Mornings are an underutilized tool to aid productivity.

Let me explain.

We’re often at our peak in the mornings. This is why Mark McGuinness suggests the single most important change you can make to your workday is to move your creative time to mornings. We’re more mentally alert and our mental batteries are charged.

Where do we spend all of this energy? Email. Meetings. We fragment our time. This, however, isn’t the path to success. There is another way.

“Before the rest of the world is eating breakfast,” writes Laura Vanderkam in What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast “the most successful people have already scored daily victories that are advancing them toward the lives they want.”

Vanderkam studied successful people and she discovered that early mornings were when they had the most control over their own schedules. They used this time to work on their priorities.

Taking control of your mornings is very much like investing in yourself. This is how Billionaire Charlie Munger got so smart: he set aside an hour in the mornings every day just to learn.

While there are 168 hours in the week not all of them are created equally. Vanderkam writes:

People who were serious about exercise did it in the mornings. At that point, emergencies had yet to form, and they would only have to shower once. As Gordo Byrn, a triathlon coach, once told me, “There’s always a reason to skip a four o’clock workout, and it’s going to be a good reason, too.”

Most people find doing anything that requires self-discipline easier to do in the morning. The same can be said for focus.

Roy Baumeister, author of Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength, has spent more time studying willpower and self-discipline than most. In his book he highlights one famous experiment where students were asked to fast before coming into the lab. They were then put into a room with food. Specifically, radishes, chocolate chip cookies, and candy. Some of the students could eat whatever they wanted while others could only eat the radishes. After the food, they were supposed to work on “unsolvable” geometry puzzles.

The students who’d been allowed to eat chocolate chip cookies and candy typically worked on the puzzles for about twenty minutes, as did a control group of students who were also hungry but hadn’t been offered food of any kind. The sorely tempted radish eaters, though, gave up in just eight minutes— a huge difference by the standards of laboratory experiments. They’d successfully resisted the temptation of the cookies and the chocolates, but the effort left them with less energy to tackle the puzzles.

“Willpower,” Baumeister and co-author John Tierney write, “like a muscle, becomes fatigued from overuse.”

This is a problem because you don’t just have one willpower battery for work and another one for home. They are the same battery. And this bucket is used to control your thought processes and emotions. As Baumeister said in an interview:

You have one energy resource that is used for all kinds of acts (of) self-control. That includes not just resisting food temptations, but also controlling your thought processes, controlling your emotions, all forms of impulse control, and trying to perform well at your job or other tasks. Even more surprisingly, it is used for decision making, so when you make choices you are (temporarily) using up some of what you need for self-control. Hard thinking, like logical reasoning, also uses it.

Most self-control failures happen in the evening after a long day of traffic, bickering kids, pointless meetings, and other things that zap our self-control.

Baumeister continues:
“Diets are broken in the evening, not the morning. The majority of impulsive crimes are committed after 11: 00 p.m. Lapses in drug use, alcohol abuse, sexual misbehavior, gambling excesses, and the like tend to come about late in the day.”

After a good night’s sleep your battery is charged and ready to go.

In What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast, Vanderkam writes:

In these early hours, we have enough willpower and energy to tackle things that require internal motivation, things the outside world does not immediately demand or reward.

…

That’s the argument for scheduling important priorities first. But there’s more to the muscle metaphor. Muscles can be strengthened over time. A bodybuilder must work hard to develop huge biceps, but then he can go into maintenance mode and still look pretty buff. Paradoxically, with willpower, research has found that people who score high on measures of self-discipline tend not to employ this discipline when they do regular activities that would seem to require it, such as homework or getting to class or work on time. For successful people, these are no longer choices but habits.

“Getting things down to routines and habits takes willpower at first but in the long run conserves willpower,” says Baumeister. “Once things become habitual, they operate as automatic processes, which consume less willpower.”

If we learned anything from Mason Currey’s book, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, it was that routines and habits played an important role in success.

In 1887 William James wrote on Habit:

Any sequence of mental action which has been frequently repeated tends to perpetuate itself; so that we find ourselves automatically prompted to think, feel, or do what we have been before accustomed to think, feel, or do, under like circumstances, without any consciously formed purpose, or anticipation of results. … The great thing, then, in all education, is to make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and to guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous to us, as we should guard against the plague.

As Tierney and Baumeister write in Willpower, “Ultimately, self-control lets you relax because it removes stress and enables you to conserve willpower for the important challenges.”

So what are the best morning habits?

Vanderkam writes in What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast:

The best morning rituals are activities that don’t have to happen and certainly don’t have to happen at a specific hour. These are activities that require internal motivation. The payoff isn’t as immediate as the easy pleasure of watching television or answering an email that doesn’t require an immediate response, but there are still payoffs. The best morning rituals are activities that, when practiced regularly, result in long-term benefits. The most successful people use their mornings for these things:

1. Nurturing their careers—strategizing and focused work
2. Nurturing their relationships—giving their families and friends their best
3. Nurturing themselves—exercise and spiritual and creative practices

Nurturing careers
The reason people do work requiring focus early in the day is the lack of interruptions. Once the day gets going, everyone wants a slice of your time.

You can crank things out; novelist Anthony Trollope famously wrote, without fail, for a few hours each morning. Charlotte Walker-Said, a history postdoc at the University of Chicago, uses the hours between 6: 00 and 9: 00 a.m. each day to work on a book on the history of religious politics in West Africa. She can read journal articles and write pages before dealing with her teaching responsibilities. “Once you start looking at email, the whole day cascades into email responses and replying back and forth,” she says. These early-morning hours are key to managing her stress in a suboptimal academic job market. “Every day I have a job,” she says. But “in the morning, I think I have a career.” She’s on to something; one study of young professors found that those who wrote a little bit every day were more likely to make tenure than those who wrote in bursts of intense energy (and put it off the rest of the time).

Nurturing relationships
One of the secrets to happy families is that mealtime with family matters.

This idea of using mornings as positive family time really stuck with me as I looked at my own life. While my kids tend to get up later, many small children wake up at the crack of dawn. So if you work outside the home and don’t see your kids during the day, why not take advantage of this? You can keep your eyes constantly focused on the clock, as I have a tendency to do, or you can set an alarm to give yourself a fifteen -minute warning, and then just relax. People always pontificate about how important family dinner is, but this is just not a reality in families with young kids who want to eat at 5: 30 or 6: 00 p.m., especially if one or both parents works later hours. But there’s nothing magical about dinner. Indeed, if the research on willpower is to be believed, we’re more crabby at dinner than we are at breakfast. Family breakfasts —when treated as relaxed, fun affairs— are a great substitute for the evening meal.

Nurturing yourself
The general sentiment here is that everyone else is sleeping so you’re not missing out on something important and you can spend time taking care of yourself, which generally leads to a positive impact on your productivity throughout the day.

In What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast Vanderkam suggests making over your mornings by tracking your time, picturing the perfect morning, thinking through the logistics, building a habit, developing a feedback loop and tuning up as necessary.

Shawn Achor, author of The Happiness Advantage and a self-proclaimed night owl, taught himself to appreciate mornings by thinking about the positive.

“The reason we stay in bed in the morning is because our brains get fatigued by thinking about all the things we have to do that day. We’re thinking about tasks rather than things that are making us happy,” he says. But the reverse of that is also true. “If you’re thinking about things you’re looking forward to, that makes it easy to get out of bed. What your brain focuses on becomes your reality.”

— Brought to you by: CURIOSITY — A curiously unconventional ad agency that helps you stand out in today’s crowded world.

Richest 85 boast same wealth as half the world:



'via Blog this'

More here.

Stockmarket capitalisations compared

Investors love the promise of high returns from emerging-market equities, but there are not many of them to buy, especially if you exclude stakes held by governments.

Our map matches the value of entire countries’ listed firms to individual western companies.

http://qz.com/165716/how-i-made-sure-all-12-of-my-kids-could-pay-for-college-themselves/


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That is the forthcoming book by Megan McArdle and the subtitle is Why Failing Well is the Key to Success.  I think this book will be a big deal.  It is extremely well written, engages the reader, is based upon entirely fresh anecdotes and research results, and develops an important point.  I look forward to seeing it make its mark.

http://www.psmag.com/navigation/health-and-behavior/sure-im-behind-bars-im-still-morally-superior-72363/


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Apple's App Store did $10 billion in gross revenue last year. Of that, Apple keeps $3 billion and the rest goes to developers. 

To put that big number in context, we've charted out the growth of App Store revenue versus mobile ad revenue, using data from BI Intelligence.

The overall mobile ad market is bigger, but not by much — $15 billion versus Apple's $10 billion in App Sales last year. But if you drill down, the non-search part of the mobile ad market is $7 billion. That's exactly the same as what Apple is paying out to developers. 

This is good for Apple as it wants to keep developers on its platform. It can say that it is paying out $7 billion in sales to developers. Presumably, they can make a decent amount through ads, as well. This keeps them on iOS, despite it having a smaller share of the overall smartphone market than Android.

Join the conversation about this story »

Click here to read my column in Sunday's NY Times.

Interesting take on the economics behind Bitcoin. At the heart is a quote from this article:

Underpinning the value of gold is that if all else fails you can use it to make pretty things. Underpinning the value of the dollar is a combination of (a) the fact that you can use them to pay your taxes to the U.S. government, and (b) that the Federal Reserve is a potential dollar sink and has promised to buy them back and extinguish them if their real value starts to sink at (much) more than 2%/year (yes, I know).

∞ Read this on The Loop

“Few things are as important to your quality of life as your choices about
how to spend the precious resource of your free time.”
— W. Gallagher in Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life

“[W]e’re surrounded by so much information that is of immediate interest to us
that we feel overwhelmed by the neverending pressure of trying to keep up with it all.”
— Nicolas Carr

Take a look at the media you’re consuming. There is so much noise. And no matter how many times I click, open a new tab, or check my email the pile of “interesting” information doesn’t seem to shrink.

I’m working harder and harder but not moving ahead. People can create clickbait faster than I can consume it.

As we approach 2014, I’ve been giving my media consumption some thinking. Maybe I’ve been trying to do too much. How many open tabs can one person honestly read, connect, consolidate, and retain anyway? And how many of those tabs are noise?

We tend to just add things and never take things away. There are always more people to follow on Twitter. More people to ‘friend’ on Facebook. More periodicals to read. More blogs to subscribe to. More news to watch. More … more … more …

But what are we so worried about?

Are we really going to miss a major news event? No. Unless we pack up and move to the mountains major news will find us. So is it that we’re worried about not finding out in real-time? Who cares if you find out in the first minute that Nelson Mandela has died. What matters is that he’s gone. Whether it takes you 30 seconds to find out or a day, the loss is the same.

But we need to know. And, more than ever, we need to know in real time. It’s like we’re in a race with our friends to see who of us can find out news first and share it in our circle first.

Well, that’s a race I don’t want to win.

It’s not just news. It’s the rebirth of Yellow Journalism, where everyone wants to stir emotion more than inform. Everyone wants your eyes and, more importantly, your clicks. Traffic matters. And every day the competition for our attention starts all over again. It’s toxic to us.

But is any of that making us smarter, furthering our relationships, or giving us real pleasure? I don’t think so.

The more we consume, that is the more noise we let in, the harder it becomes to find signal. And if we are what we consume, I want to make sure my brain is not getting the (mental) equivalent of too much sugar.

So my plan for 2014 is to clean my mind a bit by consuming less internet and more books. In addition to that, I want to reflect more about what I don’t want to consume. More is not better.

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients.
Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention,  and a need to allocate that attention
efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.
— Herbert Simon

Newspapers

In July 2013 I stopped reading newspapers. News is toxic to the mind.

“To be completely cured of newspapers,
spend a year reading the previous week’s newspapers.”
— Nassim Taleb in Bed of Procrustes

Why? The ratio of signal to noise in papers is too low. We end up misinterpreting noise for signal.

We’re all worried about missing out but if something important is going on, trust me it will find its way to you.

Periodicals

I subscribe to The Economist and The New York Review of Books.

A friend of mine, who reads as much if not more than I do, has a simple rule for periodicals: Either it gets read by the end of the following day or it get chucked. This keeps them from building up.

The added bonus is that if you find yourself throwing away the same thing too often, you know exactly what to unsubscribe to.

Social Media

Twitter
On Twitter, for example, I follow only the number of people I can really get through in 10 minutes of looking at everyone’s tweets. For me this is about 160-170 people.

So my rule is that If I’m at 160 and I want to add someone that means I have to remove someone. It isn’t so much that 160 is a hard limit but rather that this rule acts as a trigger to make me consider adding someone.

Within that 160, I try to also ensure that I have a lot of different politics and ideologies. Occasionally I’ll rotate people in and out to shake up my thinking.

Facebook
I don’t have a Facebook account, only a fanpage. Given the management overhead associated with that page and the low traffic flow through as a result of the business model changes at Facebook, I’m even considering getting rid of that.

It seems old school but if I want to know what my friends are up to, I’ll ask them.

In short, follow only those who consistently deliver value to you. Be ruthless.

Television

Just cut the cord. Put the time you were spending watching TV into reading and building your relationships.

Email

If your inbox is like mine it’s probably full of junk. I’ve been doing something about that recently.

All those emails that companies send you that you never asked for. I’m unsubscribing or marking them as spam. That only makes a small, yet meaningful dent.

And most importantly, I’m cutting back on the number of emails I send. Why? Because the more emails I send the more emails I get. Another tip I follow is to only check it certain times of day.

Phones

I know phones are not really media but I can’t help myself.

Much to my mother’s dismay, my home phone is set up to almost always go right to voicemail. She can call my cell if it’s an emergency but she never does. (Love you mom.)

I have a cell phone. But I use it differently than most people.

First, only a few people have my cell number. I don’t spend my day texting, sexting, or snapchatting.

Second, I use my cell primarily as a productivity enhancement: to send emails or read.

What about the apps?
When the app for linkedin started going crazy with alerts, I deleted it. Too much noise.

Blogs

This goes for me too.

Commenting on this post a friend of mine said “Aren’t you worried about people unsubscribing from Farnam Street?”

I’m not.

Your attention is valuable. I know this and I work hard to earn it.

If I’m not adding value to your life on a consistent basis, you should unsubscribe. Although the paradox is that if you unsubscribe you’ve just proven that I am adding value.

— Brought to you by: CURIOSITY — A curiously unconventional ad agency that helps you stand out in today’s crowded world.

I'm listening to How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life in my car and am really enjoying it. I found some quotes from the book via Derek Sivers and thought I'd share a few below. There are many more HERE.

Failure always brings something valuable with it. I don’t let it leave until I extract that value. 

Never make a loan to someone who is following his passion. He’s in business for the wrong reason. The best loan customer is one who has no passion whatsoever, just a desire to work hard at something that looks good on a spreadsheet.

It’s easy to be passionate about things that are working out, but they drain your passion as they fail. 

In hindsight, it looks as if the projects I was most passionate about were also the ones that worked. But objectively, my passion level moved with my success. Success caused passion more than passion caused success.

Have a system instead of a goal. Systems-driven people have found a way to look at the familiar in new and more useful ways. 

Running a marathon in under four hours is a goal, but exercising daily is a system.

A system is something you do on a regular basis that increases your odds of happiness in the long run. If you do something every day, it’s a system. If you’re waiting to achieve it someday in the future, it’s a goal.

Buying lottery tickets is not a system no matter how regularly you do it. 

The world offers so many alternatives that you need a quick filter to eliminate some options and pay attention to others. Whatever your plan, focus is always important.

If you want success, figure out the price, then pay it. It sounds trivial and obvious, but if you unpack the idea it has extraordinary power. 

Success has a price, but the price is negotiable. If you pick the right system, the price will be a lot nearer what you’re willing to pay.

If you learn to appreciate the power of systems over goals, it might lower the price of success just enough to make it worth a go.

Pocket readers pick their top hits from 2013 on Farnam Street.

1. The Buffett Formula — How To Get Smarter (this was the #3rd most saved and shared article on pocket in 2013.)

2. What can we learn from the science of high performance?

3. The Unwritten Rules of Management

4. The Tyranny of Email — 10 Tips to Save You

5. The Secrets of Happy Families

6. How You Climb A Mountain Is More Important Than Reaching The Top

7. Peak Listening — A Simple Trick You Can Apply Today

8. Warren Buffett: The three things I look for in a person

9. Improve Your Life by Paying Attention

10. Create A Happy Life in 15 Minutes or Less – Starting Now!

— Brought to you by: CURIOSITY — A curiously unconventional ad agency that helps you stand out in today’s crowded world.

moneyisnotimportant:

Stephen has a way of being funny while hitting you in the gut at the same time.

I think Alexis Madrigal has solved the mystery of the amazing telemarketing robot that called a Time reporter last week.

Update: Madrigal has written a feature-length follow-up, “Almost Human: The Surreal, Cyborg Future of Telemarketing”, and it’s a gripping read. It’s amazing to me how a system that could have only existed in science fiction a decade ago can come to life, yet seem so extraordinarily mundane.

Scott Adams, the famous creator of Dilbert, has made a very good living by understanding and revealing human psychology.

In How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, Adams shares “the strategy he has used since he was a teen to invite failure in, embrace it, then pick its pocket.”

Among the unlikely truths he offers, you’ll discover that goals are for losers, passion is bullshit, and mediocre skills can make you valuable.

This is a story of one person’s unlikely success within the context of scores of embarrassing failures. Was my eventual success primarily a result of talent, luck, hard work, or an accidental just-right balance of each? All I know for sure is that I pursued a conscious strategy of managing my opportunities in a way that would make it easier for luck to find me.

Similar to the 10 things I took away from reading The Everything Store, here are 10 things I took away ‘from the Adams book.’

1. Do creative work first.
In the morning he is a creator, in the afternoon he’s a copier. Mindless tasks go later in the day. This is the single biggest change you can make in order to improve your odds of success.

The way I approach the problem of multiple priorities is by focusing on just one main metric: my energy. I make choices that maximize my personal energy because that makes it easier to manage all of the other priorities.

One of the most important tricks for maximizing your productivity involves matching your mental state to the task.

Mark McGuinness writes the same thing in Manage Your Day-to-Day.

2. Expecting people to use reason sets you up for frustration.
This sounds like you or someone you know. Trust me.

If your view of the world is that people use reason for their important decisions, you are setting yourself up for a life of frustration and confusion. You’ll find yourself continually debating people and never winning except in your own mind. Few things are as destructive and limiting as a worldview that assumes people are mostly rational.

3. The most important form of selfishness.
We’re taught that being selfish is bad but it all depends on how you look at it. Being selfish can be good.

The most important form of selfishness involves spending time on your fitness, eating right, pursuing your career, and still spending quality time with your family and friends.

You can’t be generous to others if you’re not in a good place. Adams argues that once your needs are met you can focus on the needs of others.

4. Witholding praise is immoral.
While I’ve long thought that organizational feedback systems were broken, I had never really thought about it in this way before.

Children are accustomed to a continual stream of criticisms and praise, but adults can go weeks without a compliment while enduring criticism both at work and at home. Adults are starved for a kind word. When you understand the power of honest praise (as opposed to bullshitting, flattery, and sucking up), you realize that withholding it borders on immoral. If you see something that impresses you, a decent respect to humanity insists you voice your praise.

5. Why to read the news.
As a long time subscriber to the physical newspaper, I cut the cord in July 2013. I’ll have more to say on this later but I like reading other people’s reasoning for reading or not reading papers. Some people argue we’re heading back to Yellow Journalism, a time when papers try to get attention however they can. Others argue it’s a waste of time. Adams argues that it broadens his exposure.

I don’t read the news to find truth, as that would be a foolish waste of time. I read the news to broaden my exposure to new topics and patterns that make my brain more efficient in general and to enjoy myself, because learning interesting things increases my energy and makes me feel optimistic.

6. Fake it till you make it.
Another manifestation of what we think influences what we do but what we do influences what we think. This is, at its core, the finding of the Stanford prison experiment.

[W]e are designed to become in reality however we act. We fake it until it becomes real. Our core personality doesn’t change, but we quickly adopt the mannerisms and skills associated with our new status and position.

In addition to this, we see ourselves as part of a new group and accordingly identify ourselves “with the other members and take on some of the characteristics of the group.” This is one of the reasons why sometimes people change when they get promoted.

This is also why if you’re having a crappy day, you should find some reason to smile. It actually does make you happier.

7. Change your mind.

The ability to change your mind is probably one of the best life skills you can ever hope to develop.

[Y]ou shouldn’t hesitate to modify your perceptions to whatever makes you happy, because you’re probably wrong about the underlying nature of reality anyway.

8. Systems trump goals.

This was fascinating. I’ve long thought that the balance of organizational thinking towards goals versus systems is in need of some reflection.

Adams has looked for examples of people who use systems versus those who use goals. In most cases, he’s discovered that people using systems do better and they are more innovative. “The systems-driven people have found a way to look at the familiar in new and more useful ways,” he says in the WSJ.

If you do something every day, it’s a system. If you’re waiting to achieve it someday in the future, it’s a goal.

…

[O]ne should have a system instead of a goal. The system-versus-goals model can be applied to most human endeavours. In the world of dieting, losing twenty pounds is a goal, but eating right is a system. In the exercise realm, running a marathon in under four hours is a goal, but exercising daily is a system. In business, making a million dollars is a goal, but being a serial entrepreneur is a system.

…

Goal-oriented people exist in a state of continuous pre-success failure at best, and permanent failure at worst if things never work out. Systems people succeed every time they apply their systems, in the sense that they did what they intended to do. The goals people are fighting the feeling of discouragement at each turn. The systems people are feeling good every time they apply their system. That’s a big difference in terms of maintaining your personal energy in the right direction. …

Goal-oriented people mostly fail. If your goal is to lose 20 pounds, you will constantly think that you are not at your goal until you reach it. If you fall short you’re still a failure. The only way to reach your goal is to lose the 20 pounds. It’s a state of near perpetual failure.

What you really want is a system that increases your odds of success. Even if that system only improves the odds a little it adds up over a long life. In organizations this means, for example, you should care more about the process by which you make decisions than analysis. It also means that you should focus on building a system that evolves, improves, and survives ego. Systems increase the odds of getting lucky. Or, if you want to put it another way, they reduce stupidity.

Goal seekers optimize whereas systems thinkers simplify.

9. Understanding psychology matters.
Understanding psychology is key. This is why Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion is one of the books I think everyone should read before they turn 30.

On a scale of one to ten, the importance of understanding psychology is a solid ten.

10. Consider how you look

Realistically, most people have poor filters for sorting truth from fiction, and there’s no objective way to know if you’re particularly good at it or not. Consider the people who routinely disagree with you. See how confident they look while being dead wrong? That’s exactly how you look to them.

How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big warrants a look.

— Brought to you by: The Suddes Group -- Changing the way nonprofits think, operate and fund.

I was somewhat surprised by these numbers:

Fifty-three percent of the uninsured disapprove of the law, the poll found, compared with 51 percent of those who have health coverage. A third of the uninsured say the law will help them personally, but about the same number think it will hurt them, with cost a leading concern.

I wonder if any of this poll was conducted in Spanish, and if not whether that would have changed the results.  I found this interesting too:

Of the uninsured who said they were not likely to sign up by the deadline, fully half said it was because of the high cost. Twenty-nine percent said they planned to go without coverage because they object to the government’s requiring it, and 11 percent said they did not need health insurance.

And this:

Seventy-seven percent of the uninsured said they disapproved of the mandate, compared with 65 percent of those who already have health insurance.

That is the new and very good David Brooks column about Average is Over.  Here is one excerpt:

So our challenge for the day is to think of exactly which mental abilities complement mechanized intelligence. Off the top of my head, I can think of a few mental types that will probably thrive in the years ahead.

…Synthesizers. The computerized world presents us with a surplus of information. The synthesizer has the capacity to surf through vast amounts of online data and crystallize a generalized pattern or story.

Humanizers. People evolved to relate to people. Humanizers take the interplay between man and machine and make it feel more natural. Steve Jobs did this by making each Apple product feel like nontechnological artifact. Someday a genius is going to take customer service phone trees and make them more human. Someday a retail genius is going to figure out where customers probably want automated checkout (the drugstore) and where they want the longer human interaction (the grocery store).

…Motivators. Millions of people begin online courses, but very few actually finish them. I suspect that’s because most students are not motivated to impress a computer the way they may be motivated to impress a human professor. Managers who can motivate supreme effort in a machine-dominated environment are going to be valuable.

Do read the whole thing.

Gorgeous portraits.

Google's latest high-profile acquisition is raising eyebrows worldwide, as the search giant has bought a Boston-based robotics company that specializes in lifelike walking machines built for military projects -- creations that have proven extremely popular in online videos.

This is comedy gold. A telemarketer called a Times reported trying to get him to sign up for health insurance. He sniffs out that she appears to be software driven (as opposed to a human reading from a complex script) and sets out to prove this.

∞ Read this on The Loop

Eye-opening investigative report by Alan Schwarz for the NYT:

After more than 50 years leading the fight to legitimize attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, Keith Conners could be celebrating.

Severely hyperactive and impulsive children, once shunned as bad seeds, are now recognized as having a real neurological problem. Doctors and parents have largely accepted drugs like Adderall and Concerta to temper the traits of classic A.D.H.D., helping youngsters succeed in school and beyond.

But Dr. Conners did not feel triumphant this fall as he addressed a group of fellow A.D.H.D. specialists in Washington. He noted that recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that the diagnosis had been made in 15 percent of high school-age children, and that the number of children on medication for the disorder had soared to 3.5 million from 600,000 in 1990. He questioned the rising rates of diagnosis and called them “a national disaster of dangerous proportions.”

“The numbers make it look like an epidemic. Well, it’s not. It’s preposterous,” Dr. Conners, a psychologist and professor emeritus at Duke University, said in a subsequent interview. “This is a concoction to justify the giving out of medication at unprecedented and unjustifiable levels.”

They are mostly in the Midwest, some South Carolina too.

For the pointer I thank Craig Richardson.

A year ago I wrote a post on the returns to negative enterprise value stocks. Zero Hedge screened Russell 2000 companies finding 10 companies with negative enterprise value, and then further subdivided the screen into companies with negative, and positive free cash flow (defined here as EBITDA – Cap Ex). Here’s the list (click to […]

We’re excited to announce that starred items are now live in The Old Reader.  This has been one of the most requested features and something we’ve felt belongs in the application for a long time.  Hotkey (f) and API support are also available.  Starred items will automatically be sent to pocket for users that have it activated.

As most of you know, our focus over the past few months was to increase performance and stability of The Old Reader.  We’ve made tremendous strides and can now focus on adding functionality and making this tool a long-term sustainable platform built for the Open Web.  The best is yet to come.

Thanks for using The Old Reader!

(www.catgifs.org/2013/09/07/cat-surprised-cat-animated-gif/)

From Nassim Taleb, in Antifragile:

"The psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has a simple heuristic. Never ask the doctor what you should do. Ask him what he would do if he were in your place. You would be surprised at the difference."

Burkhard Bilger got inside the secretive Google X lab and reports back on the search giant's effort to build a self-driving car.

The Google car has now driven more than half a million miles without causing an accident-about twice as far as the average American driver goes before crashing. Of course, the computer has always had a human driver to take over in tight spots. Left to its own devices, Thrun says, it could go only about fifty thousand miles on freeways without a major mistake. Google calls this the dog-food stage: not quite fit for human consumption. "The risk is too high," Thrun says. "You would never accept it." The car has trouble in the rain, for instance, when its lasers bounce off shiny surfaces. (The first drops call forth a small icon of a cloud onscreen and a voice warning that auto-drive will soon disengage.) It can't tell wet concrete from dry or fresh asphalt from firm. It can't hear a traffic cop's whistle or follow hand signals.

And yet, for each of its failings, the car has a corresponding strength. It never gets drowsy or distracted, never wonders who has the right-of-way. It knows every turn, tree, and streetlight ahead in precise, three-dimensional detail. Dolgov was riding through a wooded area one night when the car suddenly slowed to a crawl. "I was thinking, What the hell? It must be a bug," he told me. "Then we noticed the deer walking along the shoulder." The car, unlike its riders, could see in the dark. Within a year, Thrun added, it should be safe for a hundred thousand miles.

America's legal system will make it difficult for self-driving cars to be accepted here...while not a legal kerfuffle yet, see Tesla's current difficulties w/r/t fire risk in electric cars for a taste of what's to come with self-driving cars. Europe is more likely...someplace like Holland or Denmark. They take their public and personal transportation seriously over there.

Tags: Burkhard Bilger   cars   driverless cars   Google