Letters Remain

  • Determination, Long-Terms Goals, Success

    Determination and long-term goal-setting may be more contributory to success than intelligence, suggests research being conducted by Angela Duckworth and her contemporaries.

    These two traits (perseverance and keeping long-term goals in mind) are affectionately called ‘grit’ by researchers in the field and—according to a 2007 paper on the subject (pdf)—play an important role in many academic achievements.

    Researchers are quick to point out that grit isn’t simply about the willingness to work hard. Instead, it’s about setting a specific long-term goal and doing whatever it takes until the goal has been reached. It’s always much easier to give up, but people with grit can keep going.

    […] These new scientific studies rely on new techniques for reliably measuring grit in individuals. As a result, they’re able to compare the relative importance of grit, intelligence, and innate talent when it comes to determining lifetime achievement. Although this field of study is only a few years old, it’s already made important progress toward identifying the mental traits that allow some people to accomplish their goals, while others struggle and quit. Grit, it turns out, is an essential (and often overlooked) component of success.

    “I’d bet that there isn’t a single highly successful person who hasn’t depended on grit,” says Angela Duckworth, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania who helped pioneer the study of grit. “Nobody is talented enough to not have to work hard, and that’s what grit allows you to do.”

    Duckworth created a survey to measure this “narrowly defined trait” (which you can take online), and it was actually found to be a better indicator of success than an IQ score in the 2007 Scripps National Spelling Bee.

    For more on this topic In Character‘s short interview with Angela Duckworth is worth a read, as is Cal Newport’s excellent take on ‘grit’:

    Maintain a small number of things that you return to, and do hard work on, again and again, over a long period of time. Choose things that actually interest you, but don’t obsesses over choosing the perfect things — as perfect goals […] probably don’t exist.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Steve Jobs and Circular Visualisations (Not Just Pie Charts)

    Pie charts have been having a bad time of it lately* and I can’t see things improving anytime soon.

    In one of the better articles looking at this humble chart, Brian Suda notes not only at what you can do instead, but what improvements you can make if you’re forced to use the pie chart.

    The original idea behind a pie chart is that it represents parts of a whole, each sliver or wedge is a section, when totaled gives you the overall picture. Over the years pie charts have morphed purely into eye-candy, exemplified by their sister graph the doughnut chart, which offers zero additional information.

    If we look at a few examples, you will quickly see the failings in the circular design along with how easy it can be used to misrepresent data.

    One such example of how a pie chart can be used to misrepresent data was Steve Jobs’ keynote at Macworld 2008–as discussed in Suda’s article and over at The Guardian.

    * Seth Godin called pie charts “spectacularly overrated” and Seed said we need to “get past the pie chart”.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Context and Aesthetic Judgements

    It’s no surprise that perceived context is important in influencing people’s decisions. A recent experiment has shown that people rate pictures as more aesthetically pleasing (and actually experience more pleasure while viewing them) if they believe they come from art galleries.

    Aesthetic judgments, like most judgments, depend on context. Whether an object or image is seen in daily life or in an art gallery can significantly modulate the aesthetic value humans attach to it. We investigated the neural system supporting this modulation by presenting human subjects with artworks under different contexts whilst acquiring fMRI data. Using the same database of artworks, we randomly labelled images as being either sourced from a gallery or computer generated. Subjects’ aesthetic ratings were significantly higher for stimuli viewed in the ‘gallery’ than ‘computer’ contexts.

    via @vaughanbell

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • To Breastfeed or Not

    In governmental and popular literature breastfeeding is praised as being the optimum solution to infant feeding. The Wikipedia article, for instance, is extensive and well-cited suggesting the following benefits to infants: superior nutrition, greater immune health, higher intelligence… the list goes on. For the mother, many long- and short-term health benefits are also cited.

    In what has become quite a contentious article, Hanna Rosin for The Atlantic discusses what she calls “the ultimate badge of responsible parenting”, and suggests that “the actual health benefits of breastfeeding are surprisingly thin“.

    The best commentary on the article I’ve seen comes from Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution who discusses the econometrics of breastfeeding—although the comments are equally as enlightening, covering the problems with running scientific trials on breastfeeding (i.e. ethical issues with decreeing how a mother should feed her child) and more besides.

    For now it appears that the jury is still out, edging towards breastfeeding due to small but significant benefits.

    Given the massive, lucrative market available I fully expect that by the time I’m a parent the difference between formula and breast milk will be negligible, if not edging in favour of formula thanks to nutritional and scientific advances. Of course the psychological benefits of breastfeeding (if only to the parents?) may never be able to be duplicated.

    via Overcoming Bias

    Update: The BBC reports that Nutricia (owners of the Cow & Gate and Milupa brands) has been told to cease airing misleading adverts claiming that their follow-on milk could “support the immune system”:

    Companies are not allowed to advertise formula milk for babies under six months old.

    But some pro-breast feeding groups believe there should be a total ban on this kind of advertising.

    The World Health Organization recommends that babies are given breast milk exclusively for the first six months and after that it should continue alongside food until the age of two.

    In fact, according to the WHO:

    Breastfeeding is an unequalled way of providing ideal food for the healthy growth and development of infants; it is also an integral part of the reproductive process with important implications for the health of mothers.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Technology in the Classroom

    Teachers are using technology in the classroom as a crutch, rather than a tool to increase their quality of teaching, proposes José A. Bowen, Dean of the Meadows School of the Arts, and this is why he’s removing computers from his classrooms.

    Resistance was high, both from teachers and students, but research has linked boredom in classrooms to poor test scores and lecturer computer use to student boredom.

    As Bowen says, it’s not so much about using technology, but it’s about using it better:

    More than any thing else, Mr. Bowen wants to discourage professors from using PowerPoint, because they often lean on the slide-display program as a crutch rather using it as a creative tool. Class time should be reserved for discussion, he contends, especially now that students can download lectures online and find libraries of information on the Web. When students reflect on their college years later in life, they’re going to remember challenging debates and talks with their professors. Lively interactions are what teaching is all about, he says, but those give-and-takes are discouraged by preset collections of slides.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Advantage of Female Executives

    Of the top 500 public US companies, firms with women in senior management performed 18 to 69 percent better in terms of profitability than the median companies in their industries. Not only this, but these firms, with around three women in top jobs, scored higher on top measures of organisational excellence by at least 40 percent.

    However, as Robin Hanson notes over at Overcoming Bias:

    [A]nyone who believed this result should expect to make big profits just by buying female firms and selling male firms.

    If many stock speculators believed [this], firm stock prices would jump upon hiring more female execs, making most CEOS quite eager to hire more women execs.  There would be a boom in female execs […]  Since that didn’t happen, I’ve gotta believe most speculators don’t believe those studies.

    A couple of thoughts:

    • For a start, this research was conducted on Fortune 500 companies. Not exactly a diverse, or even large, sample to find such correlations in.
    • Such research doesn’t say that female traits (or the lack of male traits) are conducive to success, but that diversity is key.
    • A firm liberal enough to have women in senior management (and rightly so) is likely to be open to many other opportunities than a conservative firm.
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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Goal Setting and Affluence

    You’ve heard of the Yale Goal-Setting Study, right? The one that goes like this:

    In 1953 a team of researchers interviewed Yale’s graduating seniors, asking them whether they had written down the specific goals that they wanted to achieve in life. Twenty years later the researchers tracked down the same cohort and found that the 3% of people who had specific goals all those years before had accumulated more personal wealth than the other 97% of their classmates combined. The study is used to illustrate the power of focus.

    Prof. Richard Wiseman, University of Hertfordshire psychologist and self-help myth-buster extraordinaire, says it best:

    There is just one small problem… the experiment never actually took place.

    A 2007 article in Fast Company corroborates the stance, in a slightly more eloquent (or should that be verbose?) manner:

    According to [Silas] Spengler [secretary of the Class of 1953 since graduation] — who listed his future occupation in the Yale yearbook as “personnel administration following a course of business administration at Harvard,” and who instead went into the navy and then to law school — he never wrote down any personal goals, nor did he and his classmates ever participate in a research study on personal goals.

    As further evidence, Spengler provided excerpts from the 1953 yearbook. No one stated personal goals, but most of the graduates predicted their future lines of work: Roberto Goizueta, Coke’s CEO, predicted his future would be with Cuba’s Compani Industrial del Tropico S.A.; William Donaldson and Dan Lufkin, founders of Wall Street’s Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, forecast futures in law. Forrest Mars, Jr., now chairman and CEO of Mars, Inc., listed “no” for employment possibilities.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • TED Speaking Guide

    Now that TEDGlobal 2009 has drawn to a close and the videos are slowly making their way online, the latest Nature has an editorial on the TED phenomenon, suggesting that “those wishing to reveal scientific ideas should learn from the engaging style of TED conference talks”.

    TED succeeds in part because participants are encouraged to talk about the unexpected. […] But perhaps the most critical key to success is the style of the talks. […]

    The talks have a strict time limit of 18 minutes — no interaction with the audience, and no questions except the informal ones asked in the extended conversation breaks. […] For a general audience, 18 minutes is plenty for getting across context and key issues, while still forcing each speaker to focus on a message — whether it be advocacy or the celebration of new knowledge.

    There is also a welcome absence of PowerPoint presentations. Instead there are plenty of images — but precious few professional scientific diagrams, which can quickly lose the audience’s attention. This forces speakers to craft talks that can engage sophisticated but scientifically untutored listeners at their level. And it also encourages speakers to try for a freely flowing, relaxed presentation style, without notes. […]

    Scientists wishing to inspire non-scientists should look at a few of these talks online and learn a thing or two.

    I would go one further: non-scientists wishing to inspire others should look to TED to learn a thing or two.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Reporting and the Internet

    It seems you can’t spend five minutes on the Internet without coming across an opinion piece on the end of traditional media or an article riffing on the age of the blog. I’ve so far refrained from noting (m)any of these articles, mainly because the argument is becoming stale and the articles are so widespread.

    Michael Massing‘s latest for The New York Review of Books is one worth your time, however: it’s a balanced, detailed view on the new landscape of reporting—that of a symbiosis between blogs, online media outlets, and traditional national and international newspapers. (It also serves as a good resource to some of the best blogs around.)

    This, in response to David Simon (he of Baltimore Sun and The Wire fame) likening the Internet to a parasite “slowly killing the host”:

    This image of the Internet as parasite has some foundation. Without the vital news-gathering performed by established institutions, many Web sites would sputter and die. In their sweep and scorn, however, such statements seem as outdated as they are defensive. Over the past few months alone, a remarkable amount of original, exciting, and creative (if also chaotic and maddening) material has appeared on the Internet. The practice of journalism, far from being leeched by the Web, is being reinvented there, with a variety of fascinating experiments in the gathering, presentation, and delivery of news.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Tao of War Photography

    Laying dormant at the bottom of my bookmarks was this article Jason pointed out over four months ago: photographer Bruce Haley‘s Tao of War Photography.

    1.  To begin with, practice this sentence: “If I get out of here alive, I’ll never do this again.”  You’ll say this to yourself every single time an already dangerous situation really turns to shit…

    63. Always keep in mind the following when you photograph people in war zones and other awful places:
    a. You’re there because you want to be – they aren’t…
    b. You can leave – they can’t…

    Beware, the Flash interface makes my eyes bleed.

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    Lloyd Morgan