Month: February 2014

Happy 10th Birthday, Facebook

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Today is the 10th anniversary of the founding of Facebook. The social network has come a long way, and in a blog post, Mark Zuckerberg reflects on its trajectory from a Harvard-only network to the worldwide use of it today:

When I reflect on the last 10 years, one question I ask myself is: why were we the ones to build this? We were just students. We had way fewer resources than big companies. If they had focused on this problem, they could have done it. 

The only answer I can think of is: we just cared more. 

While some doubted that connecting the world was actually important, we were building. While others doubted that this would be sustainable, you were forming lasting connections. 

We just cared more about connecting the world than anyone else. And we still do today.

That last sentence? I believe it was true at the time, but it’s no longer as applicable. Today, as a public corporation, the customers/users are less important that the big shareholders. The biggest evidence I see of this is the repeated pronouncements by users who say their content is viewed/shared less after Facebook tweaked its algorithms. But, if you are willing to pay a few dollars, Facebook will make sure to show your posts in your fans’ news feed. That’s a far cry from really caring about caring to connect the world, if what I have to share/say with my friends/fans literally comes at a price.

 

Before Laika: the Soviet Space Dogs

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This is a very interesting post on Medium about the dogs the Soviets sent into space in the 1950s:

While the US test rocket programme used monkeys, about two thirds of whom died, dogs were chosen by the Soviets for their ability to withstand long periods of inactivity, and were trained extensively before they flew. Only stray female dogs were used because it was thought they’d be better able to cope with the extreme stress of spaceflight, and the bubble-helmeted spacesuits designed for the programme were equipped with a device to collect feces and urine that only worked with females.

Training included standing still for long periods, wearing the spacesuits, being confined in increasingly small boxes for 15-20 days at a time, riding in centrifuges to simulate the high acceleration of launch, and being placed in machines that simulated the vibrations and loud noises of a rocket.

The first pair of dogs to travel to space were Dezik and Tsygan (“Gypsy”), who made it to 110km on 22 July 1951 and were recovered, unharmed by their ordeal, the next day. Dezik returned to space in September 1951 with a dog named Lisa, but neither survived the journey. After Dezik’s death, Tsygan was adopted by Anatoli Blagronravov, a physician who later worked closely with the United States at the height of the Cold War to promote international cooperation on spaceflight.

They were followed by Smelaya (“Brave”), who defied her name by running away the day before her launch was scheduled. She was found the next morning, however, and made a successful flight with Malyshka (“Babe”). Another runaway was Bolik, who successfully escaped a few days before her flight in September 1951. Her replacement was ignomoniously named ZIB — the Russian acronym for “Substitute for Missing Bolik”, and was a street dog found running around the barracks where the tests were being conducted. Despite being untrained for the mission, he made a successful flight and returned to Earth unharmed.

A good piece of trivia from the piece: Laika wasn’t the original name for the most famous of Russian space dogs; it was named Kudryavka (Russian: Кудрявка, meaning Little Curly) before its name was changed.

Can You Tickle Yourself If You Swap Bodies With Someone?

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The short answer is no. According to latest research, summarized here:

A popular, long-standing theory posits that the self-tickle failure occurs because of the way that the brain cancels out sensations caused by its own movements. To do this, so the theory states, the brain uses the motor command underlying a given action to make a prediction of the likely sensory consequences of that action. When incoming sensory information matches the prediction, it’s recognised as self-generated and cancelled.

If this explanation is true, then any situations that confuse the brain’s ability to predict the sensory consequences of its own actions should scupper the sensory cancellation process, thereby making self-tickling a possibility. George Van Doorn and his colleagues have put this principle to the test in dramatic fashion. They measured the potential for self-tickling in 23 participants who underwent a body-swap illusion.

The experimental set-up involved each participant sitting opposite the experimenter. The participant wore a pair of goggles that displayed a video feed from a camera that was either placed forward-facing on the participant’s own head (giving them a conventional first-person perspective), or was positioned forward-facing on the experimenter’s head, thus giving the participant a view from the experimenter’s perspective and provoking a body-swap illusion.

During both of these camera arrangements, the participant and experimenter each held one end of a wooden rod with foam at each end. The participant either moved the rod rhythmically with their right hand, causing the foam to rub against their own left palm (potentially causing self-tickling), and the experimenter’s left palm. Or, the experimenter was the one who moved the rod, causing the foam to rub against’s participant’s left palm (i.e. potential for tickling by another person) and his own left palm.

During the body-swap illusion, the participants said they felt the sensation of the foam, not where their real hand was located, but at the position of the experimenter’s hand. Given the illusion, they perceived this to be their own hand, even though it looked like someone else’s. Crucially, even in this strange situation, the participants were still unable to tickle themselves if they were the ones moving the rod (they felt the foam, but it didn’t tickle). They felt much more of tickling sensation when it was the experimenter who moved the rod.

The classic theory for why we can’t tickle ourselves is unable to explain why tickling is still not possible even in such extreme illusory contexts when the brain’s ability to predict the sensory outcomes of its actions is thrown into disarray. Moreover, self-tickling was still not experienced even in variations of the experimental setup, in which the body-swap illusion was combined with the “rubber hand illusion” and the movement of the foam was felt in a baseball bat viewed from the experimenter’s perspective!

 

RIP, Phillip Seymour Hoffman

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The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times are reporting that Phillip Seymour Hoffman has died, reportedly from a drug overdose. What a sad day, a giant loss, one of the best actors of his generations.

Worth reading today, this 2008 profile of the actor in New York Times Magazine “A Higher Calling”:

From his first roles in movies like “Scent of a Woman,” in which he played a villainous prep-school student, to the lovesick Scotty J. in “Boogie Nights,” to the passionate and ornery rock critic Lester Bangs in “Almost Famous,” Hoffman has imbued all his characters with a combination of the familiar and the unique. It’s not easy; it’s the sort of acting that requires enormous range, as well as a kind of stubborn determination and a profound lack of vanity. In the theater, Hoffman finds refuge in being part of a community. Theater presents considerable difficulties — Hoffman said his most challenging role for the stage was as Jamie Tyrone in “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” on Broadway (“That nearly killed me”). But when he speaks about his work in films, Hoffman’s struggles sound lonelier: his childhood dream was to be on the stage, and the fulfillment of that fantasy seems to mitigate some of the strain Hoffman experiences when he is acting.

“In my mid-20s, an actor told me, ‘Acting ain’t no puzzle,’ ” Hoffman said, after returning to his seat. “I thought: ‘Ain’t no puzzle?!?’ You must be bad!” He laughed. “You must be really bad, because it is a puzzle. Creating anything is hard. It’s a cliché thing to say, but every time you start a job, you just don’t know anything. I mean, I can break something down, but ultimately I don’t know anything when I start work on a new movie. You start stabbing out, and you make a mistake, and it’s not right, and then you try again and again. The key is you have to commit. And that’s hard because you have to find what it is you are committing to.”

For all of his struggles, Hoffman works a lot — he’s a very active co-artistic director of the LAByrinth Theater Company, a multicultural collective in New York that specializes in new American plays. LAB mounted five productions last year, thanks in large part to Hoffman’s diligent involvement with every aspect of the process, from fund-raising to directing to acting. “I’ve seen him tear tickets and seat people at LAB productions,” said John Patrick Shanley, the writer and director of “Doubt” and himself a LAB company member. In his 17-year-long career, Hoffman has also made more than 40 films, including “Doubt,” for which he has been nominated for a Golden Globe as best supporting actor, and “Synecdoche, New York,” which was also released this year. “Synecdoche,” which was written and directed by Charlie Kaufman, is a hugely ambitious film that deals with death and art and how they come to inform one another. Hoffman plays a theater director, Caden Cotard, who wins a MacArthur and uses the prize money to begin an autobiographical play so enormous that it swallows his actual life. The movie is, as Manohla Dargis wrote in her glowing review in The Times, “about . . . the search for an authentic self in an unauthentic world.” The plot may get murky and the worlds within worlds (within worlds) are often confusing, but the film lingers in your memory, largely because of Hoffman’s performance. As he grows old, disintegrates, misses romantic connections and suffers loss after loss in pursuit of his artistic vision, Hoffman remains the emotional center of the film.

A torturous soul, he reflected on the art of acting being the same:

But that deep kind of love comes at a price: for me, acting is torturous, and it’s torturous because you know it’s a beautiful thing. I was young once, and I said, That’s beautiful and I want that. Wanting it is easy, but trying to be great — well, that’s absolutely torturous.

RIP, Phillip Seymour Hoffman.

The One Interview Question That Truly Matters

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According to Lou Adler, the following interview question is the most important one to ask in order to gain insight about a candidate. According to Adler, it took more than ten years of trial and error to reach this consensus:

What single project or task would you consider your most significant accomplishment in your career to date?

And the explanation:

To see why this simple question is so powerful, imagine you’re the candidate and I’ve just asked you this question. What accomplishment would you select?

Then imagine that over the course of the next 15-20 minutes I asked you the following follow-up questions. How would you respond?

  • Can you give me a detailed overview of the accomplishment?
  • Tell me about the company, your title, your position, your role, and the team involved.
  • What were the actual results achieved?
  • When did it take place and how long did the project take?
  • Why were you chosen?
  • What were the 3-4 biggest challenges you faced and how did you deal with them?
  • Where did you go the extra mile or take the initiative?
  • Walk me through the plan, how you managed it, and its measured success.
  • Describe the environment and resources.
  • Explain your manager’s style and whether you liked it.
  • What were the technical skills needed to accomplish the objective and how were they used?
  • What were some of the biggest mistakes you made?
  • What aspects of the project did you truly enjoy?
  • What aspects did you not especially care about and how did you handle them?
  • Give examples of how you managed and influenced others.
  • How did you change and grow as a person?
  • What you would do differently if you could do it again?
  • What type of formal recognition did your receive?

With an accomplishment big enough, and answers detailed enough to fill 20 minutes, this one line of questioning can tell an interviewer everything he or she needs to know about a candidate. The insight gained is remarkable. But the real secret ingredient is not the question; that’s just a setup. The most important elements are the details underlying the accomplishment. This is what real interviewing is about — delving into the details.

My favorite question when I do interviews: what have you built? Describe it.