Year: 2012

On Lying and Eye Movement

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Can you tell a liar from the way his eyes move when he tells a lie? A new study suggests otherwise:

When right-handed people move their eyes up and to the left in response to a question, they are picturing a real memory. When their eyes go up and to the right, the theory goes, they are accessing the creative centers of the brain and visualizing an imagined event — therefore concocting a lie. The theory, dating back to the 1970s, is widely repeated and frequently taught in neuro-linguistic training courses. But it has never been thoroughly substantiated, and new research suggests it is little more than pseudoscience.

In a controlled study published in the journal PLoS One, British researchers monitored the eye movements of 32 right-handed people as they told lies and truths about recent events to an interviewer. The scientists found that there was no pattern of eye movement that predicted lying. In a second experiment, 50 people were asked to look for signs of lying among interviewees. Although half were taught to look for eye movements, they fared no better at lie detection than an untrained control group.

Myth busted, it seems.

Walter Kirn: Confessions of an Ex-Mormon

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Walter Kirn, the National Correspondent at The New Republic, writes a poignant story of becoming a Mormon and then renouncing the religion. The fresh American start promised by the Church of Latter Day Saints “didn’t turn out like that”:

My stated excuse for sneaking away from Mormonism was skepticism about its doctrines, but I’d learned that most Mormons don’t grasp all the teachings of Joseph Smith—nor do they credit all the ones they do grasp. After the bus trip to Eden, holy Missouri never came up again in conversation. As for the future temple in Independence, I found out that the spot where Smith said it would rise belonged to a Mormon splinter sect with a U.S. membership of about 1,000. The “sacred underwear”? It was underwear. Everyone wears it, so why not make it sacred? Why not make everything sacred? It is, in some ways. And most sacred of all are people, not wondrous stories, whose job is to help people feel their sacredness. Sometimes the stories don’t work, or they stop working. Forget about them; find others. Revise. Refocus. A church is the people in it, and their errors. The errors they make while striving to get things right.

But I didn’t have the patience, or the humility. I wasn’t a son of stubborn pioneers. I was the son of the lawyer on the plane who’d suffered the breakdown I thought I could avoid. I left the Church as abruptly as I’d entered it. No formalities, no apologies, no goodbyes.

Highly recommend reading in its entirety. If you’re wondering what else Walter Kirn is also known for: writing the book Up in the Air, which inspired a film of the same name starring George Clooney. It’s an excellent film.

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(via @Longreads)

Georgia Tech Joins Coursera

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My alma mater, Georgia Tech, is one of twelve new universities that has joined the Coursera team. Coursera is a social entrepreneurship company that partners with the top universities in the world to offer courses online for anyone to take, for free. In their own words: “We envision a future where the top universities are educating not only thousands of students, but millions. Our technology enables the best professors to teach tens or hundreds of thousands of students.”

Take a look at the course offerings from Georgia Tech. The Computational Photography course taught by Professor Irfan Essa looks intriguing:

This course is aimed at teaching you the basics of how computation has impacted the entire workflow of photography, from how images are captured, manipulated and collaborated on and shared.  At the core of it photography means, drawing with light and how light can be captured to form images/videos. In this class you will learn about how the optics, and the sensor within a camera are generalized, as well as the lighting and other aspects of the environment are generalized to capture novel images. We will also cover post and pre processing techniques to manipulate and improve images. Finally, we will consider the power of the web and the Internet for both analyzing and sharing images, as well as the impact of mobile smart phone cameras. This class builds on concepts from well known disciplines like computer vision, computer graphics, and image processing. Look forward to participate in this class.

Sign me up!

The Weird and the Misfits

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This message of embracing your weirdness, of being a misfit, is reverberating with a stronger frequency in my life these days. Here is Alex McCaw:

By definition, the system isn’t set up to cater for misfits. While I am by no means comparable to those famous alumni on my school wall, I am also a misfit. Misfits don’t blend into the artificial world of enforced hierarchies, such as those in high school, and are often happier forging their own paths. By the time I was seventeen, I had already dropped out of two schools and decided enough was enough. The system wasn’t for me. I packed up my bags and moved to London. I knew what I was passionate about, and I wasn’t afraid to admit it. I wanted to spend the rest of my life programming.

Chris Sacca recently gave the commencement speech to a crowd of newly graduated students. He talked about being a misfit, about standing out and embracing what you really are. As he says, your GPA only matters to people who can’t find any other reason to find you interesting.

The most important piece of advice I can give you on the path to happiness, is not just be yourself, but be your weird self. It takes too much energy to be other than your weird self. We spend so much of our lives living up to the expectations of others.

It’s our collection of screw ups, stories and idiosyncrasies, that make us weird and interesting. Weirdness is why we adore our friends. Weirdness is what binds us to our colleges. Weirdness is what sets us apart and gets us hired. Be your unapologetic weird selves.

Where else have I heard this message? At World Domination Summit this year, Chris Brogan said: “You will succeed the weirder you get.”

On Making Friends After College

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This piece in The New York Times on making friends after college resonated with me deeply. Personally, I have found that I have lost connections with some of the people I bonded in college. More importnatly, I’ve found it exceedingly challenging to make friends after college (and graduate school).

Our story is not unusual. In your 30s and 40s, plenty of new people enter your life, through work, children’s play dates and, of course, Facebook. But actual close friends — the kind you make in college, the kind you call in a crisis — those are in shorter supply.

As people approach midlife, the days of youthful exploration, when life felt like one big blind date, are fading. Schedules compress, priorities change and people often become pickier in what they want in their friends.

No matter how many friends you make, a sense of fatalism can creep in: the period for making B.F.F.’s, the way you did in your teens or early 20s, is pretty much over. It’s time to resign yourself to situational friends: K.O.F.’s (kind of friends) — for now.

The three conditions on why making friends becomes difficult as one enters their 30s:

As external conditions change, it becomes tougher to meet the three conditions that sociologists since the 1950s have considered crucial to making close friends: proximity; repeated, unplanned interactions; and a setting that encourages people to let their guard down and confide in each other, said Rebecca G. Adams, a professor of sociology and gerontology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. This is why so many people meet their lifelong friends in college, she added.

Good read in its entirety.

What are some things you’ve done to make friends after college? I am really curious.

Cal Newport on Building a Remarkable Career

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Last weekend, I attended the World Domination Summit. It’s a brilliant “un-conference” but together by Chris Guillebeau, whose blog and adventures I’ve been following for many years.

One of the speakers at the conference was Cal Newport, who I’ve been following since my time at Georgia Tech. Cal has finished his PhD (and post-doc) studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is now an assistant professor at Georgetown University.

I attended Cal’s breakout session on Saturday afternoon and his main keynote on Sunday afternoon, and I wanted to present some takeaways from Cal’s talks.

“Follow Your Passion” Is Bad Advice

Cal Newport came into the conference professing that his argument might stir up some controversy at WDS, since it’s a bit unorthodox. The gist of his argument about building and leading a remarkable career: “the follow your passion” advice is not only bad, it is wrong. Newport’s claim can further be broken down:

Sitting down to figure out what you’re passionate about and then being disappointed when you try it and it doesn’t work out is a mistake. Instead of following your passion, you should pick something that is of interest to you you and that is going to give you interesting options. Once you get into this interest, build it into a craft with hard work and dedication. Once you are skilled in that arena, leverage your knowledge and skills to prioritize the things that matter to you in life. This is the foundation for what can be a remarkable life.

This isn’t just a hokey hypothesis put on by Newport. He has spent significant amount of his free time (the guy isn’t on Facebook, Twitter, or any social media: any effort that he doesn’t put into his work goes into this other interest of Newport’s, namely, how students think, behave, and choose their careers).

How To Develop a Remarkable Career

Cal Newport summarized the path to a remarkable career (and doing what you love):

1. Get good at something that is rare and valuable. 

2. After you get good, leverage yours skill for things that really matter to you (e.g. a lifestyle with more autonomy, freedom), allowing yourself to focus on the parts of that skill that truly matter, or convert that value into a part of your life you really care about. Understand that you cannot convert anything to what matters to you unless you have first developed necessary and valuable skills, because otherwise you’ve got nothing to leverage.

3. But it is only when you become really good at something and have the opportunity to leverage your skills that you will face the most resistance from outside forces (family, internal struggles, your boss). In other words, at the moment when you can take    the leap and do something extraordinary, you’ll have the greatest resistance to stay complacent (in status quo), continuing on your current path.

4. What you do for your work might be a lot less important than you think. The general traits you leverage are more important than the work itself, as counterintuitive as that might appear. Cal talked about a number of things that Steve Jobs could have done and been successful at, besides starting Apple Computer. In fact, Steve Jobs was successful in leading another company: Pixar.

Case Study: Bill McKibben

To drill down to Cal’s hypothesis, Cal offered the example of one of his favorite authors: Bill McKibben. McKibben went to Harvard University, where he worked for the student newspaper, The Harvard Crimson. After a strong career at the paper (where he ended up becoming an editor), McKibben went on to write at The New Yorker. He spent six years working at The New Yorker, developing his career and honing his skills as a writer.

But then McKibben did something unexpected. Instead of taking a promotion at The New Yorker, he quit his job and moved to Adirondocak Mountains in upstate New York to write a book called End of Nature. The book became a critical success, cementing McKibben as one of the authorities on environmentalism. What’s important to realize here is that McKibben used his leverage that he developed pursuing his writing career to go out on his own. At perhaps the apex of his career, instead of choosing to continue on his path at The New Yorker, he had enough attention (and skill) to know that he can go out on his own and write this book. When he quit his job, he already had an “in” with various publishers and other notables in the publishing industry such that he could get a big advance and go out and write End of Nature. Had McKibben not paid his dues, so to speak, at The New Yorker and decided to write this book right out of Harvard, he would have probably been ignored. At the same time, McKibben faced massive resistance from those around him when he decided to go out on his own and spend time writing End of Nature.

Conclusion

The key to building a remarkable career isn’t following your passion, necessarily. It’s doing something interesting, developing valuable skills, and then leveraging your opportunities. On Saturday’s conclusion to his keynote, Cal offered this brilliant advice to the audience: Do as Steve Jobs did, not as he said.

Cal Newport has written about his experience speaking at World Domination Summit in this post.

If you are interested in this topic, then I recommend giving Cal Newport’s upcoming book So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love a closer look. It comes out in September.

Italo Calvino on Classics

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What is a classic? In his collection of essays on classical literature titled Why Read the Classics?, Italo Calvino produces the following 14 definitions of a “classic”:

  1. The classics are those books about which you usually hear people saying: ‘I’m rereading…’, never ‘I’m reading….’
  2. The Classics are those books which constitute a treasured experience for those who have read and loved them; but they remain just as rich an experience for those who reserve the chance to read them for when they are in the best condition to enjoy them.
  3. The classics are books which exercise a particular influence, both when they imprint themselves on our imagination as unforgettable, and when they hide in the layers of memory disguised as the individual’s or the collective unconscious.
  4. A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading.
  5. A classic is a book which even when we read it for the first time gives the sense of rereading something we have read before.
  6. A classic is a book which has never exhausted all it has to say to its readers.
  7. The classics are those books which come to us bearing the aura of previous interpretations, and trailing behind them the traces they have left in the culture or cultures (or just in the languages and customs) through which they have passed.
  8. A classic is a work which constantly generates a pulviscular cloud of critical discourse around it, but which always shakes the particles off.
  9. Classics are books which, the more we think we know them through hearsay, the more original, unexpected, and innovative we find them when we actually read them.
  10. A classic is the term given to any book which comes to represent the whole universe, a book on a par with ancient talismans.
  11. ‘Your’ classic is a book to which you cannot remain indifferent, and which helps you define yourself in relation or even in opposition to it.
  12. A classic is a work that comes before other classics; but those who have read other classics first immediately recognize its place in the genealogy of classic works.
  13. A classic is a work which relegates the noise of the present to a background hum, which at the same time the classics cannot exist without.
  14. A classic is a work which persists as a background noise even when a present that is totally incompatible with it holds sway.

To this day, one of my favorite books by Calvino remains Invisible Cities. If you’ve never read it, well… it’s a classic.

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(via Reddit Books)

An Interview with Aaron Paul of Breaking Bad

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For all you Breaking Bad fans out there, this is a must-read interview with Aarol Paul (the man who plays Jesse Pinkman) in GQ.

A few highlights, including this gem where we find out that Pinkman was supposed to only last one season on the show:

GQ: With Breaking Bad, I’ve heard again and again that Vince’s original intention was for you to be finished after one season. Then something happened—you were good!—and so the plan shifted. 

Aaron Paul: Well, I never knew that the original idea was to kill off Jesse. I had no idea. So my first meeting was—I mean, it was probably the sixth or seventh pilot that I read that season. First one that I went out for. But when I read it, I was like, AMC? They’re doing original programming? I thought they only played old Westerns.But it was hands-down the best pilot that I’ve ever read. In all honesty, I didn’t think it would see the light of day, because you don’t see stuff like that on TV.

This is the only way to watch the show I think: marathon…

GQ: It seemed like everyone I know sort of binged to catch up on Breaking Bad over the last year or two, and watched the whole series in one go. Do you hear from fans that they’re watching the show that way? 

Aaron Paul: All the time. People have come up to me saying, “I’ve watched all four seasons in four days.” And I’m like, “Well, that’s impossible.” But people assure me they really do it.

On working with Bryan Cranston:

GQ: You and Bryan, in interviews I’ve seen you guys do—even after the Emmys, for example [Bryan has won three for his role on BB, and Aaron has won one]—it seems that you have just an incredibly strong friendship.

Aaron Paul: We do. And I’ll be honest: I was a decent actor before. I’m not going to beat myself up, but I—you can always learn. But after working on Breaking Bad, it’s like going to an extreme acting workshop every day. Working with Bryan, he’s just—he’s on such a different level than me.

Aaron Paul is getting married. He met the girl at Coachella. His words on “knowing” when you meet the right person for you:

But you know when people say, “When you know, you know”? It was crazy. The moment that happened—even leading up to the kiss on the Ferris wheel, I couldn’t imagine myself being without her. Because just the idea of doing this all the time was such a fantasy of mine—I was like, “Wait, can this actually exist?” I don’t know—maybe this is just one those crazy, whirlwind Coachella romances that you always hear about.

Season 5 premiere is tomorrow night!

Reading the Masters

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Federico Pereiro from Argentina offers this advice: read the Masters. 

Some time ago, I came across the Wikipedia article of Niels Henrik Abel, and something there burnt its way into my mind.

Abel changed the face of mathematics, despite dying at 27. And here comes the thing – I give the mic to Wikipedia now:

When asked how he developed his mathematical abilities so rapidly, he replied “by studying the masters, not their pupils.”

By studying the masters, not their pupils.

The proposition is a bit like trying to climb a wall instead of a stair. Already I found straining to follow the gist of the textbooks of the subject I was interested – how could I deal with the masters?

Click through the post to see his suggestions on reading the Masters of Computer Science.

Americans Living Larger

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Recession? What recession? Bloomberg reports:

The percentage of new single-family homes greater than 3,000 square feet has grown by one-third in the last decade, according to data released last month by the U.S. Census Bureau. The increase has occurred even while 4.3 million homes have been foreclosed upon since January 2007, a result of the housing- bubble collapse and economic meltdown. Slightly more than 1 in 4 new homes built last year were larger than 3,000 square feet, the highest percentage since 2007.

This is even more mind-boggling:

The Census Bureau reports that the average size of a U.S. house rose in 2011 to 2,480 square feet, up from 2,392 square feet in 2010. The 2011 figure is 62.6 percent larger than the 1,525-square-foot average size in 1973.

So people are buying fewer newer homes, but when they do, they want to get that 3,000 square foot McMansion. Makes total sense.