Scott McCloud (Understanding Comics) has a more interesting family history than I realized. He opens his TED Talk with a sad story about solar eclipses:
Scott McCloud and Solar Eclipses
Friday, March 13th, 2015Workforce Science
Friday, March 13th, 2015Michael Housman, chief analytics officer for Evolv, discusses workforce science with Stephen Dubner (Think Like a Freak):
We looked specifically at pay in a research study that we just finished. We found, there is no question that pay enables people to stay longer, and they perform better. But the magnitude of the effects were actually not as big as we had expected. So for every 10 percent increase in pay, there’s a 5 percent reduction in quitting behavior. So it’s a less than one-for-one offset. And what’s more, is that when someone receives a raise, there are kind of these warm fuzzies that are associated with receiving the raise. There’s this halo effect. We found that that effect lasts longer than a week, but not as long as a month.
[...]
Your supervisor alone accounts for about as much variance in terms of longevity in these roles as everything else combined. The effects are staggering. Anecdotally, this seems to resonate with people because everyone has had a bad boss that made them leave the job. And we’ve really made understanding that supervisor/employee relationship a priority of ours because I came into this thinking that it was all about raw talent. You get the right person in the job and everything will work itself out, and that’s really the key decision. Our research has actually show that that’s actually a relatively small piece of the pie, something in the range of 10 to 15 percent.
[...]
What we found was that people who said they were honest actually were 33 percent more likely to be terminated for policy violations. So, learned our lesson, which is you don’t ask people if they’re honest because you tend not to get an honest answer.
[...]
We came up with a very creative way of measuring what we think is honesty and integrity, which is that we asked them upfront, early in the assessment, how are your computer skills, what’s your typing speed, do you feel comfortable with the keyboard and mouse, toggling between the screen and so on and so forth. And then guess what? About five or six screens later we tested them. We asked them what’s the shortcut for cutting and pasting text using a word processor. We actually measured their typing speed and accuracy. And what we found when we compared their self-assessed responses to their actual technical proficiency is that there were two groups of people that came out. One group was relatively honest. They were what they said they were in terms of the technical skills. And the other group we will call a little bit creative in that they claimed to be exceptional with the keyboard and mouse, but they couldn’t type more than 10 words a minute.
Evolv found that the honest employees tested better on just about every performance metric — except sales.
The Disco Song
Thursday, March 12th, 2015In the summer of 1974, Chris Stein wrote a song with the catchy feel of “Rock the Boat”. Debbie Harry wrote some lyrics about falling in and out of love and threw in a 1960s R&B girl group-style “Ooo-ooo, ohhh-oh” fill when they started performing the song at CBGB. This became the disco song, which became Blondie’s first hit — but only after Mike Chapman produced it:
Mr. Stein: Originally, Debbie’s second line of the song was, “Soon turned out, he was a pain in the ass.” Mike thought that might not play well on the radio, so I threw out a phrase, “heart of glass,” which everyone liked. Debbie worked it in as “Soon turned out, had a heart of glass.” That’s the title we used on the song.
Mr. Chapman: I asked Debbie which singer she liked most in the music business. She said, “Donna Summer,” particularly on “I Feel Love.” I never expected that. I said to her and Chris, “Why don’t we give this song a Giorgio Moroder feel?” Giorgio had produced Donna’s great albums.
Cool Brick
Thursday, March 12th, 2015The cool brick was inspired by the Muscatese evaporative cooling window, which combines a wood screen, or mashrabiya, and a ceramic vessel filled with water, to passively cool interiors in desert environments:
Comprised of 3D printed porous ceramic bricks set in mortar, each brick absorbs water like a sponge and is designed as a three dimensional lattice that allows air to pass through the wall. As air moves through the 3D printed brick, the water that is held in the micro-pores of the ceramic evaporates, bringing cool air into an interior environment, lowering the temperature using the principle of evaporative cooling.
The bricks are modular and interlocking, and can be stacked together to make a screen. The 3D lattice creates a strong bond when set in mortar. The shape of the brick also creates a shaded surface on the wall to keep a large percentage of the wall’s surface cool and protected from the sun to improve the wall’s performance.
Orca Matriarchs
Wednesday, March 11th, 2015Female orcas (killer whales) live into their nineties, even though they typically stop breeding at 40. Males only live to 50:
The only other species known to go through a menopause and live so long without reproducing are humans and short-finned pilot whales.
Croft and colleagues watched 750 hours of video of orca family pods. Over 100 individually recognisable orcas were filmed in the coastal Pacific waters off British Columbia and Washington since 1976.
The team found that post-menopausal females were 32 and 57 per cent more likely than non-menopausal adult females or adult males respectively to lead the group. They were also significantly more likely to lead the group in years when their staple food – chinook salmon – was in short supply.
“It’s probably accumulated experience,” says Croft. “Anyone who fishes for migratory trout or salmon will tell you that timing is key, that the fish return in particular cycles of tides and times of the year. Post-menopausal females probably get to know where to look and when.”
[...]
In most known animal species, males rapidly leave their parents, becoming completely independent. Male and female orcas, by contrast, stay in a family unit for life, with the males occasionally exchanging pods temporarily to breed. The upshot, says Croft, is that if females survive for many decades, breeding for the first three or four, their pod becomes increasingly replete with their descendants. Therefore, it becomes more and more in their own interests to safeguard the survival of the pod, and thereby their own genetic legacy.
“There’s a tipping point where they stop reproducing and help their offspring instead, as do grandmothers in the human context,” says Croft.
The findings seem to support the “grandmother hypothesis”, the idea that older women in hunter-gatherer communities evolved to go through the menopause so that they could carry on passing on their wisdom and experience about food sources and other survival tips without the added costs of having more children themselves.
At Their Meets, the Audience Flips, Too
Wednesday, March 11th, 2015Utah’s women’s gymnastics team has the highest average attendance in women’s college sports — and in pro sports, too:
The gymnastics team, ranked fourth this season, is averaging 14,682 through four meets. That is on pace to break the team record of 14,376 last year, when only 18 Division I men’s basketball teams regularly played in front of bigger crowds. (Utah was not one of them, and will not be again this year, despite a resurgence to national title contender.)
Plenty of other fans watch from home. Women’s gymnastics meets are, on average, the third most-viewed events on the Pac-12 Network, behind football and men’s basketball.
“And it’s not a distant third, either,” the network vice president Kirk Reynolds said. “It’s right in there with men’s basketball.”
[...]
And if Utah can sell 7,500 season tickets (ranging from $30 to $120), attract 15,000 fans to a two-hour meet, and essentially break even financially, why don’t more universities do the same thing?
Utah, like many other universities, was looking to fill a quota, not seats, in 1975, when it hired a former college diver to coach its women’s gymnastics team:
Marsden, who was paid $1,500, posted fliers around campus looking for would-be gymnasts. At the end of the first season, in 1976, Utah finished 10th in the country. Marsden saw opportunity.
[...]
“No one is going to care as much about your program as you are,” Greg Marsden said. “You can’t abdicate that responsibility.”
Which is why Marsden, now 64 and in his 40th season, still designs the team leotards, down to the placement of every sparkle. And why he knows where every outlet is in the team’s 18,000-square-foot practice facility, and the reason it was placed there.
And why, in the middle of Saturday’s meet with No. 16 Stanford, Marsden walked over to the Utah marketing director Jennifer White and whispered in her ear. He was annoyed that a scoreboard was not working properly. Even while coaching, he was concerned with marketing.
“It was his formula that turned this into an attendance dynasty,” said White, who is in her sixth year.
Marsden’s mantra is unchanged: Create a fast-moving event with no lulls, keep the audience informed of the score and let fans know that their enthusiasm creates an advantage. (Utah’s all-time home record is 431-26.)
The marketing model mirrors the N.B.A.’s. Utah’s gymnasts — nicknamed the Red Rocks, from a marketing campaign 20 years ago that stuck — are introduced with pyrotechnics, dramatic lighting and bass-heavy video production. (Among the introductory boasts: the nation’s leading grade-point average.)
Performances, done one at a time so the crowd’s attention is focused, move from one to another with little lag time. The warm-up minutes between the four events (vault, bars, beam and floor) are filled with contests on the floor and attention-grabbers on the video board. There are cheerleaders, a pep band and a student section.
[...]
“With how dialed in they are, and how structured their meets are, it’s almost like they were waiting for television to arrive,” said Will O’Toole, coordinating producer for the Pac-12 Network. “And that scene, with 15,000 people, the pyrotechnics, the video — I thought I was at a Knicks game.”
Marsden’s quest to streamline the meets has not always endeared him to other coaches. Utah is the only program to reach the national championships every year of its existence, but it frustrates Marsden that the finals are called the Super Six. He has argued that four teams, rotating through four events, would be much easier to follow for fans and better for television. The national championships will be shown live only on ESPN3, the network’s online platform, and will attract a far smaller audience than the likes of Utah see each week.
And why, Marsden wondered, do six gymnasts perform each event, if only the top five scores count? Make every routine matter, he said.
“A lot of sports have done what they can to make their events more friendly,” he said, citing basketball’s adoption of shot clocks and 3-point lines as an example. “Ours has not done that.”
[...]
Utah gymnastics, with a $750,000 budget, breaks even, the university said, thanks mostly to arena revenues from its meets and booster contributions that cover the 12 scholarships.
Steve Sailer notes that the biggest draw in women’s college sports is one where the girls don’t do what they boys do.
Not the Droids You Were Looking For
Tuesday, March 10th, 2015While discussing cyber vulnerabilities in Star Wars, Jon Jeckell explains the limited role of droids:
Perhaps the marginal role and oddly circumscribed capabilities of computers and droids in Star Wars indicates past, even multiple past tragedies with artificially intelligent systems.
There’s evidence of this with killer robot and bounty hunter IG-88, allegedly a leftover from a smoldering droid/AI uprising. Although droids are capable of complex reasoning, tasks, and even emotion, their capabilities seem strangely circumscribed in many ways. R2D2 and C3PO are capable of fully autonomous action, complex reasoning and performing wide ranges of tasks, including many they were never designed to perform. Yet the first generation of Battle Droids fielded by the Separatists were kept under tight central control. They completely shut down in the middle of battle after Anakin Skywalker destroyed the central control ship. Later generations of Separatist war droids operated independently, but demonstrated severely constrained levels of intelligence compared with even the childlike intelligence of R2D2 and C3PO.
There is also a palpable disdain and distrust for droids, particularly in the aftermath of the Clone Wars. Written records cryptically mention that it is standard practice to wipe droid memory regularly. We know this only because Luke Skywalker insisted on making R2D2 an exception from this practice. This may also explain the ancillary role computers are given in operating ships and reveal why ships and fighters have such abysmally poor weapons targeting despite the power of computers and sensors.
Hunting with Wolves
Tuesday, March 10th, 2015Modern humans formed an alliance with wolves soon after entering Europe:
We tamed some and the dogs we bred from them were then used to chase prey and to drive off rival carnivores, including lions and leopards, that tried to steal the meat.
“Early wolf-dogs would have tracked and harassed animals like elk and bison and would have hounded them until they tired,” said Shipman. “Then humans would have killed them with spears or bows and arrows.
“This meant the dogs did not need to approach these large cornered animals to finish them off — often the most dangerous part of a hunt — while humans didn’t have to expend energy in tracking and wearing down prey. Dogs would have done that. Then we shared the meat. It was a win-win situation.”
At that time, the European landscape was dominated by mammoths, rhinos, bison and several other large herbivores. Both Neanderthals and modern humans hunted them with spears and possibly bows and arrows. It would have been a tricky business made worse by competition from lions, leopards, hyenas, and other carnivores, including wolves.
“Even if you brought down a bison, within minutes other carnivores would have been lining up to attack you and steal your prey,” said Shipman. The answer, she argues, was the creation of the human-wolf alliance. Previously they separately hunted the same creatures, with mixed results. Once they joined forces, they dominated the food chain in prehistoric Europe — though this success came at a price for other species. First Neanderthals disappeared to be followed by lions, mammoths, hyenas and bison over the succeeding millennia. Humans and hunting dogs were, and still are, a deadly combination, says Shipman.
Humans slowly changed wolves into dogs, but humans may have changed to:
Consider the whites of our eyes, she states. The wolf possesses white sclera as does Homo sapiens though, crucially, it is the only primate that has them.
“The main advantage of having white sclera is that it is very easy to work out what another person is gazing at,” added Shipman. “It provides a very useful form of non-verbal communication and would have been of immense help to early hunters. They would been able to communicate silently but very effectively.”
Thus the mutation conferring white sclera could have become increasingly common among modern humans 40,000 years ago and would have conferred an advantage on those who were hunting with dogs.
(Hat tip to HBD Chick.)
On Higher Consciousness
Tuesday, March 10th, 2015The way spiritual people discuss higher consciousness puts most secular types on edge, but the idea isn’t crazy:
Ordinary life rewards practical, unintrospective, self-justifying outlooks that are the hallmarks of what we could call ‘lower’ consciousness. Neuroscientists speak of a ‘lower’ part of the brain they term the reptilian mind and tell us that under its sway, we strike back when we’re hit, blame others, quell any stray questions that lack immediate relevance, fail to free-associate and stick closely to a flattering image of who we are and where we are headed.
However, at rare moments, when there are no threats or demands upon us, perhaps late at night or early in the morning, when our bodies and passions are comfortable and quiescent, we have the privilege of being able to access the higher mind — what neuroscientists call our neocortex, the seat of imagination, empathy and impartial judgement. We loosen our hold on our own egos and ascend to a less biased and more universal perspective, casting off a little of the customary anxious self-justification and brittle pride.
In such states, the mind moves beyond its particular self-interests and cravings. We start to think of other people in a more imaginative way. Rather than criticise and attack, we are free to imagine that their behaviour is driven by pressures derived from their own more primitive minds, which they are generally in no position to tell us about. Their temper or viciousness are, we now see, symptoms of hurt rather than of ‘evil’.
It’s an astonishing gradual evolution to develop the ability to explain others’ actions by their distress, rather than simply in terms of how it affects us. We perceive that the appropriate response to humanity is not fear, cynicism or aggression, but always — when we can manage it — love.
I wouldn’t go quite so far with that last point. Our reptile-brain instincts aren’t always right, but they aren’t always wrong, either.
France’s Submission
Monday, March 9th, 2015Anthony Daniels (Theodore Dalrymple) reviews Houellebecq’s Soumission:
Houellebecq is a writer with a single underlying theme: the emptiness of human existence in a consumer society devoid of religious belief, political project, or cultural continuity in which, moreover, thanks to material abundance and social security, there is no real struggle for existence that might give meaning to the life of millions. Such a society will not allow you to go hungry or to live in the abject poverty that would once have been the reward of idleness, whether voluntary or involuntary. This, in Houellebecq’s vision of the world, lends an inspissated pointlessness to all human activity, which becomes nothing more than a scramble for unnecessary consumer goods that confer no happiness or (at best) a distraction from that very emptiness. For Houellebecq, then, intellectual or cultural activity becomes mere soap opera for the more intelligent and educated rather than something of intrinsic importance or value. That is why a university teacher of economics in one of his books describes his work as the teaching of obvious untruths to careerist morons, rather than as, say, the awakening of young minds to the fascinating task of reducing the complexity of social interactions to general principles.
So brilliantly does Houellebecq describe the arduous vacuity of the life of his protagonists that one suspects (or knows?) that his books are strongly autobiographical, not in the shallow sense that the incidents in them are necessarily those that he has lived, but in the deeper sense that the whole of what one might call the feeling-tone of his protagonists is actually his. This tone is in a way worse than mere despair, which has at least the merit of strength and of posing a possible solution, namely suicide; the Houellebeckian mood is as chronic illness is to acute, an ache rather than a pain. In Soumission, for example, the protagonist, a university teacher of literature, describes his (and, implicitly by extension, our) daily life as but a succession of trivial, boring problems and imperative tasks that are the dark side, as it were, of modern convenience: “blocked washbasin, internet connection broken, speeding ticket, dishonest cleaning lady, mistake in tax return.” I doubt whether there is anybody — any middle class person at any rate — who will be unfamiliar with these irritations that can, if they accumulate, come so easily to dominate our thoughts and to color our attitude to life.
Getting Better at Getting Better
Monday, March 9th, 2015James Surowiecki (The Wisdom of Crowds) notes that we’re seeing the mainstreaming of excellent habits — or excellence habits:
In the late nineteen-fifties, Raymond Berry, the great wide receiver for the Baltimore Colts, was famous for his attention to detail and his obsessive approach to the game: he took copious notes, he ate well, he studied film of his opponents, he simulated entire games by himself, and so on. But, as the journalist Mark Bowden observed, Berry was considered an oddball. The golfer Ben Hogan, who was said to have “invented practice,” stood out at a time when most pro golfers practiced occasionally, if at all. Today, practicing six to eight hours a day is just the price of admission on the P.G.A. Tour. Everyone works hard. Everyone is really good.
This goes beyond athletics to chess and classical music, too.
Do you let your environment program you any way it wants?
Sunday, March 8th, 2015Movies and books form a mental structure in your head of what is possible and what is not, Scott Adams says, but these are artificial structures based on the rules of fiction, not reality:
Our brains like to force things into familiar boxes. If you have the world’s greatest idea to feed the poor, but it reminds people of The Hunger Games, you can count on folks saying it won’t work. Our brains run to the nearest analogy and stick to it like glue. That might be a problem if the nearest analogy is based on fiction.
I would like to see a study of decision-making based on how much fiction one consumes. My hypothesis is that consumers of fiction will draw their “experience” in part from fiction and it will warp their understanding of what is practical or possible in the real world.
When I was a teen, adults started yapping about how our hippy music was warping our minds. We laughed at how stupid that was. But as an educated adult I can see that music rewires our brains, just as any other experience does. So listening to angry music should, according to everything we understand about human behavior and the brain, rewire a kid to be more like the people singing the songs. Influence of that sort only requires a combination of identification with the singer’s message, repetition, and emotion; Popular music provide that in abundance.
My hypothesis is that reading anything raises your intelligence in a variety of ways, as one might imagine. But I think exposure to fiction makes you less grounded in the real world (subconsciously) and more likely to make decisions the way the captain of the Enterprise would have done it, for example.
And I also think music is reprogramming the brains of kids in unpredictable and potentially dangerous ways. To believe otherwise is to believe that music is somehow the one thing in our environment that does not rewire us through repetition and emotion.
I think you all agree that our environment influences us in small ways all the time. Everything you see and learn rewires your brain. If you think fiction and music have only trivial impacts on us, you probably have a different frame of reference from me. As a trained hobbyist-hypnotist I have a unique impression of how easily we moist robots can be rewired. And as a cartoonist/blogger I see a huge volume of human reactions to what I produce; that’s how I noticed a fiction-thinking pattern, or so I think.
This isn’t an opinion piece. I’m just offering a hypothesis that fiction and music are reprogramming us to the point of influencing our happiness and our decisions. And we let that rewiring happen according to our cravings for entertainment, not our intelligence.
My guess is that on a scale from 1 to 10, you think this negative impact of fiction and music is closer to a 2, and not something to worry about in a free society. My vantage point on this topic is different from that of most of you, and my observation is that the problem is closer to an 8.
Personally, I stopped consuming angry, violent, or unhappy fiction long ago. My anecdotal observation is that it makes a gigantic difference in my mental state. But everyone is different.
My question of the day is whether you choose your fiction and music based on how it will rewire your mood and your mind, or do you select it based on its entertainment value. To put it another way, do you let your environment program you any way it wants, or do you try to manage that process?
Management Theories of Roman Slave-Owners
Sunday, March 8th, 2015
They understood that slaves could not simply be terrified into being good at their job. Instead, the Romans used various techniques to encourage their slaves to work productively and willingly, from bonuses and long-term inducements, to acts designed to boost morale and generate team spirit. All of these say more than we might imagine about how employers manage people successfully in the modern world.
Above all, the story shows how comfortable the Romans were with leadership and command. They believed that there is a world of difference between having the organisational skills to run a unit and actually being able to lead it. By contrast modern managers are often uncomfortable with being promoted above their staff. I worked in a large corporation for a decade and I had numerous bosses who tried to be my friend. Raising yourself over others sits uneasily with democratic ideals of equality. Today’s managers have to pretend to be one of the team.
The Romans would have scoffed at such weakness. Did Julius Caesar take his legions off-site to get them to buy-in to his invasion of Gaul? Successful leaders had to stand out from the crowd and use their superior skills to inspire, cajole and sometimes force people to do what was necessary. Perhaps we would do well to learn from their blunt honesty.
Why They Lost The Wheel
Saturday, March 7th, 2015Once, in ancient times, the Middle East teemed with carts and wagons and chariots, but they were totally driven out by the coming of the camel:
Good harnesses for camels were designed in Central Asia and, in the 19th century, in the Australian desert, but these did not affect the Middle East.
The only way to make use of this immensely strong beast for transport was to throw the load, averaging anywhere from 300 to 500 pounds, on its back. Thus the pack camel came to compete directly with the ox cart for heavy transport.
The ox cart was equally slow, and in the competition the camel had certain positive advantages. It ate otherwise unusable desert plants, which made its upkeep inexpensive. Little wood, a valuable commodity in the largely deforested Middle East, was required by ancient saddling technology. And its care and breeding could be left to the nomads and thus not be a burden upon the farmer or merchant.
These advantages meant that camel transport was about 20 percent cheaper than wagon transport, according to the edict on prices issued by the Roman emperor Diocletian in the third century A.D. Therefore, simple economic efficiency caused the camel to supplant the wheel, not some mysterious reversion to primitive life.
(Hat tip to commenter Harold!)
American policy makers do not read books
Saturday, March 7th, 2015American policy makers do not read books, T. Greer reminds us:
Some books are surely read, of course, but the harsh truth of the matter is that between their professional responsibilities and the reading burden posed by simply keeping up with current affairs most people charged with crafting American strategy do not have the time to read very many real books. The knowledge they gain from what they read during their policy-making years will be broad, but it is probably not deep.
For some areas this is to be expected–ISIS has hardly been around long enough for many monographs to be written about it. But books upon books about counter-insurgency and terrorism, Islamic millenarian ideology, contemporary Near Eastern society, and the region’s history have been written. Many of these books, especially those with a historical bent, cannot be reduced to a power-point slide briefing or a New York Times op-ed. And if readers of The Stage have learned anything from reading this blog, it should be that the historical and cultural context of our adventures abroad matter. We lose wars when our strategists do not know realize this, and much more besides.
One cannot take this condemnation too far. There is a real limit to what you can expect policy-makers to master. No man can be an expert in all domains and it is too much to expect the Secretary of State to read three or four histories of a troublesome country every time a new crisis begins. Back when John Quincy Adams was America’s premiere grand strategist and it took several weeks for letters to cross the Atlantic it was feasible for statesmen to pull off a reading spree before the trouble was over. This is too much to expect of senior policy makers in this era, who are not only expected to make time in their schedules for fancy photo ops and jet trips across the world, but often must react to crises minutes and seconds after they occur. It is a wonder these men read anything at all.
If the American strategist of 2015 has a deep base of historical, cultural, and scientific knowledge to draw on to guide the decisions he makes this is because he acquired this knowledge base before he was a senior policy maker. You can actually see hints of this in the survey data — Avey and Desch asked policy makers to list the living international relations scholars they thought had the greatest influence on actual policy making. Along with scholars-turned-officials (e.g. Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Anne-Marie Slaughter) and public intellectuals (e.g. Francis Fukuyama, Fareed Zakaria) were a list of men whose scholarly apogee was twenty to thirty years ago, back when our policy makers were undergrads! (Funnily enough many of these men — Samuel Huntington, Albert Wohlstetter, Hans Morgenthau — are not only past their scholarly prime, but are no longer alive!) Those who rose to prominence after 1995 barely register.