurt his relationship with his wife. They talked about the kids, nothing more, because that was all they had in common. And at work, David never had enough time to prepare for all his meetings.
So he devised an experiment. Before leaving the office each day, he'd look at the next day's schedule and pick one big meeting to get ready for. On his drive home — at a decent hour — he'd think about what he could do and say at that meeting. When he got home, he'd run some ideas by his wife.
It worked beautifully: "This gave us something new to talk about each day, it gave her a much better understanding of what I do, it engaged her, and it enhanced our relationship because we were having richer conversations. My wife made good suggestions — and I've had better meetings as a result."
The experiment has also had a positive effect on David's team. After telling his direct reports he was changing his hours in the office, one of them approached him with a request to adjust her schedule, because it was aggravating a medical problem. Another employee said he felt empowered to take care of an aging parent during the day when he needed to. He didn't feel guilty about it — David's own actions made it clear that it was OK.
"The example I was setting before was work first, work first, work first," David reflects. "Now I might be in the office for fewer hours, but I'm making faster and better decisions. And my wife has more understanding when work does have to come first. In the long-term, this means that I'm a more engaged leader for Target without an unmanageable tension between my wife and my work."
Interested in identifying your own misalignments and structuring experiments to improve them? Let's get started.
Adapted from "Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life" (HBR April 2008) and content posted on hbr.org on February 21, 2013. Stew Friedman's thoughts on how to structure experiments to better your four-domain integration can be found in the HBR Press book, Guide to Managing Stress.
In fact, CPR doesn’t work 75% of the time. It works 8% of the time. That’s the percentage of people who are subjected to CPR and are revived and live at least one month. And those 8% don’t necessarily go back to healthy lives: 3% have good outcomes, 3% return but are in a near-vegetative state, and the other 2% are somewhere in between. With those kinds of odds, you can see why physicians, who don’t have to rely on medical dramas for their information, might say “no.” [link]
But what was the actual impact of coffeehouses on productivity, education and innovation? Rather than enemies of industry, coffeehouses were in fact crucibles of creativity, because of the way in which they facilitated the mixing of both people and ideas…It was a coffeehouse argument among several fellow scientists that spurred Isaac Newton to write his “Principia Mathematica,” one of the foundational works of modern science. Coffeehouses were platforms for innovation in the world of business, too. Merchants used coffeehouses as meeting rooms, which gave rise to new companies and new business models. A London coffeehouse called Jonathan’s, where merchants kept particular tables at which they would transact their business, turned into the London Stock Exchange. Edward Lloyd’s coffeehouse, a popular meeting place for ship captains, shipowners and traders, became the famous insurance market Lloyd’s. [link]
Justin.mortensenHaven't primary school teacher's known that lectures don't work, in general, for at least a century?
Imagine you receive the same lecture twice: once from a charismatic lecturer speaking fluently without notes and maintaining eye contact; and again from a hesitant speaker, slumped over her notes and stumbling over her words. Which is better?
In terms of what you learn there is surprisingly little to choose between the two, according to a team of psychologists.
“The fluent instructor was rated significantly higher than the disfluent instructor on traditional instructor evaluation questions, such as preparedness and effectiveness,” say the researchers, in the journal Psychonomic Bulletin and Review. “However, lecture fluency did not significantly affect the amount of information learned.” [link]
The Humanity Journal interviews anthropologist James Ferguson, starting with the origins of his book, The Anti-Politics Machine:
It began with my dissatisfaction with the very repetitive policy-focused discussions going on at the time (in the academy and outside it) concerning “development failure.” The question was always, “Why do development projects fail?” and “How can we do it better the next time?” But these did not seem to me very productive questions. Lesotho was knee-deep in “failed” development projects, and to come in and say that they were failing seemed to me to be not actually saying very much—that was obvious on its face.
So I instead found myself more and more interested in another set of questions, which was, “What is it that these projects are in fact doing?” I said, let us set aside these normative questions of success and failure, and let us be good anthropologists and be descriptive: what is going on here?
Once I started asking that question, I found that the intellectual work that was being done in these development agencies and development reports and in development discourse generally was quite substantial.
There was a tendency toward academic snobbery, I think, to look at these development intellectuals as people who were just being really bad anthropologists, to point out that what they were saying was not very well supported, and to pick it apart. What I wanted to say is that they are not doing good anthropology because they are not trying to do good anthropology—they are trying to do something else, and they are actually very good at doing that something else.
That something else has to do with constituting usable objects, meaning the objects that can be attached to programs that development agencies are there to set up. It has to do with creating the points of engagement with the knowable world that make it possible for them to do their jobs—that make it possible for these programs to build a case for why they need more money to do the next project, and why the next project is going to turn out differently than the previous one.
I wanted not only to say that this technical work is important, it is an action in the world—it is not just talk, it is a material practice that produces material effects—but also to open up the question of “what are those effects?”
The full interview is interesting, in spite of the fact the interviewers have the annoying habit of speaking in six-syllable jargon.
The book is is number one on my list of books development workers and academics should read, but usually don’t.
Here is an article-length version of the book.
The post What development agencies really do appeared first on Chris Blattman.
Systems that turn a driver's speech into text are the most distracting. Drivers in a University of Utah test experienced a kind of inattention blindness that mean they sometimes overlooked potential hazards.
Justin.mortensenWelcome to Australia!
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“I never used Excel at work but I saw other people making pretty graphs and thought, ‘I could probably draw with that,’” says 73-year old Tatsuo Horiuchi.
More here. Hat tip @franciscome
The post Is this the most beautiful Excel spreadsheet in history? appeared first on Chris Blattman.
The New Zealand Medical Journal published a study over a year ago that’s worth mentioning, given that this country also has a compulsory bike-helmet law:
Evaluation of New Zealand’s bicycle helmet law
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Abstract
The New Zealand helmet law (all ages) came into effect on 1 January 1994. It followed Australian helmet laws, introduced in 1990–1992. Pre-law (in 1990) cyclist deaths were nearly a quarter of pedestrians in number, but in 2006–09, the equivalent figure was near to 50% when adjusted for changes to hours cycled and walked.
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From 1988–91 to 2003–07, cyclists’ overall injury rate per hour increased by 20%. Dr Hillman, from the UK’s Policy Studies Institute, calculated that life years gained by cycling outweighed life years lost in accidents by 20 times. For the period 1989–1990 to 2006–2009, New Zealand survey data showed that average hours cycled per person reduced by 51%.
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This evaluation finds the helmet law has failed in aspects of promoting cycling, safety, health, accident compensation, environmental issues and civil liberties.
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Some 45 trillion gallons of water are lost each year with all of the food that's thrown out around the world, according to a report from the World Resources Institute. This represents a staggering 24 percent of all water used for agriculture.
Lisa Wade and Gwen Sharp, two sociologists (who also work on the excellent Sociological Images blog) have advice for this year's college grads that goes beyond "find your passion, follow your dreams" (something that actually doesn't work for most college grads, statistically). Instead, they offer research-grounded advice in how to lead a happy, full life:
2. Make Friends
Americans put far too much emphasis on finding Mr. or Ms. Right and getting married. We think this will bring us happiness. In fact, however, both psychological well-being and health are more strongly related to friendship. If you have good friends, you’ll be less likely to get the common cold, less likely to die from cancer, recover better from the loss of a spouse, and keep your mental acuity as you age. You’ll also feel more capable of facing life’s challenges, be less likely to feed depressed or commit suicide, and be happier in old age. Having happy friends increases your chance of being happy as much as an extra $145,500 a year does. So, make friends!4. Don’t Take Your Ideas about Gender and Marriage Too Seriously
If you do get married, keep going with the flow. Relationship satisfaction, financial security, and happy kids are more strongly related to flexibility in the face of life’s challenges than any particular way of organizing families. The most functional families are ones that can bend. So partnering with someone who thinks that one partner should support their families and the other should take responsibility for the house and children is a recipe for disaster. So is being equally rigid about non-traditional divisions of labor. It’s okay to have ideas about how to organize your family – and, for the love of god, please talk about both your ideals and fallback positions on this – but your best bet for happiness is to be flexible.
Advice for College Grads from Two Sociologists
(Image: Graduation, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from ajschwegler's photostream)
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Among the niceties and travails of meeting people for the first time, there’s no more loaded question than “What do you do?” I would almost prefer to respond to “What is your favorite sexual position?” or “How do you feel about your mother?” because people would be less likely to read into my answer. [link]
Which reminds me, of course, of Grosse Pointe Blank
Marty: They all have husbands and wives and children and houses and dogs, and, you know, they’ve all made themselves a part of something and they can talk about what they do. What am I gonna say? “I killed the president of Paraguay with a fork. How’ve you been?”
He recounted for me the way his patients lament the disappearance of lust. “They use terms with real emphasis, words that are violent,” he said. ” ‘This is like someone cut off my arm.’ ‘This is not how I see myself.’ ‘This is like something’s been ripped away from me. Stripped away. Stolen.’ ” Among the applicants for the trials whom Goldstein interviewed was a law student. After five years with her boyfriend, she couldn’t trick herself into the desire for him she once felt; she could only trick him into believing she still felt it. “I don’t like to hurt his feelings,” she said. “I’m a team player.” [link]
For all of the books (thousands) written on leadership, individuals (millions) who have participated in leadership seminars and dollars (billions) invested in leadership development, too many leadership experts still fail to distinguish between the practice of leadership and the exercise of bureaucratic power.
In order to engage in a conversation about leadership, you have to assume you have no power — that you aren't "in charge" of anything and that you can't sanction those who are unwilling to do your bidding. If, given this starting point, you can mobilize others and accomplish amazing things, then you're a leader. If you can't, well then, you're a bureaucrat.
To gain a true leadership advantage, organizations must be filled with individuals who understand how to maximize their own ratio of "accomplishment over authority." They must believe it's possible to do something big with a little dab of power. Think, for example, of Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, the world's largest compendium of knowledge. None of the thousands of individuals who've contributed to Wikipedia report to Wales, and yet, as a "social architect," he built a platform that energized and organized an extraordinary amount of human effort.
What, then, are the attributes of individuals who can inspire others and multiply their impact?
They are seers — individuals who are living in the future, who possess a compelling vision of "what could be." As human beings, we're constantly looking forward, and we love to sign on with individuals who are already working on "the next big thing."
They are contrarians — free of the shackles of conventional wisdom and eager to help others stage a jailbreak. It's exciting to be around these free-spirited thinkers who liberate us from the status quo and open our minds to new possibilities.
They are architects — adept at building systems that elicit contribution and facilitate collaboration. They leverage social technologies in ways that amplify dissident voices, coalesce communities of passion and unleash the forces of change.
They are mentors — rather than hoarding power, they give it away. Like Mary Parker Follett, the early 20th-century management pioneer, they believe the primary job of a leader is to create more leaders. To this end, they coach, tutor, challenge and encourage.
They are connectors — with a gift for spotting the "combinational chemistry" between ideas and individuals. They help others achieve their dreams by connecting them with sponsors, like-minded peers, and complementary resources.
They are bushwhackers — they clear the trail for new ideas and initiatives by chopping away at the undergrowth of bureaucracy. They're more committed to doing the right thing than to doing things right.
They are guardians — vigilant defenders of core values and enemies of expediency. Their unflinching commitment to a higher purpose inspires others and encourages them to stand tall for their beliefs.
They are citizens — true activists, their courage to challenge the status quo comes from their abiding commitment to doing as much good as possible for as many as possible. They are other-centered, not self-centered.
Critically, all these roles are rooted in the most potent and admirable human qualities — passion, curiosity, compassion, daring, generosity, accountability and grit. These are the qualities that attract allies and amplify accomplishments. These are the DNA strands of 21st-century leadership. Only by strengthening them can we fully unleash the latent leadership talents that reside in every organization.
That's why we have launched the Leaders Everywhere Challenge in partnership with HBR and McKinsey & Company. Tell us what your organization is doing to encourage leadership everywhere. How is it working to escape the limits of top-down power structures? What is it doing to equip and energize individuals to exercise their leadership gifts, wherever they are in the organization? How is it nurturing the sort of leaders whom others will want to follow in a post-bureaucratic world? Learn more here.
Artist Lauren Ryan creates incredible animal sculptures entirely from pipe cleaners. My favorite is her palm-sized thylacine, a Tasmanian "tiger." The last confirmed thylacine died in 1936 but some crytpozoologists think they may not be extinct after all. Lauren Ryan's "Chenille Stems" (via The Anomalist)
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In this new article in Third World Quarterly, Tobias Denskus and I analyze blog and Twitter coverage of the United Nations High-level Plenary Meeting of the General Assembly on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), a three-day event held at UN Headquarters in New York in 2010. We find that topics receiving the densest coverage mirrored existing priorities as defined by the MDGs. Although most blog entries created content which, in contrast to tweets, went beyond spreading mere factual or referential information on the event and even included some critical commentary, sustained debates did not emerge. Social media content accompanying the Summit thus reproduced global aid rituals rather than catalyzing conversations about alternative priorities for and approaches to international development. The case demonstrates that social media can serve to reinforce elite structures and discursive hegemony, which calls into doubt their recent characterization as catalysts of political change.
Community is the heart of university. Students mix with other similarly aged people in an environment ripe with social activity, friendship, ideation, and discussion. It's the most powerful element of college or graduate school — and also the most jarring to leave behind.
Social isolation often follows graduation. I know firsthand. After college, I moved to Washington, D.C., and ended up living in the suburbs near work for a year, struggling to connect with others in a new city where few friends lived nearby. And after graduate school, I moved to Atlanta, but had to commute for one year back and forth to Boston where my wife was finishing grad school — a schedule that made it nearly impossible to get involved with friends or organizations in the city I called home. During those times, I found myself unfulfilled, lonely, and restless — struggling to rediscover the community and connection I'd taken for granted the year before.
My experience is reasonably typical. The New York Times recently lamented the difficulties in making new friends as a person enters their 30s (the age at which many are leaving graduate school), largely because the three essential ingredients to forging friendship are lacking or harder to find post-university — "proximity; repeated, unplanned interactions; and a setting that encourages people to let their guard down and confide in each other." And this is exacerbated when young professionals take jobs that find them on the road three to four days per week. I've heard this time and again from my friends who are working hard but finding it difficult to forge new friendships or romantic partnerships, connect with old friends or the families they have, and give back to the communities in which they live.
This is tragic because community is so important — perhaps even more important than career. Numerous studies have shown the link between health and community or friendship — prolonging life, promoting brain health, and even influencing your weight. One study even found that only smoking is as deleterious to men's heart health as lack of social support. Research has also shown that friendship and community are key elements to happiness. And the importance of these friendships only increases with age. Family relationships are similarly important. Researchers have found a much stronger relationship between happiness and family relationships over time than between happiness and income; and 75 percent of adults consider their families to be the most important and satisfying element of their lives. Voluteering and community service also lead to happier individuals and communities alike. But all of these — family, friendship, community service — are connected to our ability to limit our working schedules and firmly plant ourselves in a place for a period of time.
So why do so many of us so consistently deprioritize these things after graduation? We simply fail to focus on it. Career success is visible and easy to define. We can measure it in raises and promotions. And it has urgency because it's what allows us to pay our bills. Community, meanwhile, is something soft and seemingly without urgency — we tell ourselves there will always be time for friendship, family, and community service just after we've mounted the next hill of career success. But this skewed prioritization — done with the best of intentions — can lead us to sadly kick important relationships, civic service, and our own happiness and well-being further and further down the road.
Author Bronnie Ware spent many years as a nurse caring for others in the last few weeks of their lives. Based on that experience, she wrote a now famous essay (and book) on her dying patients' top five regrets. All are worth a read, but two relate directly to community. Bronnie's dying patients claimed, "I wish I hadn't worked so hard" — expressing a longing to have spent more time with their spouses and children. And they coupled that with the desire to have "stayed in touch with my friends." Their sentiments were summed up perhaps even more concisely in the conclusions of a study started in 1938 which followed 267 Harvard graduates, many of whom were ambitious and professionally successful (including future president John F. Kennedy), for seventy years after college. The primary conclusion of that study? "Happiness is love. Full stop." Career is important. But community conquers all.
So, for all the new graduates out there, I won't spend time reciting the ways in which to make community — through romantic partnerships, involvement in religious or civic organizations, dedication to existing friends or carving out time to make new ones. At some level, we social human beings all know how to do those things. I'll simply offer this advice: Remember that the most powerful part of your educational experience was social. And use that knowledge to build a life after graduation that's happy, balanced, and fulfilled.
Avoiding hype, jargon and unnecessarily long words has been a constant plea on Bad Language. Using overly long words makes you sound less trustworthy and more stupid. Hyped-up marketing waffle means nothing at all.
The Up-Goer Five, built by Theo Sanderson, takes this thinking to another level. It is programmed to recognise the 1000 most common words in the English language and it challenges you to explain a complex idea using just those words. Every time you use a word that is not in that list, it flags it up as not allowed. It is a lot harder than it sounds.
I started off with a concept close to the heart of Bad Language: how to write well.
Good writing is clear, to the point, and does not use long words for no good reason. In order to write well you need to consider the person who is reading your work. How much time do they have? What do they already know? And how would you talk to them if you were talking in a coffee shop? The point is to sound relaxed and like yourself and use words that are used all the time and are easy to understand.
So that was not so hard. The idea behind it really isn’t so complex. Then I tried something a little more tricky. What is the patriarchy?
For a long time men controlled the way we lived, worked and formed ideas about things. Part of that control meant they got to decide what it meant to be a man or a woman. This meant you had to act or dress or think the right way or you would not be accepted by everyone else around you. So for women this meant that they were not able to have any say in what made them who they were.
Today although things have changed that mean women can work and have a say in how things are run, thoughts and ideas are still stuck in a made-up way of thinking about what it means to be either a man or a woman. And this means women still have to fight to have the same power and control as men.
This was really hard. And I’m not even sure I express the idea properly even after quite a while searching for simple ways to explain it.
This tool might not be the most practical aid for producing good copy, but it is a very helpful exercise in bringing you down off your verbal pedestal when your language is getting a little flowery. It also helps to highlight when a longer or more complex word really is extremely useful and appropriate. We should not be afraid to use long words when they mean exactly what we want to say. Or short ones for that matter.
The English language is vast and full of wondrous words. What Up-Goer Five really shows, I suppose, is that good writing is not about keeping individual words simple, but about breaking ideas down to their simplest parts in order to communicate them effectively.
Sometimes, it’s better to use a single word for that small stick with a black middle that leaves a mark when you rub it on things, even if it isn’t one of the 1000 most common words around.
They “speak” through their feet, some can even draw, and at least one has been hung for murder. A collection of picks about pachyderms.
[Link]I have found myself frustrated with Michael Pollan lately. In the course of promoting his new book about cooking, he's taken to spouting some opinions that I'll frankly call claptrap. He's mocked women who felt trapped by the kitchen drudgery that they got stuck with simply because they owned a vagina. He's implied that it's easy (if you're not lazy) for everyone to make every meal an ideologically sound slow-food meal. In general, he's disparaged the very idea that some people don't like to cook.
Thankfully, my personal food guru, Lynn Rosetto Kasper, is here to call shenanigans on all this nonsense. She gave a fantastic interview on NPR this afternoon, shooting down the idea that everyone would love to cook if they only tried it. In fact, says Kasper, you don't have a moral obligation to cook at all. The world needs eaters, too.
Tom Crann: What are some of the pressures, and why? Where do they come from, for people who feel pressured to cook if they're not very good at it?
Lynne Rosetto Kasper: The new food awareness that we've seen over the past decade. Here's the flip side. We cook if we are smart. We're supposed to cook to save our families and ourselves from dysfunctional, unhealthy lives. We cook to fight the obesity epidemic. We cook to save our identities, culturally, our traditions. We cook to strike out against the forces we feel are evil -- you name them. We cook because it shows how cool we are. ... the pressure today is we all should be doing this thing. And yeah, it's great to cook, it's wonderful to cook. But this is not something you take on if you really think you're going to hate it.
I think we should - if we possibly have an option -- do what we really enjoy doing. Because no matter what it is, that's what we're going to be good at.
You can read a transcript online, but it leaves out some of the discussion and I recommend listening to the audio. It's an interview of beauty. And I say that as somebody who loves to cook. The key, though, is that cooking every meal is not something I alone am solely responsible for, no matter how I'm feeling or what day it is. It's not something that takes up a large portion of my life. And it is something that I just happen to find relaxing and fun. If any of those facts weren't true, my thoughts on cooking might be very different. And it's silly to expect otherwise.
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Regrettably, the Wikipedia entry for "Citation needed" ("a common editorial remark on Wikipedia, which has become used to refer to Wikipedia in wider popular culture") doesn't include any actual assertions tagged with [citation needed].
On July 4, 2007, the webcomic xkcd published a comic which depicted a protestor holding up a "citation needed" sign during a political speech.[7]
In late 2010, banners with the template appeared at the somewhat tongue-in-cheek Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear,[8] and in February 2011, at a more serious demonstration in Berlin against German defence minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, who had been embroiled in a scandal after it was discovered he had plagiarised portions of his doctoral thesis.[9]
The New York Times has commented on the propensity of some "stickler editors" for adding the template to unattributed facts,[10] and has used the phrase in an online headline.[11]
Citation needed (via JWZ) 
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On average, the shorter your first name, the more you will earn. In fact, the data show each extra letter “costs” you about $3,600 in annual salary.
In order to test the theory that shorter names always fare better, the site tested 24 pairs of full names against nicknames to see whether Bill or William, Chris or Christopher, Debbie or Deborah would win out. And in each case, the shorter name earned more — well, with one exception: Larry vs. Lawrence. If you’re still skeptical, the site also analyzed names that are spelled differently, such as Michele vs. Michelle, Sara vs. Sarah and Philip vs. Phillip. Again, fewer letters meant higher earnings. [link]
Pat Robertson thinks that, but for the Ivy League and its intellectual snobbery, we’d have more people raised from the dead in America. He explained … why “amazing miracles … happen with great frequency in places like Africa, and not here in the USA.”
“Cause people overseas didn’t go to Ivy League schools! [chuckles] Well, we’re so sophisticated. We think we’ve got everything figured out. We know about evolution, we know about Darwin, we know about all these things that say god isn’t real….overseas they’re simple, humble, you tell them God loves them and they say “okay he loves me.” And you tell them God will do miracles and they say “okay, we believe you.” And that’s what God’s looking for. That’s why they have miracles.” [link]
