links of the day

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.

Jesse Eisenberg Should Stick to Acting

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Your mileage may vary, but Jesse Eisenberg’s short story titled “A SHORT STORY WRITTEN WITH THOUGHT-TO-TEXT TECHNOLOGY” published in The New Yorker is a clunker. I think he should stick to acting, thank you very much.

Jesus, I’ve written another loser.

…

That barista keeps looking at me. She’ll probably ask me to leave if I don’t buy something. She’s kind of attractive. Not her hair—her hair seems stringy—but her face is nice. I should really buy something.

Their divorce was remarkably amicable. In fact, John would often tell his parents, “Rebecca and I are better friends now than when we were married!” In fact, John looked forward to the days when he and Rebecca, with their new partners, would reminisce about their marriage, seeing it in a positive light, like two mature adults.

Maybe I’ll just get a pumpkin-spice loaf. That way I can still sit here without going through a whole production of buying a coffee and giving my name and feeling like an asshole while it gets made.

…

I’ll say something cool, like “The coffee’s not the only thing hot in here.” And she’ll probably be like, “I get off at seven.” And I’ll probably say something like “I don’t have a real job, so any time’s good for me.” Jesus, who am I kidding? I’m a loser. She would never like me. Even a stringy-haired barista with a slutty back tattoo would never like me.

Can you convince me the merit of the piece in the comments? Because I didn’t find it interesting or funny!

On Growing Up Feeling Unattractive

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In a post titled “I Was Not a Pretty Child,” Hannah Dale Thompson reflects on what it was like growing up feeling unattractive and being made fun of by peers:

Being unattractive in your youth forces you to develop positive personality traits. That’s why comedians are not sexy. Relying on something other than appearance for attention breeds a larger-than-life personality. It breeds a confidence that is more than superficial. It breeds humor, and a social awareness and empathy that, I think, can only be developed from the outside. I am more charismatic, confident, interesting, and funny because I was an ugly sixteen-year-old. I am slightly less superficial and marginally more open-minded. I can stand up for myself. Three days after the best first date I have ever been on, my half-drunk suitor called to tell me I have more moxie than anyone else he’s ever met. I am proud of all of these things; people should take pride in overcoming obstacles and developing better personality traits. Even if the obstacles involve bushy eyebrows and the personality bonus leads to self-diagnosed histrionic personality disorder.

…

Being unattractive in your youth separates you from even the other awkward, unattractive kids. I never had a real date to a high school dance. The entire concept of “Sadie Hawkins” terrified me. I never made anyone’s “top five girls” list. I never made anybody’s “girls” list. By the age of eighteen, I had approximately zero experience with games or manipulation or difficult social interaction. 

It’s interesting to read about how she developed as a person as she grew more attractive in her twenties:

Sometime around my twentieth birthday, I became reasonably good-looking. I started dating lawyers and financiers in their late twenties and early thirties. I became the kind of girl other women approach. I live with a model. All of my friends are beautiful and interesting. If I’m being very honest, I’m always a little angry when I have to purchase my own drink. At the grocery store last November, a boy who was mercilessly cruel to me in high school approached my mom and told her that he was “sorry for being so mean to HD in high school” because he “saw on Facebook” that I was “pretty hot now.” My mother, God bless her, pointed out to him the ridiculousness of that apology.

But what of friendship?

Women my age, particularly the bright-young-thing-in-a-big-city set that I am lucky to be a part of, are inundated with advice. About sex, careers, feminism, children, boyfriends, hook-ups, grad school. Lean in, but not too far. You can do anything a man can do, as long as you’re well put-together and relatively inoffensive. Ask for more, but don’t get cocky. No one tells women my age about the importance of friendship.

In the end, these two sentences dig deep:

This wound is new, but feels familiar. It’s something I remember being used to.

I’ve gotten used to being ignored as well…

E-Books vs. Lattes vs. Cigarettes

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A premise in this thoughtful essay by Kaya Genç on the trade-offs between buying coffee or books: What would George Orwell choose: e-books or lattes?

Kaya lives in Istanbul, Turkey where international editions of books and magazine subscriptions are more expensive than the digital counterparts. Upgrading to an e-book reader last year, there are lamentations of this sort:

In the good, old, and expensive days of literary shopping I would choose books from the shelves, walk to the counter, pay in cash, and head to a coffee shop with my purchases — the favorite ritual of my teenage years. I would open the first book’s cover, accompanied by a cigarette and a cup of strong Turkish coffee. These would always be very physical experiences: I remember the crinkling pages, the waft of the smoke, the oils of the coffee. Afterward my hands smelled of nicotine; my mind hungered for more books.

Lately, however, this ritual has all but disappeared from my life. My reading materials have been thoroughly digitized. I have lost touch with both the printed book and the banknote. In the long chronicle of my reading habits I am currently living through the age of the .EPUB file and the plastic card. It is a chilly period, I must admit, a dark age, and at times it makes me yearn for the good old days of my undergraduate life. 

Citing Orwell’s Books v. Cigarettes essay, who pinpointed his spending habits on books vs. cigarettes:

To fully estimate his reading expenses he added to the sum the cost of newspapers and periodicals. Orwell typically read two daily papers, an evening paper, two Sunday papers, a weekly magazine, and “one or two” monthly magazines. He added these and the cost of his library subscriptions. In the end he concluded that his “total reading expenses over the past fifteen years have been in the neighbourhood of £25 a year.”

In contrast, he had spent £40 a year on cigarettes. His reading habit was cheaper than his smoking one. The workers had had little reason to complain about the cost of books, he decided. If they were not reading literature it was probably because they found books boring — not because they couldn’t afford them.

In the similar vein, Kaya calculates how much money he spends on coffee vs. e-books:

My e-reading expenditures, then, cost me around $385 — less than my coffee expenditures for the same period, which were in the neighborhood of $1,800. My e-reading habit thus costs only a fifth of my drinking one (maybe a little more when I’m not working on a novel). For every dollar I spent on the likes of Tolstoy I spent four on coffee beans.   

An exercise for the reader: do you spend more on coffee or books/e-books? I will update this post when I finish my own calculations for the year 2013…

How Climate Change is Changing the Taste of Fuji Apples

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Fuji apples were, once upon a time, perhaps the most delicious apples you could sink your teeth into. However, these days the Fuji apples just aren’t quite hitting the spot like they used to, and we might never see them reach their former glory again.

By comparing samples of modern-day Fujis to similar studies from the 70s, a team of researchers has discovered that the formerly glorious Fuji has recently grown substantially mealier and has a lower flavor concentration. The likely culprit? Climate change. Per the abstract:

The effects of climate change on the taste and textural attributes of foods remain largely unknown, despite much public interest. On the basis of 30–40 years of records, we provide evidence that the taste and textural attributes of apples have changed as a result of recent global warming. Decreases in both acid concentration, fruit firmness and watercore development were observed regardless of the maturity index used for harvest date (e.g., calendar date, number of days after full bloom, peel colour and starch concentration), whereas in some cases the soluble-solids concentration increased; all such changes may have resulted from earlier blooming and higher temperatures during the maturation period. These results suggest that the qualities of apples in the market are undergoing long-term changes.

Interesting.

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(via Smithsonian Magazine)