Thanks, +Nikhil Patel
Thursday, December 31, 2015
Wednesday, December 30, 2015
Tuesday, December 29, 2015
Class Differences in Child-Rearing Are on the Rise
Read more in the NYT. Thanks, +Zuhair Khan
15 ways to catch up with friends that aren't grabbing coffee or a cocktail
Excellent find, +Jessica Goldfin
Economics: a family business?
Last month the New York Times' David Leonhardt published a fascinating article, listing 13 young (untenured) US-based economists in his piece The Future of Economics Isn’t So Dismal. It's already been given a god run in the econoblogs. The reason I'm writing about it more than a month later is the accompanying table (click on it to see a larger, clearer version). Of the 13 up-and-coming academic economists, six are married to each other.Read more in the New Economist.
A 13-Year-Old Google Science Fair Finalist Has A Simple Idea To Stop Cyberbullying
An excerpt:
The science behind Prabhu's idea is simple: Teens are impulsive and, because of their brain structure, more likely to post hurtful messages without pausing to think about the consequences.
The prefrontal cortex — the part of the brain responsible for self-control that helps people think before acting — isn't fully developed until age 25. Her theory is that if teens are forced to take a moment of reflection before posting a mean comment, they won't do it.
She created a system to test her hypothesis called Rethink, which prompted students who said they would post a mean comment to think about how it might affect its target before posting it. Turns out, in 93.43% of her 533 trials, the student decided not to post the comment.Read more in Business Insider.
Cards Against Humanity
The CAH team wanted to give their Chinese manufacturers a week-long vacation, but since they are contractors, they couldn't mandate it. So, how did they figure out how to do one?
Read the answer on The Cards Against Humanity blog.
Thanks, +Cassie Coravos
Read the answer on The Cards Against Humanity blog.
Thanks, +Cassie Coravos
The Value of Time: How Much is Your Time Really Worth?
Hm, I've also thought about this:
A few weeks before I began writing this article, I was shopping for a small travel bag. After much searching I found one that I liked and, at just $19, it was very affordable. But there was one problem: the bag was made by a company in the United Kingdom and it cost $45 to ship it to the United States.
I was immediately turned off by the idea of paying $45 to ship a $19 bag, so I searched for retail stores. The company had a physical location in New York City and I was already planning to visit the city a few weeks later. I looked up the store location and realized that it would take me about one hour to go out of my way and stop at the store during my trip.
That’s when I thought of the question that prompted this entire article: “Was one hour of my time worth $45?”Read more in James Clear.
How Jack Dorsey Manages Being CEO Of Both Twitter And Square
Read more in Forbes.
Giving Up Is the Enemy of Creativity
What determines whether the ideas we generate are truly creative? Recent research of ours finds that one common factor often gets in the way: we tend to undervalue the benefits of persistence.
In a series of experiments we observed that people consistently underestimated the number of ideas they could generate while solving a creative challenge. In one, we brought 24 university students into the laboratory during the week leading up to Thanksgiving and asked them to spend ten minutes coming up with as many ideas of dishes to serve at Thanksgiving dinner as they could. Then we had them predict how many more ideas they could generate if they persisted on the task for an additional ten minutes. After that, they actually persisted for ten minutes.
On average, the students predicted they would be able to generate around 10 new ideas if they persisted. But we found that they were actually able to generate around 15 new ideas.Read more in HBR.
Is Bitcoin Unsustainable?
An excerpt:
Motherboard points out that using bitcoin is incredibly energy-intensive: "A single bitcoin transaction uses roughly enough electricity to power 1.57 American households for a day... That makes Bitcoin about 5,033 times more energy intensive, per transaction, than VISA"Read more in The Motherboard at Vice.
Sunday, December 27, 2015
Thursday, December 24, 2015
Wednesday, December 23, 2015
Monday, December 21, 2015
In An Accident, Who Will A Driverless Car Be Programmed To Kill?
"When ethics are automated, life-and-death decisions may be in Google's hands." A somewhat scary excerpt:
When an accident happens or is about to happen, your car needs to do something, and what it does will be determined by how it is programmed by it's makers. Lin points out that an ethical difference lays between a human driver’s reaction and a driverless car’s decision, a pre-meditated programming choice to value one life over another, even if the precise owner of that life is not known at the time. In the exact same situation, even if the car reacts exactly the same way as a human would, Lin says that the decision could be viewed as "premeditated homicide."
If your car is programmed to "minimize harm" by choosing to swerve into a helmet-wearing cyclist instead of the helmet-less cyclist on the other side, then aren't responsible people being penalized? In this world, bike users might skip wearing helmets to avoid becoming victims of robo-cars.Read more in FastCo.
The mystery of China’s missing brides
"They were brought in to redress the shortage of women caused by the one-child policy. But then a whole village of mail-order brides vanished." Read more in FT.
Thanks, +Zuhair Khan
Thanks, +Zuhair Khan
Thursday, December 17, 2015
Koko is available for everyone
Read more in WIRED.
Social Enterprise: From McKinsey To Goldman, MBA Careers With Social Impact Are Endless
Read more in BusinessBecause.
Wednesday, December 16, 2015
Millennials Don't Care About Owning Cars, And Car Makers Can't Figure Out Why
Read more in FastCo.
The First Person to Hack the iPhone Built a Self-Driving Car. In His Garage.
Tuesday, December 15, 2015
The Antidote To Burnout Is Progress
Burnout is caused when you repeatedly make large amounts of sacrifice and or effort into high-risk problems that fail…You effectively condition your brain to associate work with failure… The best way to prevent burnout is to follow up a serious failure with doing small things that you know are going to work.Read more from Tom Tugnuz.
America’s millennials are in crisis—and it’s not all in their heads
A couple staggering stats:
- About one-third of all college students are first generation.
- Forty-three percent of millennials are of color, and deal on a daily basis with the challenges of white privilege.
- Twenty-six percent of undergraduates are raising dependent children.
- One in five female students will be sexually assaulted in college.
- Seventy percent of college students have student debt. Nationwide, that adds up to $1.2 trillion—a per-student average of $29,000.
- Student debt is higher for black students than white students. In 2013, 42% of black families carried student loan debt, compared to 28% of white families.
- Forty percent of the nation’s unemployed are millennials.
- Hate crimes on campuses are on the rise, and over 11% of all hate crimes in 2009 took place on college campuses.
- By the age of 23, nearly half of black males and 40% of white males have been arrested.
- Despite recruiting efforts to draw a diverse student body, students of color often find a lack of inclusion and support once they arrive. From offensive Halloween garb to KKK graffiti, these students often encounter unwelcoming, or even hostile, environments. This is especially true at schools located outside of urban areas.
- Black and Hispanic students have lower graduation rates than whites. In 2005, 62% of whites got a degree within six years, versus 40% of blacks and 51% of Hispanics.
- Seventy-nine percent of faculty are white, a statistic that,according to research, can negatively influence the academic success of nonwhite students.
- College-educated black students are also disproportionately unemployed. In 2013, 12.4% of black graduates were unemployed, compared to 4.9% of whites.
Thanks, +Zuhair Khan
Saturday, December 12, 2015
The Internet Criticizes Reese's Peanut Butter Trees, But Then Reese's Drops The Most Witty Response
Friday, December 11, 2015
Self-Compassion for Writers and Other Tortured Souls
An excerpt:
I was talking to a Buddhist friend at the weekend who’s a wonderful writer. She creates amazing blog posts that usually start off deeply personal but go on to teach important and universal lessons about life. I have a lot to learn from her about combining the personal and the instructional, and in many ways I regard her as the better writer. The thing is, she told me she hasn’t been able to write for two years now, because she’s a perfectionist.
And that’s the problem with perfectionism. Perfectionism makes us anything but perfect, because, for one thing, it makes it harder for us to create.Read more in ZenHabits.
Stay Focused on Your Goals Not Your Critics
Remember, it's better to create something and be criticised than to create nothing and criticise others.
— Ricky Gervais (@rickygervais) November 22, 2015I've been thinking more about the adage that we "become an amalgamation of the 5 people we spend the most time with" -- so, who is that?
Mark Suster has his answer.
Why millennials may not produce many more Mark Zuckerbergs
Millennials have been heralded as the uniquely diverse, highly educated, politically independent social media marvels. But a new poll finds many of them would also just like a good job at an established business with some vacation time.Read more in the Washington Post.
Thanks, Safwan
Why So Many Minority Millennials Can't Get Ahead
Read more in the Atlantic.
Thanks, +Megan Gardner
Just search for "groin pain." How Google data is helping track STDs.
Read more in FastCompany.
What's wrong with finance
In this year’s presidential address to the American Financial Association, Luigi Zingales asked “Does Finance Benefit Society?”. He concluded that “at the current state of knowledge there is no theoretical reason to support the notion that all the growth of the financial sector in the last 40 years has been beneficial to society”. And a recent paper from the Bank of International Settlements, the central bankers’ central bank, concluded that “the level of financial development is good only up to a point, after which it becomes a drag on growth”.Read more in the Economist.
Thanks, Pranav
Study Finds Racial Discrimination by Airbnb Hosts
The lack of anonymity on Airbnb may lead to persistent racial discrimination, a working paper from Harvard Business School found. Renters with names that sounded African American had a harder time booking reservations on the site than those who had white-sounding names, according to the study.Read more in Bloomberg.
Thanks, +Zuhair Khan
Thursday, December 10, 2015
Pursuing Gender Equality as a Competitive Advantage
Hadley Mullin was already an anomaly as a female investor at TSG Consumer Partners, the private equity firm she joined in 2004. Six months later, she found out she was pregnant.
Balancing motherhood with the demands of private equity was not the usual track in an industry overwhelmingly dominated by men. But even after Ms. Mullin nervously told the TSG partners her news, they did something unexpected: They promoted her. And kept promoting her, three children later.And the results:
In its most recent fund, TSG reported a net return of 50 percent, more than double the industry average. The firm takes a distinct approach compared with traditional buyout shops, adding less leverage and investing in the business from the outset of their acquisition, rather than slashing expenses from every angle.Read more in Dealbook.
Thanks, +Pamela Coravos
Brain Reflexes That Monitor the Pecking Order
Thanks, +Katherine Stiner
Wednesday, December 9, 2015
Study confirms that ending your texts with a period is terrible
Sunday, December 6, 2015
Radical Candor — The Surprising Secret to Being a Good Boss
But after the meeting, Scott’s boss, Sheryl Sandberg, suggested they take a walk together. She talked about the things she’d liked about the presentation and how impressed she was with the success the team was having — yet Scott could feel a “but” coming. “Finally she said, ‘But you said um a lot.’ And I thought, ‘Oh, no big deal. I know, I do that. But who cared if I said um when I had the tiger by the tail?’”
Sandberg pushed forward, asking whether Scott’s ums were the result of nervousness. She even suggested that Google could hire a speaking coach to help. Still, Scott brushed off the concern; it didn’t seem like an important issue. “Finally, Sheryl said, ‘You know, Kim, I can tell I'm not really getting through to you. I'm going to have to be clearer here. When you say um every third word, it makes you sound stupid.’”
“Now, that got my attention!” Scott says.
For all of us raised in a culture that preaches, “If you can’t say something nice…", that criticism might not sound so nice. But Scott knows now that it was the kindest thing Sandberg could have done for her. “If she hadn't said it just that way, I would've kept blowing her off. I wouldn't have addressed the problem. And what a silly thing to let trip you up.” (Incidentally, she did work with that speaking coach, and kicked her umhabit handily.) In the years since, Scott has worked to operationalize what it was that made Sandberg such a great boss.Read more in First Round.
Thanks, +Jordan Dods
The Case Against Work-Life Balance: Owning Your Future
Shyam Sankar, the 13th employee at Palantir, makes a strong case for hard work and resilience over work-life balance early in one's career.
Thanks, +Julia French
Staring into the abyss of companies that glorify triple-digit hours (never mind the substance of the work), this makes intuitive sense. But having surveyed the landscape of high-tech hiring, I’m convinced you should be just as concerned about jobs that promise high stimulation and total comfort. When you let yourself be sold on easy hours, outrageous perks, and glib assurances about the project you’ll join and the technologies you’ll get to play with, you’ve just agreed to let your future become someone else’s.
I hate the construct of work-life balance for the same reason I love engineering: the reality is dynamic and generative, not zero-sum. It’s about transcending the constraints of simplistic calculations. Creating the life and the work you want are by no means easy challenges, but they are absolutely attainable. What’s not realistic is thinking you can own your future and be comfortable at the same time. Grit, not virtuosity, will be the biggest determinant of your success, for reasons I’ll explore in a bit.Also, he makes a case against activities that focus more on reflection than action (e.g., time spent in business school):
These days, I build in calendar blocks for “brain space”. That wouldn’t have made sense 10 or even 5 years ago – not because I have more free time now, but because, early in your career, you learn much more by doing than reflecting. And this can be the difference between creating your future and receiving it in a fancy envelope.Read more in Shyam's blog.
Thanks, +Julia French
All Combat Roles Now Open to Women, Defense Secretary Says
In a historic transformation of the American military, Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter said on Thursday that the Pentagon would open all combat jobs to women.
“There will be no exceptions,” Mr. Carter said at a news conference. He added, “They’ll be allowed to drive tanks, fire mortars and lead infantry soldiers into combat. They’ll be able to serve as Army Rangers and Green Berets, Navy SEALs, Marine Corps infantry, Air Force parajumpers and everything else that was previously open only to men.”Read more in the NYT.
HackerScripts
Hungover? Run Script.
Need coffee? Run Script.
Share it with geeks in your team, you can thank me later. Check out the Scripts in GitHub.
Via Software Lead Weekly
Need coffee? Run Script.
Share it with geeks in your team, you can thank me later. Check out the Scripts in GitHub.
Via Software Lead Weekly
New opportunities opening for women in private equity
For example, half of the incoming associates in 2015 at Washington-based alternative investment firm The Carlyle Group are women, said Christopher Ullman, Carlyle spokesman. Carlyle's next generation of female executives includes Anita Balaji, principal, who joined the firm in 2006.Read more in P&I.
Thanks, Chris
The pen is mightier than the sword
Read more in the DailyMail.
Friday, December 4, 2015
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Why Women Aren’t C.E.O.s, According to Women Who Almost Were
"It’s not a pipeline problem. It’s about loneliness, competition and deeply rooted barriers." Read more in the NYT .
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Even women who earn overwhelmingly positive performance reviews are told that they have ‘personality flaws,’ a new study finds. The double...
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Many talented rural students don't go to elite schools, because they are unaware of the options. Read more in the NYT . Thanks, +Ju...
