Month: February 2010
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The Benefits of Side Projects
The creation of 3M’s Scotch Tape, the Declaration of Independence and Metallica: just three of the stories Ben Casnocha retells to show the importance of innovation through side projects. Is giving away a day a week of your employees’ time worth it? Google executives seem to think so. They cite first the enormous goodwill generated internally:…
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Personal R&D
Many successful companies run expansive research and development departments, allowing them to enhance their capabilities and discover and exploit the new opportunities this speculative research often brings. Josh Kaufman suggests that we create our own personal R&D budgets–akin to those of corporations–for our personal development: What would it look like if you set aside 10-20%…
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Evidence-Based Methods to Become Lucky
In an attempt to discover whether there were genuine personality traits that separate the lucky from the unlucky, Richard Wiseman studied 400 people over a number of years and discovered that there are indeed behavioural differences between the lucky and luckless—and that we can ‘learn’ these traits to improve our luck. Wiseman states that the…
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When (and When Not) to Consider Venture Capital
On discussing why he and his co-founders are seeking venture capital funding for their programming question and answer site (StackOverflow), Joel Spolsky provides a number of scenarios for when a company should give consideration to VC funding: There’s a land grab going on. There is a provable concept that’s repeatable. The business could benefit from…
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Icon-Based Business Plans
Depending on who you listen to, a business plan is either a waste of your time or an essential document. A good compromise could be Peter Hilton’s idea to create a concise, icon-based business plan visualisation: Inspired by the simplicity and success of the Creative Commons icons, which condense pages of information that no one ever…
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Nature Improves Attention
When studying complex tasks, taking a moment away from the problem is a proven way to refocus one’s thoughts. How different surroundings affect this “attention restoration” has now been studied and it has been discovered that the more complex a problem, the more a natural (non-urban) scene benefits our focus and study–whether this natural scene…
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Sleep and Weight Loss
While asleep our metabolic rate increases such that we lose more than three times the amount of weight than if we are awake (awake but lying dormant, of course): 1.9g/min compared to 0.6g/min. This increase in ‘caloric expenditure’ is not yet fully understood, but there are a number of reasons why we may lose more…
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The Cognitive Importance of Good Sleep
After a week of surviving on minimal sleep you may assume that a lazy weekend will allow you to recover in time for the coming days. Not so: research has shown that not even a full week of quality sleep can reverse the cognitive and physiological ‘damage’ just five days of poor sleep can inflict on…
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(Insincere) Flattery Works
Flattery–even exaggerated, insincere and obvious flattery–works. That’s the conclusion from a study looking at whether compliments initially dismissed as “meaningless flattery” in advertising copy work on an implicit, unconscious level. They do. What this research suggests […] is that the implicit positivity we experience as a result of viewing [positive advertising] images could play an important role in what…
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Framing Financial Loses to Conservatives
In a series of novel framing experiments, researchers have shown that our self-identified political leanings correlate with how we perceive financial losses. Hundreds of online participants chose between various flights, computers and so on. In each case they could plump for a cheaper option or a more expensive, greener option, the latter including either a ‘tax’…