Month: August 2013

In Praise of Laziness

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Very good piece in The Economist on disruptions, endless meetings, and pointless tasks. Many people mistake being busy for being productive, whereas they’re often not correlated!

Yet the biggest problem in the business world is not too little but too much—too many distractions and interruptions, too many things done for the sake of form, and altogether too much busy-ness. The Dutch seem to believe that an excess of meetings is the biggest devourer of time: they talk of vergaderziekte, “meeting sickness”. However, a study last year by the McKinsey Global Institute suggests that it is e-mails: it found that highly skilled office workers spend more than a quarter of each working day writing and responding to them.

Which of these banes of modern business life is worse remains open to debate. But what is clear is that office workers are on a treadmill of pointless activity. Managers allow meetings to drag on for hours. Workers generate e-mails because it requires little effort and no thought. An entire management industry exists to spin the treadmill ever faster.

All this “leaning in” is producing an epidemic of overwork, particularly in the United States. Americans now toil for eight-and-a-half hours a week more than they did in 1979. A survey last year by the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that almost a third of working adults get six hours or less of sleep a night. Another survey last year by Good Technology, a provider of secure mobile systems for businesses, found that more than 80% of respondents continue to work after leaving the office, 69% cannot go to bed without checking their inbox and 38% routinely check their work e-mails at the dinner table.

Not just business people, but everyone would be better off if they did less and thought more.

Hinge: A Dating App Developed by a Military Contractor

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The Verge reports on one John Kleint, a former military contractor who’s now switched gears and is helping develop a dating app called Hinge:

When Kleint first started working at Hinge, in a DC office not far from his old defense gig, the first challenge was understanding his new data set — tens of thousands of completely harmless Facebook users. On a good day at his old job, nobody got hurt, and now, a good day is when Hinge receives an email from two soul mates who found each other using the service. Hinge doesn’t ask the usual array of questions like “Do you believe in God?” from its users, and instead relies on pre-existing signals to make assumptions about you. Solely by examining your friends and interests, the service can predict your political leaning, your age, your sexual orientation, and your race. Kleint works on the algorithms and machine learning techniques to make it all work.

“There are certain factors that go into a stable long-term relationship, and you can infer some of those factors from your friends,” he says. “There’s no explicit equation. There’s no guessing that likes should have 20 percent weight and attraction should be 30 percent.” Picking matches is especially hard since different people have different tastes. Hinge takes the opposite approach to some dating sites like OkCupid with overt “hot or not” meters and percentage odds of being a a match. And unlike dating services that simply pair you with somebody who’s also obsessed with Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back,Hinge uses that data to learn other things about you. Kleint won’t expose Hinge’s secret sauce, but points to a study by researchers at Cambridge University who created an algorithm that correctly predicts male sexuality 88 percent of the time, and is 95 percent accurate at distinguishing between African Americans and Caucasian Americans, without ever having seen a photo.

The app is in limited release so far: Washington D.C. and New York City, primarily.

The Perils of Captivity of India’s Celebrity Elephants

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A really sad piece in this week’s New York Times Magazine profiles a few celebrity elephants in India and the perils of captivity that they endure.

The captivity of elephants in south India goes back thousands of years. At first their use was mostly practical — tanks in wartime, timber forklifts in peacetime. In Kerala, elephants have been status symbols since the feudal era, and today most of its captive elephants are owned by private individuals. And it’s the only state in India where elephants are widely used for temple festivals. When or why this tradition started is unknown — no scripture commands it — but you can imagine how it may have happened: elephants were housed at temples between battles and were gradually integrated into religious festivities. Eventually, as soldiers and loggers replaced their elephants with machines, festivals became the best way owners could turn a profit on such high-maintenance animals.

Celebrity elephants in India.

Celebrity elephants in India.

Twenty years ago, Kerala elephants would appear only at whatever festivals were within walking distance, and few elephants were famous. Now they’re trucked all over the state to the highest bidder, the price driven up every year by the enthusiasms of the superfans who form associations to honor their favorite animals, urge festival organizers to feature them and trash-talk the competition. “You call that an elephant?” they write on their rivals’ Facebook pages. “Go tie him up in the cow barn.” The fans are especially concerned with what’s called lakshanam — a term that elephantspotlight.com defines as “the sexy features of the elephants.” A fan named Sujith told me: “The ivory should be clean white. The tail should be like a brush, and the trunk should reach the ground.” (Sujith’s own favorite elephant, he said, was out of commission this season: he was hit in the hind legs by an S.U.V.)

Celebrity elephants at a festival in India.

Celebrity elephants at a festival in India.

Although most elephant festivals in India are Hindu, Kerala is unusual in that its population is a quarter Muslim and a fifth Christian, and those faiths have jumped on the elephant bandwagon, too. At a Muslim festival I went to, rowdy young men rode up and down the road throwing confetti from the 60-odd elephants they rented — some of the same elephants that carried idols at Hindu temples the day before.

There is a conflict among India’s population on what should be done to protect these elephants:

…the solution to the harm inflicted on and by elephants is self-evident: their captivity should be banned — or at the very least, elephants should no longer be used in festivals. Tradition or not, they’re wild animals that belong in the forest. But Raman Sukumar, the founder of the Asian Nature Conservation Foundation and perhaps the world’s leading expert on Asian elephants, says it isn’t that simple. Asian elephants have been on the endangered-species list since 1986, yet contrary to trends nearly everywhere else in the world, the wild-elephant population in southern India has actually been increasing over the past several decades, with elephants now living in places where they hadn’t been spotted for hundreds of years. The trouble with this is that deforestation and booming human populations have shrunk and fragmented their habitats, which means elephants are increasingly coming into conflict with humans — raiding crops, running amok in forest villages. Thirty years ago, Sukumar told me, wild elephants killed around 150 people a year across India. Today it’s closer to 500. When wild elephants exceed the capacity of their habitats, the only alternative to capturing them is culling them, which is to say, shooting them dead.

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Additional reading:

1) This excellent 2006 New York Times piece titled “An Elephant Crackup?” which highlights how elephants have become more violent, prone to attacking villages and humans.

2) George Orwell’s classic essay “Shooting an Elephant.” One of my favorite works by Orwell outside of 1984.

The New York Times Reviews The Art of Sleeping Alone

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The New York Times reviews Sophie Fontanel’s memoir The Art of Sleeping Alone, and it is filled with wonderful, caustic zingers like this:

The first thing to say about “The Art of Sleeping Alone” is that it’s very French. It’s slim, chic and humorless, that is, a sophisticated bagatelle of a volume, filled with detours to exotic locales: the Sahara, Goa in India, the Greek island of Hydra.

It’s also gauzy and episodic and not particularly well written, yet it drifts along on a kind of existential bearnaise of its own secreting. It’s “Bonjour Tristesse” grown bruised, older, warier.

The book appears to be awkward, with a number of non sequiturs:

The opposite of experience is innocence, of course, and in “The Art of Sleeping Alone,” the author often longs to retreat from the adult world into one that can resemble childhood. She wants her life to be “soft and fluffy.” She wishes to be “the girl I’d been years before.”

At night, she hugs her clean pillows as if they were stuffed animals. When she sees a kind father with his children, she thinks, “Who had adored me like that since my parents?”

She takes long lavender milk baths, baths that are no longer just about the “Silkwood”-style scrubbing of the smell of men from her body. “I felt as if some divinity were rejoicing in me,” she writes. “Until then, water had been only a useful element, like the showers, for example, into which I rushed to cleanse myself of a presence after having let myself get caught.”

I am definitely NOT putting this one on my reading list.

Ellen Huerta on Leaving Google

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A raw, honest, beautiful post by Ellen Huerta on what it was like working in a well-paying, cushioned job at Google, and what it was like to bite the bullet and quit:

And then, as my month off came to an end, I decided on a whim to go to Joshua Tree for New Year’s with one of my close college friends, her boyfriend and a collection of their friends who lived in LA. As we were huddled around the campfire before midnight, in 20 degree weather, one of their friends began to ask me about myself. Almost everyone there was an artist of some sort, so I remember feeling shy about the fact I worked at a huge tech company. It was almost like admitting I worked for the IRS. He asked what I did for work and how long I’d been doing it and I told him. His response was, ‘So you must really like it then to be there for so long. What about it? What’s it like?’ It felt like so many questions, so intrusive, but he was just being conversational. I remember saying something nice (most likely I said ‘the people are great’ which is true), but I remember feeling defensive, like I was being tested. In reality, that was all in my head, but that was my light going off…for the first time I was recognizing inauthenticity in myself. I couldn’t stand it.

After that conversation, I wandered away from the campfire for a few minutes to get a better look at the stars. The moon had never looked so big. I could hear old school hip hop from our camp in the distance, but I was surrounded by absolutely nothing and no one, and I felt free in the universe. It was that moment that I realized I was truly free to do whatever I wanted in this world and it was completely up to me to make it happen. It was my life, and I had to stop caring what people thought about it. If I wanted to bake, I should. If I wanted to write, I should. If I wanted to start a company, I should. If I wanted to do nothing, I should. If I wanted to fuck up for once, I should. I was probably only out there for a few minutes before someone tapped my shoulder to go back to the fire (it was so cold that night your pee froze as soon as it hit the ground), but it felt like an eternity. Maybe I would have reached this conclusion had I stayed in San Francisco, but I really believe it was the magic of being nowhere that did it. Being nowhere forced me to stay silent long enough to hear what I hadn’t wanted to admit: I wasn’t living authentically. When I returned to work, I gave my notice immediately.

The key: authenticity.

What kind of leap will you be making this week?

 

How Facebook is Making us Lonely and Unhappy

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What is the connection with being active on social networks and being lonely? A lot more than you think. Watch this video below titled “The Innovation of Loneliness”:

 

Beautifully done. And I hope you didn’t miss the underlying message. It’s even more pernicious than that: not only are we becoming more lonely with  frequent use of Facebook, we’re also feeling terrible about it as a consequence.

Debunked: “Right-Brain” vs. “Left-Brain” Personalities

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For years in popular culture, the terms “left-brained” and “right-brained” have come to signify disparate personality types, with an assumption that some people use the right side of their brain more, (those who are supposedly more creative/artistic) while some use the left side more (those who are more logical/analytical). But newly released research findings from University of Utah neuroscientists assert that there is no evidence within brain imaging that indicates some people are right-brained or left-brained:

Following a two-year study, University of Utah researchers have debunked that myth through identifying specific networks in the left and right brain that process lateralized functions. Lateralization of brain function means that there are certain mental processes that are mainly specialized to one of the brain’s left or right hemispheres. During the course of the study, researchers analyzed resting brain scans of 1,011 people between the ages of seven and 29. In each person, they studied functional lateralization of the brain measured for thousands of brain regions — finding no relationship that individuals preferentially use their left -brain network or right- brain network more often.

Following a two-year study, University of Utah researchers have debunked that myth through identifying specific networks in the left and right brain that process lateralized functions. Lateralization of brain function means that there are certain mental processes that are mainly specialized to one of the brain’s left or right hemispheres. During the course of the study, researchers analyzed resting brain scans of 1,011 people between the ages of seven and 29. In each person, they studied functional lateralization of the brain measured for thousands of brain regions — finding no relationship that individuals preferentially use their left -brain network or right- brain network more often.

“It’s absolutely true that some brain functions occur in one or the other side of the brain. Language tends to be on the left, attention more on the right. But people don’t tend to have a stronger left- or right-sided brain network. It seems to be determined more connection by connection, ” said Jeff Anderson, M.D., Ph.D., lead author of the study, which is formally titled “An Evaluation of the Left-Brain vs. Right-Brain Hypothesis with Resting State Functional Connectivity Magnetic Resonance Imaging.” It is published in the journal PLOS ONE this month.

From the paper’s abstract:

Lateralized brain regions subserve functions such as language and visuospatial processing. It has been conjectured that individuals may be left-brain dominant or right-brain dominant based on personality and cognitive style, but neuroimaging data has not provided clear evidence whether such phenotypic differences in the strength of left-dominant or right-dominant networks exist. We evaluated whether strongly lateralized connections covaried within the same individuals. Data were analyzed from publicly available resting state scans for 1011 individuals between the ages of 7 and 29. For each subject, functional lateralization was measured for each pair of 7266 regions covering the gray matter at 5-mm resolution as a difference in correlation before and after inverting images across the midsagittal plane. The difference in gray matter density between homotopic coordinates was used as a regressor to reduce the effect of structural asymmetries on functional lateralization. Nine left- and 11 right-lateralized hubs were identified as peaks in the degree map from the graph of significantly lateralized connections. The left-lateralized hubs included regions from the default mode network (medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex, and temporoparietal junction) and language regions (e.g., Broca Area and Wernicke Area), whereas the right-lateralized hubs included regions from the attention control network (e.g., lateral intraparietal sulcus, anterior insula, area MT, and frontal eye fields). Left- and right-lateralized hubs formed two separable networks of mutually lateralized regions. Connections involving only left- or only right-lateralized hubs showed positive correlation across subjects, but only for connections sharing a node. Lateralization of brain connections appears to be a local rather than global property of brain networks, and our data are not consistent with a whole-brain phenotype of greater “left-brained” or greater “right-brained” network strength across individuals. Small increases in lateralization with age were seen, but no differences in gender were observed.

So while there are more creative/artistic people in the world, this study purports that the active parts of the brain do not account for said personality traits. You learn something new every day, right?

When They Can’t Lay You Off, Employers in Japan Send You to Boredom Rooms

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What happens if you’re working in Japan and a company wants to lay you off, and offers you a lucrative early retirement or severance deal? Well, if you choose not to accept the terms, the company has no right to fire you. So what they’ll do instead is send you to work in a so-called “Boredom Room.”

In Japan, lifetime employment has long been the norm and where large-scale layoffs remain a social taboo, at least at Japan’s largest corporations like Sony. The New York Times profiles one man who’s chosen to go into the Boredom Room and spend his workday there: reading college textbooks, surfing the Internet, and who knows what else.

Sony said it was not doing anything wrong in placing employees in what it calls Career Design Rooms. Employees are given counseling to find new jobs in the Sony group, or at another company, it said. Sony also said that it offered workers early retirement packages that are generous by American standards: in 2010, it promised severance payments equivalent to as much as 54 months of pay. But the real point of the rooms is to make employees feel forgotten and worthless — and eventually so bored and shamed that they just quit, critics say.

Labor practices in Japan contrast sharply with those in the United States, where companies are quick to lay off workers when demand slows or a product becomes obsolete. It is cruel to the worker, but it usually gives the overall economy agility. 

However, and this is a point worth emphasizing: critics say the real point of the boredoom rooms is to make employees feel forgotten and worthless — and eventually get so bored and shamed that they just quit.

Read the entire story here.

Can an Alligator Run the Hundred Meter Hurdles?

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Gary Marcus, writing in The New Yorker, offers a summary of why artificial intelligence isn’t so intelligent (and has a long way to go to catch up with the human brain). He focuses on the research of Hector Levesque, who is a critic of the modern A.I.:

In a terrific paper just presented at the premier international conference on artificial intelligence, Levesque, a University of Toronto computer scientist who studies these questions, has taken just about everyone in the field of A.I. to task. He argues that his colleagues have forgotten about the “intelligence” part of artificial intelligence.

Levesque starts with a critique of Alan Turing’s famous “Turing test,” in which a human, through a question-and-answer session, tries to distinguish machines from people. You’d think that if a machine could pass the test, we could safely conclude that the machine was intelligent. But Levesque argues that the Turing test is almost meaningless, because it is far too easy to game. Every year, a number of machines compete in the challenge for real, seeking something called the Loebner Prize. But the winners aren’t genuinely intelligent; instead, they tend to be more like parlor tricks, and they’re almost inherently deceitful. If a person asks a machine “How tall are you?” and the machine wants to win the Turing test, it has no choice but to confabulate. It has turned out, in fact, that the winners tend to use bluster and misdirection far more than anything approximating true intelligence. One program worked by pretending to be paranoid; others have done well by tossing off one-liners that distract interlocutors. The fakery involved in most efforts at beating the Turing test is emblematic: the real mission of A.I. ought to be building intelligence, not building software that is specifically tuned toward fixing some sort of arbitrary test.

The crux, it seems to me, is how machines interpret the subtleties of human communication and how we talk. Marcus offers the following example in which a substitute of one word yields disparate answers:

The large ball crashed right through the table because it was made of Styrofoam. What was made of Styrofoam? (The alternative formulation replaces Stryrofoam with steel.)

a) The large ball
b) The table

Continuing, he explains:

These examples, which hinge on the linguistic phenomenon known as anaphora, are hard both because they require common sense—which still eludes machines—and because they get at things people don’t bother to mention on Web pages, and that don’t end up in giant data sets.

More broadly, they are instances of what I like to call the Long-Tail Problem: common questions can often be answered simply by trawling the Web, but rare questions can still stymie all the resources of a whole Web full of Big Data. Most A.I. programs are in trouble if what they’re looking for is not spelled out explicitly on a Web page. This is part of the reason for Watson’s most famous gaffe—mistaking Toronto for a city in the United States.

Levesque’s paper is short and easily accessible for the layman.

How New York City Has Changed During the Bloomberg Administration

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The New York Times has a fascinating interactive this weekend showing how the city of New York has transformed in ten years during the Michael Bloomberg administration as mayor.

Since Bloomberg took office, New York City has added 40,000 new buildings.

Below is a comparison of the NYC downtown skyline from 2002 and 2013:

NYC in 2002

 

NYC in 2013

In addition to a major initiative to rezone the city, Bloomberg helped establish more than 450 miles of bike lanes around the city.

Bike Lanes in NYC

I highly encourage you to check out the entire interactive.