Category Archives: Idea Soup

Arts and Letters, Idea Soup

Heard the One About the Physicist and the Fashion Model?

You could be forgiven for mistakenly assuming this story to be a work of pop fiction from the colorful and restless minds of Quentin Tarrantino or the Coen brothers. But in another example of life mirroring art, it’s all true.

From the New York Times:

In November 2011, Paul Frampton, a theoretical particle physicist, met Denise Milani, a Czech bikini model, on the online dating site Mate1.com. She was gorgeous — dark-haired and dark-eyed, with a supposedly natural DDD breast size. In some photos, she looked tauntingly steamy; in others, she offered a warm smile. Soon, Frampton and Milani were chatting online nearly every day. Frampton would return home from campus — he’d been a professor in the physics and astronomy department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for 30 years — and his computer would buzz. “Are you there, honey?” They’d chat on Yahoo Messenger for a while, and then he’d go into the other room to take care of something. A half-hour later, there was the familiar buzz. It was always Milani. “What are you doing now?”

Frampton had been very lonely since his divorce three years earlier; now it seemed those days were over. Milani told him she was longing to change her life. She was tired, she said, of being a “glamour model,” of posing in her bikini on the beach while men ogled her. She wanted to settle down, have children. But she worried what he thought of her. “Do you think you could ever be proud of someone like me?” Of course he could, he assured her.

Frampton tried to get Milani to talk on the phone, but she always demurred. When she finally agreed to meet him in person, she asked him to come to La Paz, Bolivia, where she was doing a photo shoot. On Jan. 7, 2012, Frampton set out for Bolivia via Toronto and Santiago, Chile. At 68, he dreamed of finding a wife to bear him children — and what a wife. He pictured introducing her to his colleagues. One thing worried him, though. She had told him that men hit on her all the time. How did that acclaim affect her? Did it go to her head? But he remembered how comforting it felt to be chatting with her, like having a companion in the next room. And he knew she loved him. She’d said so many times.

Frampton didn’t plan on a long trip. He needed to be back to teach. So he left his car at the airport. Soon, he hoped, he’d be returning with Milani on his arm. The first thing that went wrong was that the e-ticket Milani sent Frampton for the Toronto-Santiago leg of his journey turned out to be invalid, leaving him stranded in the Toronto airport for a full day. Frampton finally arrived in La Paz four days after he set out. He hoped to meet Milani the next morning, but by then she had been called away to another photo shoot in Brussels. She promised to send him a ticket to join her there, so Frampton, who had checked into the Eva Palace Hotel, worked on a physics paper while he waited for it to arrive. He and Milani kept in regular contact. A ticket to Buenos Aires eventually came, with the promise that another ticket to Brussels was on the way. All Milani asked was that Frampton do her a favor: bring her a bag that she had left in La Paz.

While in Bolivia, Frampton corresponded with an old friend, John Dixon, a physicist and lawyer who lives in Ontario. When Frampton explained what he was up to, Dixon became alarmed. His warnings to Frampton were unequivocal, Dixon told me not long ago, still clearly upset: “I said: ‘Well, inside that suitcase sewn into the lining will be cocaine. You’re in big trouble.’ Paul said, ‘I’ll be careful, I’ll make sure there isn’t cocaine in there and if there is, I’ll ask them to remove it.’ I thought they were probably going to kidnap him and torture him to get his money. I didn’t know he didn’t have money. I said, ‘Well, you’re going to be killed, Paul, so whom should I contact when you disappear?’ And he said, ‘You can contact my brother and my former wife.’ ” Frampton later told me that he shrugged off Dixon’s warnings about drugs as melodramatic, adding that he rarely pays attention to the opinions of others.

On the evening of Jan. 20, nine days after he arrived in Bolivia, a man Frampton describes as Hispanic but whom he didn’t get a good look at handed him a bag out on the dark street in front of his hotel. Frampton was expecting to be given an Hermès or a Louis Vuitton, but the bag was an utterly commonplace black cloth suitcase with wheels. Once he was back in his room, he opened it. It was empty. He wrote to Milani, asking why this particular suitcase was so important. She told him it had “sentimental value.” The next morning, he filled it with his dirty laundry and headed to the airport.

Frampton flew from La Paz to Buenos Aires, crossing the border without incident. He says that he spent the next 40 hours in Ezeiza airport, without sleeping, mainly “doing physics” and checking his e-mail regularly in hopes that an e-ticket to Brussels would arrive. But by the time the ticket materialized, Frampton had gotten a friend to send him a ticket to Raleigh. He had been gone for 15 days and was ready to go home. Because there was always the chance that Milani would come to North Carolina and want her bag, he checked two bags, his and hers, and went to the gate. Soon he heard his name called over the loudspeaker. He thought it must be for an upgrade to first class, but when he arrived at the airline counter, he was greeted by several policemen. Asked to identify his luggage — “That’s my bag,” he said, “the other one’s not my bag, but I checked it in” — he waited while the police tested the contents of a package found in the “Milani” suitcase. Within hours, he was under arrest.

Read the entire article following the jump.

Image: Paul Frampton, theoretical physicist.Courtesy of Wikipedia.

Idea Soup, tD

The United States: Land of the Creative and the Crazy

It’s unlikely that you would find many people who would argue against the notion that the United States is truly the most creative and innovative nation; from art to basic scientific research, from music to engineering, from theoretical physics to food science, from genetic studies and medicine to movies. And yet perplexingly, the nation continues to yearn for its wild, pioneering past, rather than inventing a brighter and more civilized future. To many outsiders the many contradictions that make up the United States are a source laughter and much incredulity. The recent news out of South Dakota shows why.

[div class=attrib]From the New York Times:[end-div]

Gov. Dennis Daugaard of South Dakota on Friday signed into law a bill that would allow teachers to carry guns in the classroom.

While some other states have provisions in their gun laws that make it possible for teachers to be armed, South Dakota is believed to be the first state to pass a law that specifically allows teachers to carry firearms.

About two dozen states have proposed similar bills since the shootings in December at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., but all of them have stalled.

Supporters say that the measure signed by Mr. Daugaard, a Republican, is important in a rural state like South Dakota, where some schools are many miles away from emergency responders.

Opponents, which have included the state school board association and teachers association, say this is a rushed measure that does not make schools safer.

The law says that school districts may choose to allow a school employee, hired security officer or volunteer to serve as a “sentinel” who can carry a firearm in the school. The law does not require school districts to do this.

Mr. Daugaard said he was comfortable with the law because it gave school districts the right to choose whether they wanted armed individuals in schools, and that those who were armed would have to undergo firearms training similar to what law enforcement officers received.

“I think it does provide the same safety precautions that a citizen expects when a law enforcement officer enters onto a premises,” Mr. Daugaard said in an interview. But he added that he did not think that many school districts would end up taking advantage of the measure.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article after the jump.[end-div]

Idea Soup

Txt-Speak: Linguistic Scourge or Beautiful New Language?

OMG! DYK wot Ur Teen is txtng?

[tube]yoF2vdLxsVQ[/tube]

Most parents of teenagers would undoubtedly side with the first characterization: texting is a disaster for the English language — and any other texted language for that matter. At first glance it would seem that most linguists and scholars of language would agree. After all, with seemingly non-existent grammar, poor syntax, complete disregard for spelling, substitution of symbols for words, and emphasis on childish phonetics, how can texting be considered anything more than a regression to a crude form of proto-human language?

Well, linguist John McWhorter holds that texting is actually a new form of speech, and for that matter, it’s rather special and evolving in real-time. LOL? Read on and you will be 😮 (surprised). Oh, and if you still need help with texting translation, check-out dtxtr.

[div class=attrib]From ars technica:[end-div]

Is texting shorthand a convenience, a catastrophe for the English language, or actually something new and special? John McWhorter, a linguist at Columbia University, sides with the latter. According to McWhorter, texting is actually a new form of speech, and he outlined the reasons why today at the TED2013 conference in Southern California.

We often hear that “texting is a scourge,” damaging the literacy of the young. But it’s “actually a miraculous thing,” McWhorter said. Texting, he argued, is not really writing at all—not in the way we have historically thought about writing. To explain this, he drew an important distinction between speech and writing as functions of language. Language was born in speech some 80,000 years ago (at least). Writing, on the other hand, is relatively new (5,000 or 6,000 years old). So humanity has been talking for longer than it has been writing, and this is especially true when you consider that writing skills have hardly been ubiquitous in human societies.

Furthermore, writing is typically not a reflection of casual speech. “We speak in word packets of seven to 10 words. It’s much more loose, much more telegraphic,” McWhorter said. Of course, speech can imitate writing, particularly in formal contexts like speechmaking. He pointed out that in those cases you might speak like you write, but it’s clearly not a natural way of speaking.

But what about writing like you speak? Historically this has been difficult. Speed is a key issue. “[Texting is] fingered-speech. Now we can write the way we talk,” McWhorter said. Yet we view this as some kind of decline. We don’t capitalize words, obey grammar or spelling rules, and the like. Yet there is an “emerging complexity…with new structure” at play. To McWhorter, this structure facilitates the speed and packeted nature of real speech.

Take “LOL,” for instance. It used to mean “laughing out loud,” but its meaning has changed. People aren’t guffawing every time they write it. Now “it’s a marker of empathy, a pragmatic particle,” he said. “It’s a way of using the language between actual people.”

This is just one example of a new battery of conventions McWhorter sees in texting. They are conventions that enable writing like we speak. Consider the rules of grammar. When you talk, you don’t think about capitalizing names or putting commas and question marks where they belong. You produce sounds, not written language. Texting leaves out many of these conventions, particularly among the young, who make extensive use of electronic communication tools.

McWhorter thinks what we are experiencing is a whole new way of writing that young people are using alongside their normal writing skills. It is a “balancing act… an expansion of their linguistic repertoire,” he argued.

The result is a whole new language, one that wouldn’t be intelligible to people in the year 1993 or 1973. And where it’s headed, it will likely be unintelligible to us were we to jump ahead 20 years in time. Nevertheless, McWhorter wants us to appreciate it now: “It’s a linguistic miracle happening right under our noses,” he said.

Forget the “death of writing” talk. Txt-speak is a new, rapidly evolving form of speech.

[div class=attrib]Follow the entire article after the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Video: John McWhorter courtesy of TED.[end-div]

Idea Soup

2013: Mississippi Officially Abolishes Slavery

The 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution was enacted in December 1865. It abolished slavery.

But, it seems that someone in Mississippi did not follow the formal process. So, the law was officially ratified only a couple of weeks ago — 147 years late. Thanks go to two enterprising scholars and the movie Lincoln.

[div class=attrib]From the Guardian:[end-div]

Mississippi has officially ratified the 13th amendment to the US constitution, which abolishes slavery and which was officially noted in the constitution on 6 December 1865. All 50 states have now ratified the amendment.

Mississippi’s tardiness has been put down to an oversight that was only corrected after two academics embarked on research prompted by watching Lincoln, Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-nominated film about president Abraham Lincoln’s efforts to secure the amendment.

Dr Ranjan Batra, a professor in the department of neurobiology and anatomical sciences at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, saw Spielberg’s film and wondered about the implementation of the 13th amendment after the Civil War. He discussed the issue with Ken Sullivan, an anatomical material specialist at UMC, who began to research the matter.

Sullivan, a longtime resident of the Mississippi, remembered that a 1995 move to ratify the 13th amendment had passed the state Senate and House. He tracked down a copy of the bill and learned that its last paragraph required the secretary of state to send a copy to the office of the federal register, to officially sign it into law. That copy was never sent.

Sullivan contacted the current Mississippi secretary of state, Delbert Hosemann, who filed the paperwork for the passage of the bill on 30 January. The bill passed on 7 February. Hosemann said the passage of the bill “was long overdue”.

 

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article following the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Seal of the State of Mississippi. Courtesy of Wikipedia.[end-div]

Idea Soup, tD

Introverts: Misunderstood, Oppressed

It’s time for Occupy Extroverts. Finally, this would give introverts of the world the opportunity to be understood and valued. Now, will the introverts rise up to challenge the extroverts, insert one or two words in to a conversation and take their rightful place? Hmm, perhaps not, it may require too much attention and/or talking. What a loss — the world could learn so much from us.

[div class=attrib]From the Atlantic:[end-div]

Do you know someone who needs hours alone every day? Who loves quiet conversations about feelings or ideas, and can give a dynamite presentation to a big audience, but seems awkward in groups and maladroit at small talk? Who has to be dragged to parties and then needs the rest of the day to recuperate? Who growls or scowls or grunts or winces when accosted with pleasantries by people who are just trying to be nice?

If so, do you tell this person he is “too serious,” or ask if he is okay? Regard him as aloof, arrogant, rude? Redouble your efforts to draw him out?

If you answered yes to these questions, chances are that you have an introvert on your hands—and that you aren’t caring for him properly. Science has learned a good deal in recent years about the habits and requirements of introverts. It has even learned, by means of brain scans, that introverts process information differently from other people (I am not making this up). If you are behind the curve on this important matter, be reassured that you are not alone. Introverts may be common, but they are also among the most misunderstood and aggrieved groups in America, possibly the world.

I know. My name is Jonathan, and I am an introvert.

Oh, for years I denied it. After all, I have good social skills. I am not morose or misanthropic. Usually. I am far from shy. I love long conversations that explore intimate thoughts or passionate interests. But at last I have self-identified and come out to my friends and colleagues. In doing so, I have found myself liberated from any number of damaging misconceptions and stereotypes. Now I am here to tell you what you need to know in order to respond sensitively and supportively to your own introverted family members, friends, and colleagues. Remember, someone you know, respect, and interact with every day is an introvert, and you are probably driving this person nuts. It pays to learn the warning signs.

What is introversion? In its modern sense, the concept goes back to the 1920s and the psychologist Carl Jung. Today it is a mainstay of personality tests, including the widely used Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Introverts are not necessarily shy. Shy people are anxious or frightened or self-excoriating in social settings; introverts generally are not. Introverts are also not misanthropic, though some of us do go along with Sartre as far as to say “Hell is other people at breakfast.” Rather, introverts are people who find other people tiring.

Extroverts are energized by people, and wilt or fade when alone. They often seem bored by themselves, in both senses of the expression. Leave an extrovert alone for two minutes and he will reach for his cell phone. In contrast, after an hour or two of being socially “on,” we introverts need to turn off and recharge. My own formula is roughly two hours alone for every hour of socializing. This isn’t antisocial. It isn’t a sign of depression. It does not call for medication. For introverts, to be alone with our thoughts is as restorative as sleeping, as nourishing as eating. Our motto: “I’m okay, you’re okay—in small doses.”

How many people are introverts? I performed exhaustive research on this question, in the form of a quick Google search. The answer: About 25 percent. Or: Just under half. Or—my favorite—”a minority in the regular population but a majority in the gifted population.”

Are introverts misunderstood? Wildly. That, it appears, is our lot in life. “It is very difficult for an extrovert to understand an introvert,” write the education experts Jill D. Burruss and Lisa Kaenzig. (They are also the source of the quotation in the previous paragraph.) Extroverts are easy for introverts to understand, because extroverts spend so much of their time working out who they are in voluble, and frequently inescapable, interaction with other people. They are as inscrutable as puppy dogs. But the street does not run both ways. Extroverts have little or no grasp of introversion. They assume that company, especially their own, is always welcome. They cannot imagine why someone would need to be alone; indeed, they often take umbrage at the suggestion. As often as I have tried to explain the matter to extroverts, I have never sensed that any of them really understood. They listen for a moment and then go back to barking and yipping.

Are introverts oppressed? I would have to say so. For one thing, extroverts are overrepresented in politics, a profession in which only the garrulous are really comfortable. Look at George W. Bush. Look at Bill Clinton. They seem to come fully to life only around other people. To think of the few introverts who did rise to the top in politics—Calvin Coolidge, Richard Nixon—is merely to drive home the point. With the possible exception of Ronald Reagan, whose fabled aloofness and privateness were probably signs of a deep introverted streak (many actors, I’ve read, are introverts, and many introverts, when socializing, feel like actors), introverts are not considered “naturals” in politics.

Extroverts therefore dominate public life. This is a pity. If we introverts ran the world, it would no doubt be a calmer, saner, more peaceful sort of place. As Coolidge is supposed to have said, “Don’t you know that four fifths of all our troubles in this life would disappear if we would just sit down and keep still?” (He is also supposed to have said, “If you don’t say anything, you won’t be called on to repeat it.” The only thing a true introvert dislikes more than talking about himself is repeating himself.)

With their endless appetite for talk and attention, extroverts also dominate social life, so they tend to set expectations. In our extrovertist society, being outgoing is considered normal and therefore desirable, a mark of happiness, confidence, leadership. Extroverts are seen as bighearted, vibrant, warm, empathic. “People person” is a compliment. Introverts are described with words like “guarded,” “loner,” “reserved,” “taciturn,” “self-contained,” “private”—narrow, ungenerous words, words that suggest emotional parsimony and smallness of personality. Female introverts, I suspect, must suffer especially. In certain circles, particularly in the Midwest, a man can still sometimes get away with being what they used to call a strong and silent type; introverted women, lacking that alternative, are even more likely than men to be perceived as timid, withdrawn, haughty.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article after the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]This Man Was Talked to Death. Artist: John Cameron / Currier & Ives c1983. Library of Congress.[end-div]

Idea Soup, Technica

The Police Drones Next Door

You might expect to find police drones in the pages of a science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick or Iain M. Banks. But by 2015, citizens of the United States may well see these unmanned flying machines patrolling the skies over the homeland. The U.S. government recently pledged to loosen Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) restrictions that would allow local law enforcement agencies to use drones in just a few short years. So, soon the least of your worries will be traffic signal cameras and the local police officer armed with a radar gun. Our home-grown drones are likely to be deployed first for surveillance. But, undoubtedly armaments will follow. Hellfire missiles over Helena, Montana anyone?

[div class=attrib]From National Geographic:[end-div]

At the edge of a stubbly, dried-out alfalfa field outside Grand Junction, Colorado, Deputy Sheriff Derek Johnson, a stocky young man with a buzz cut, squints at a speck crawling across the brilliant, hazy sky. It’s not a vulture or crow but a Falcon—a new brand of unmanned aerial vehicle, or drone, and Johnson is flying it. The sheriff ’s office here in Mesa County, a plateau of farms and ranches corralled by bone-hued mountains, is weighing the Falcon’s potential for spotting lost hikers and criminals on the lam. A laptop on a table in front of Johnson shows the drone’s flickering images of a nearby highway.

Standing behind Johnson, watching him watch the Falcon, is its designer, Chris Miser. Rock-jawed, arms crossed, sunglasses pushed atop his shaved head, Miser is a former Air Force captain who worked on military drones before quitting in 2007 to found his own company in Aurora, Colorado. The Falcon has an eight-foot wingspan but weighs just 9.5 pounds. Powered by an electric motor, it carries two swiveling cameras, visible and infrared, and a GPS-guided autopilot. Sophisticated enough that it can’t be exported without a U.S. government license, the Falcon is roughly comparable, Miser says, to the Raven, a hand-launched military drone—but much cheaper. He plans to sell two drones and support equipment for about the price of a squad car.

A law signed by President Barack Obama in February 2012 directs the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to throw American airspace wide open to drones by September 30, 2015. But for now Mesa County, with its empty skies, is one of only a few jurisdictions with an FAA permit to fly one. The sheriff ’s office has a three-foot-wide helicopter drone called a Draganflyer, which stays aloft for just 20 minutes.

The Falcon can fly for an hour, and it’s easy to operate. “You just put in the coordinates, and it flies itself,” says Benjamin Miller, who manages the unmanned aircraft program for the sheriff ’s office. To navigate, Johnson types the desired altitude and airspeed into the laptop and clicks targets on a digital map; the autopilot does the rest. To launch the Falcon, you simply hurl it into the air. An accelerometer switches on the propeller only after the bird has taken flight, so it won’t slice the hand that launches it.

The stench from a nearby chicken-processing plant wafts over the alfalfa field. “Let’s go ahead and tell it to land,” Miser says to Johnson. After the deputy sheriff clicks on the laptop, the Falcon swoops lower, releases a neon orange parachute, and drifts gently to the ground, just yards from the spot Johnson clicked on. “The Raven can’t do that,” Miser says proudly.

Offspring of 9/11

A dozen years ago only two communities cared much about drones. One was hobbyists who flew radio-controlled planes and choppers for fun. The other was the military, which carried out surveillance missions with unmanned aircraft like the General Atomics Predator.

Then came 9/11, followed by the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and drones rapidly became an essential tool of the U.S. armed forces. The Pentagon armed the Predator and a larger unmanned surveillance plane, the Reaper, with missiles, so that their operators—sitting in offices in places like Nevada or New York—could destroy as well as spy on targets thousands of miles away. Aerospace firms churned out a host of smaller drones with increasingly clever computer chips and keen sensors—cameras but also instruments that measure airborne chemicals, pathogens, radioactive materials.

The U.S. has deployed more than 11,000 military drones, up from fewer than 200 in 2002. They carry out a wide variety of missions while saving money and American lives. Within a generation they could replace most manned military aircraft, says John Pike, a defense expert at the think tank GlobalSecurity.org. Pike suspects that the F-35 Lightning II, now under development by Lockheed Martin, might be “the last fighter with an ejector seat, and might get converted into a drone itself.”

At least 50 other countries have drones, and some, notably China, Israel, and Iran, have their own manufacturers. Aviation firms—as well as university and government researchers—are designing a flock of next-generation aircraft, ranging in size from robotic moths and hummingbirds to Boeing’s Phantom Eye, a hydrogen-fueled behemoth with a 150-foot wingspan that can cruise at 65,000 feet for up to four days.

More than a thousand companies, from tiny start-ups like Miser’s to major defense contractors, are now in the drone business—and some are trying to steer drones into the civilian world. Predators already help Customs and Border Protection agents spot smugglers and illegal immigrants sneaking into the U.S. NASA-operated Global Hawks record atmospheric data and peer into hurricanes. Drones have helped scientists gather data on volcanoes in Costa Rica, archaeological sites in Russia and Peru, and flooding in North Dakota.

So far only a dozen police departments, including ones in Miami and Seattle, have applied to the FAA for permits to fly drones. But drone advocates—who generally prefer the term UAV, for unmanned aerial vehicle—say all 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the U.S. are potential customers. They hope UAVs will soon become essential too for agriculture (checking and spraying crops, finding lost cattle), journalism (scoping out public events or celebrity backyards), weather forecasting, traffic control. “The sky’s the limit, pun intended,” says Bill Borgia, an engineer at Lockheed Martin. “Once we get UAVs in the hands of potential users, they’ll think of lots of cool applications.”

The biggest obstacle, advocates say, is current FAA rules, which tightly restrict drone flights by private companies and government agencies (though not by individual hobbyists). Even with an FAA permit, operators can’t fly UAVs above 400 feet or near airports or other zones with heavy air traffic, and they must maintain visual contact with the drones. All that may change, though, under the new law, which requires the FAA to allow the “safe integration” of UAVs into U.S. airspace.

If the FAA relaxes its rules, says Mark Brown, the civilian market for drones—and especially small, low-cost, tactical drones—could soon dwarf military sales, which in 2011 totaled more than three billion dollars. Brown, a former astronaut who is now an aerospace consultant in Dayton, Ohio, helps bring drone manufacturers and potential customers together. The success of military UAVs, he contends, has created “an appetite for more, more, more!” Brown’s PowerPoint presentation is called “On the Threshold of a Dream.”

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article following the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image: Unmanned drone used to patrol the U.S.-Canadian border. (U.S. Customs and Border Protection/AP).[end-div]

Idea Soup, tD

Measuring Antifragility

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, one of our favorite thinkers and writers over here at theDiagonal recently published Antifragile, his follow-up to his successful “black swan” title Black Swan. In Antifragile Taleb argues that some things thrive when subjected to volatility, disorder and uncertainty. He labels the positive reaction to these external stressors, antifragility. (Ironically, this book was published by Random House).

In his essay, excerpted below, Taleb summarizes the basic tenets of antifragility and the payoff that we would gain from its empirical measurement. This would certainly represent a leap forward, from our persistent and misguided focus on luck in research, relationships and business.

[div class=attrib]From Edge.org:[end-div]

Something central, very central, is missing in historical accounts of scientific and technological discovery. The discourse and controversies focus on the role of luck as opposed to teleological programs (from telos, “aim”), that is, ones that rely on pre-set direction from formal science. This is a faux-debate: luck cannot lead to formal research policies; one cannot systematize, formalize, and program randomness. The driver is neither luck nor direction, but must be in the asymmetry (or convexity) of payoffs, a simple mathematical property that has lied hidden from the discourse, and the understanding of which can lead to precise research principles and protocols.

MISSING THE ASYMMETRY

The luck versus knowledge story is as follows. Ironically, we have vastly more evidence for results linked to luck than to those coming from the teleological, outside physics—even after discounting for the sensationalism. In some opaque and nonlinear fields, like medicine or engineering, the teleological exceptions are in the minority, such as a small number of designer drugs. This makes us live in the contradiction that we largely got here to where we are thanks to undirected chance, but we build research programs going forward based on direction and narratives. And, what is worse, we are fully conscious of the inconsistency.

The point we will be making here is that logically, neither trial and error nor “chance” and serendipity can be behind the gains in technology and empirical science attributed to them. By definition chance cannot lead to long term gains (it would no longer be chance); trial and error cannot be unconditionally effective: errors cause planes to crash, buildings to collapse, and knowledge to regress.

The beneficial properties have to reside in the type of exposure, that is, the payoff function and not in the “luck” part: there needs to be a significant asymmetry between the gains (as they need to be large) and the errors (small or harmless), and it is from such asymmetry that luck and trial and error can produce results. The general mathematical property of this asymmetry is convexity (which is explained in Figure 1); functions with larger gains than losses are nonlinear-convex and resemble financial options. Critically, convex payoffs benefit from uncertainty and disorder. The nonlinear properties of the payoff function, that is, convexity, allow us to formulate rational and rigorous research policies, and ones that allow the harvesting of randomness.

OPAQUE SYSTEMS AND OPTIONALITY

Further, it is in complex systems, ones in which we have little visibility of the chains of cause-consequences, that tinkering, bricolage, or similar variations of trial and error have been shown to vastly outperform the teleological—it is nature’s modus operandi. But tinkering needs to be convex; it is imperative. Take the most opaque of all, cooking, which relies entirely on the heuristics of trial and error, as it has not been possible for us to design a dish directly from chemical equations or reverse-engineer a taste from nutritional labels. We take hummus, add an ingredient, say a spice, taste to see if there is an improvement from the complex interaction, and retain if we like the addition or discard the rest. Critically we have the option, not the obligation to keep the result, which allows us to retain the upper bound and be unaffected by adverse outcomes.

This “optionality” is what is behind the convexity of research outcomes. An option allows its user to get more upside than downside as he can select among the results what fits him and forget about the rest (he has the option, not the obligation). Hence our understanding of optionality can be extended to research programs — this discussion is motivated by the fact that the author spent most of his adult life as an option trader. If we translate François Jacob’s idea into these terms, evolution is a convex function of stressors and errors —genetic mutations come at no cost and are retained only if they are an improvement. So are the ancestral heuristics and rules of thumbs embedded in society; formed like recipes by continuously taking the upper-bound of “what works”. But unlike nature where choices are made in an automatic way via survival, human optionality requires the exercise of rational choice to ratchet up to something better than what precedes it —and, alas, humans have mental biases and cultural hindrances that nature doesn’t have. Optionality frees us from the straightjacket of direction, predictions, plans, and narratives. (To use a metaphor from information theory, if you are going to a vacation resort offering you more options, you can predict your activities by asking a smaller number of questions ahead of time.)

While getting a better recipe for hummus will not change the world, some results offer abnormally large benefits from discovery; consider penicillin or chemotherapy or potential clean technologies and similar high impact events (“Black Swans”). The discovery of the first antimicrobial drugs came at the heel of hundreds of systematic (convex) trials in the 1920s by such people as Domagk whose research program consisted in trying out dyes without much understanding of the biological process behind the results. And unlike an explicit financial option for which the buyer pays a fee to a seller, hence tend to trade in a way to prevent undue profits, benefits from research are not zero-sum.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article following the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image: Antifragile by Naseem Nicholas Taleb, book cover. Courtesy of the author / Random House / Barnes & Noble.[end-div]

Idea Soup

RIP: Chief Innovation Officer

“Innovate or die” goes the business mantra. Embrace creativity or you and your company will fall by the wayside and wither into insignificance.

A leisurely skim through a couple of dozen TV commercials, print ads and online banners will reinforce the notion — we are surrounded by innovators.

Absolutely everyone is innovating: Subway innovates with a new type of sandwich; Campbell Soup innovates by bringing a new blend to market more quickly; Skyy vodka innovates by adding a splash of lemon flavoring; Mercedes innovates by adding blind spot technology in its car door mirrors; Delta Airlines innovates by adding an inch more legroom for weary fliers; Bank of America innovates by communicating with customers via Twitter; L’Oreal innovates by boosting lashes. Innovation is everywhere and all the time.

Or is it?

There was a time when innovation meant radical, disruptive change: think movable type, printing, telegraphy, light bulb, mass production, photographic film, transistor, frozen food processing, television.

Now, the word innovation is liberally applied to just about anything. Marketers and advertisers have co-opted the word in service of coolness and an entrepreneurial halo. But, overuse of the label and its attachment to most new products and services in general has ensured that its value has become greatly diminished. Rather than connoting disruptive change, innovation in business is no more than a corporate cliché designed to market the coolness or an incremental improvement. So, who needs a Chief Innovation Officer anymore? After all, we are now all innovators.

[div class=attrib]From the Wall Street Journal:[end-div]

Got innovation? Just about every company says it does.

Businesses throw around the term to show they’re on the cutting edge of everything from technology and medicine to snacks and cosmetics. Companies are touting chief innovation officers, innovation teams, innovation strategies and even innovation days.

But that doesn’t mean the companies are actually doing any innovating. Instead they are using the word to convey monumental change when the progress they’re describing is quite ordinary.

Like the once ubiquitous buzzwords “synergy” and “optimization,” innovation is in danger of becoming a cliché—if it isn’t one already.

“Most companies say they’re innovative in the hope they can somehow con investors into thinking there is growth when there isn’t,” says Clayton Christensen, a professor at Harvard Business School and the author of the 1997 book, “The Innovator’s Dilemma.”

A search of annual and quarterly reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission shows companies mentioned some form of the word “innovation” 33,528 times last year, which was a 64% increase from five years before that.

More than 250 books with “innovation” in the title have been published in the last three months, most of them dealing with business, according to a search of Amazon.com.

The definition of the term varies widely depending on whom you ask. To Bill Hickey, chief executive of Bubble Wrap’s maker, Sealed Air Corp., it means inventing a product that has never existed, such as packing material that inflates on delivery.

To Ocean Spray Cranberries Inc. CEO Randy Papadellis, it is turning an overlooked commodity, such as leftover cranberry skins, into a consumer snack like Craisins.

To Pfizer Inc.’s PFE +0.85% research and development head, Mikael Dolsten, it is extending a product’s scope and application, such as expanding the use of a vaccine for infants that is also effective in older adults.

Scott Berkun, the author of the 2007 book “The Myths of Innovation,” which warns about the dilution of the word, says that what most people call an innovation is usually just a “very good product.”

He prefers to reserve the word for civilization-changing inventions like electricity, the printing press and the telephone—and, more recently, perhaps the iPhone.

Mr. Berkun, now an innovation consultant, advises clients to ban the word at their companies.

“It is a chameleon-like word to hide the lack of substance,” he says.

Mr. Berkun tracks innovation’s popularity as a buzzword back to the 1990s, amid the dot-com bubble and the release of James M. Utterback’s “Mastering the Dynamics of Innovation” and Mr. Christensen’s “Dilemma.”

The word appeals to large companies because it has connotations of being agile and “cool,” like start-ups and entrepreneurs, he says.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article after the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image: Draisine, also called Laufmaschine (“running machine”), from around 1820. The Laufmaschine was invented by the German Baron Karl von Drais in Mannheim in 1817. Being the first means of transport to make use of the two-wheeler principle, the Laufmaschine is regarded as the archetype of the bicycle. Courtesy of Wikipedia.[end-div]

Idea Soup

Anxiety, Fear and Wisdom

In a recent essay author Jana Richman weaves her personal stories about anxiety with Bertrand Russell’s salient observations on fear, and the desert Southwest is her colorful backdrop.

[div class=attrib]From the New York Times:[end-div]

On a cold, sunny day in early March, my husband, Steve, and I layered up and took ourselves out to our backyard: Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument. For a few days we had been spiraling downward through a series of miscommunications and tensions — the culmination of my rigorous dedication to fear, or what Bertrand Russell aptly coined “the tyranny of the habit of fear.”  A fresh storm had dropped 10 inches of snow with little moisture giving it an airy, crystallized texture that sprayed out in an arc with each footstep and made a shushing sound, as if it were speaking directly to me. Shush. Shush. Shush.

Moving into the elegant world of white-draped red rock is usually enough to strip our minds of the qualms that harass us, but on this particular day, Steve and I both stomped into the desert bearing a commitment to hang onto the somber roles we had adopted. Solemnity is difficult, however, when one is tumbling down hills of snow-covered, deep sand and slipping off steep angles of slickrock on one’s backside. Still, it took a good half-mile before we were convinced of our absurdity.

Such is the nature of the desert. If you persist in your gravity, the desert will take full advantage — it will have you falling over yourself as you trudge along carrying your blame and angst and fear; it will mock you until you literally and figuratively lighten up and conform to the place. The place will never conform to you. We knew that; that’s why we went. That’s why we always go to the desert when we’re stuck in a cycle of self-induced wretchedness.

“Fear,” Russell writes, “makes man unwise in the three great departments of human conduct: his dealings with nature, his dealings with other men, and his dealings with himself.”

I can attest to the truth of Russell’s words. I’ve spent many lifetime hours processing fear, and I’ve brought fear’s oppression into my marriage. Because fear is the natural state of my mind, I often don’t realize I’m spewing it into the atmosphere with my words and actions. The incident that drove us into the desert on that particular day was, in my mind, a simple expression of concern, a few “what will happen ifs”; in Steve’s mind, a paranoid rant. Upon reflection, I have to agree with his version.

A few months prior, Steve and I had decided upon a change in our lives: certainty in the form of a bi-weekly paycheck was traded for joy in the form writing time. It wasn’t a rash decision; it was five years in the making. Yet, from the moment the last check was cashed, my fear began roiling, slowly at first, but soon popping and splashing out of its shallow container. My voiced concerns regarding homelessness and insolvency went considerably beyond probable, falling to the far side of remotely possible. In my world, that’s enough for worry, discussion, obsession, more discussion, and several nights of insomnia.

We had parked the truck at the “head of the rocks,” an understated description of a spot that allows a 360-degree view of red and white slickrock cut with deep gulches and painted with the sweeping wear of wind and water. The Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument is 1.9 million acres of land, much of it devoid of human intrusion on any given day. Before we moved to the small town of Escalante on the Monument’s border, we came here from our city home five hours away — alone or together — whenever life threatened to shut us down.

From the head of the rocks, we followed the old cream cellar road, a wagon trail of switchbacks carved into stone in the early 1900s. We could see our destination about two miles out — a smooth, jutting wall with a level run of sand at its base that would allow us to sit with our faces to the sun and our backs against the wall — a fitting spot.

Steve walked behind me in silence, but I knew his thoughts. My fear perplexes and disparages him. His acts of heroism should dispel my anxiety, but it persists beyond the reach of his love.  Yet, his love, too, persists.

Knowing I’ll pick up and read anything placed in my path, Steve had left on the butcher block where I eat breakfast Russell’s timeless collection of essays, “New Hopes for a Changing World,” published in 1951, five years before I was born. I skimmed the table of contents until I reached three essays entitled, “Fear,” “Fortitude,” and “Life Without Fear,” in which Russell writes about the pervasive and destructive nature of fear. One of the significant fears Russell writes about — a fear close to his own heart — is the fear of being unlovable, which, he writes, is self-fulfilling unless one gets out from under fear’s dominion.  I’ve been testing Russell’s theory for the past eight years.

I’ve heard it said that all fear stems from the knowledge of our own mortality, and indeed, many of our social systems thrive by exploiting our fear of death and our desire to thwart it. But fear of death has never been my problem. To me, life, not death, holds the promise of misery.  When life is lived as a problem to be solved, death offers the ultimate resolution, the release of all fears, the moment of pure peace.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article following the jump.[end-div]

Idea Soup

Cluttered Desk, Cluttered Mind

Life coach Jayne Morris suggests that de-cluttering your desk, attic or garage can add positive energy to your personal and business life. Morris has coached numerous business leaders and celebrities in the art of clearing clutter.

[div class=attrib]From the Telegraph:[end-div]

According to a leading expert, having a cluttered environment reflects a cluttered mind and the act of tidying up can help you be more successful.

The advice comes from Jayne Morris, the resident “life coach” for NHS Online, who said it is no good just moving the mess around.

In order to clear the mind, unwanted items must be thrown away to free your “internal world”, she said.

Ms Morris, who claims to have coached celebrities to major business figures, said: “Clearing clutter from your desk has the power to transform you business.

“How? Because clutter in your outer environment is the physical manifestation of all the clutter going on inside of you.

“Clearing clutter has a ripple effect across your entire life, including your work.

“Having an untidy desk covered in clutter could be stopping you achieving the business success you want.”

She is adamant cleaning up will be a boon even though some of history’s biggest achievers lived and worked in notoriously messy conditions.

Churchill was considered untidy from a boy throughout his life, from his office to his artist’s studio, and the lab where Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin was famously dishevelled.

Among the recommendations is that the simply tidying a desk at work and an overflowing filing cabinet will instantly have a positive impact on “your internal world.”

Anything that is no longer used should not be put into storage but thrown away completely.

Keeping something in the loft, garage or other part of the house, does not help because it is still connected to the person “by tiny energetic cords” she claims.

She said: “The things in your life that are useful to you, that add value to your life, that serve a current purpose are charged with positive energy that replenishes you and enriches your life.

“But the things that you are holding on to that you don’t really like, don’t ever use and don’t need anymore have the opposite effect on your energy. Things that no longer fit or serve you, drain your energy.”

Briton has long been a nation of hoarders and a survey showed that more than a million are compulsive about their keeping their stuff.

Brains scans have also confirmed that victims of hoarding disorder have abnormal activity in regions of the brain involved in decision making – particularly in what to do with objects that belong to them.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article following the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image: Still from Buried Alive Season 3, TLC.[end-div]

Idea Soup

Psst! AIDS Was Created by the U.S. Government

Some believe that AIDS was created by the U.S. Government or bestowed by a malevolent god. Some believe that Neil Armstrong never set foot on the moon, while others believe that Nazis first established a moon base in 1942. Some believe that recent tsunamis were caused by the U.S. military, and that said military is hiding evidence of alien visits in Area 51, Nevada. The latest of course is the great conspiracy of climate change, which apparently is created by socialists seeking to destroy the United States. This conspiratorial thinking makes for good reality-TV, and presents wonderful opportunities for psychological research. Why after all, in the face of seemingly insurmountable evidence, widespread common consensus and fundamental scientific reasoning, do such ideas, and their believers persist?

[div class=attrib]From Skeptical Science:[end-div]

There is growing evidence that conspiratorial thinking, also known as conspiracist ideation, is often involved in the rejection of scientific propositions. Conspiracist ideations tend to invoke alternative explanations for the nature or source of the scientific evidence. For example, among people who reject the link between HIV and AIDS, common ideations involve the beliefs that AIDS was created by the U.S. Government.

My colleagues and I published a paper recently that found evidence for the involvement of conspiracist ideation in the rejection of scientific propositions—from climate change to the link between tobacco and lung cancer, and between HIV and AIDS—among visitors to climate blogs. This was a fairly unsurprising result because it meshed well with previous research and the existing literature on the rejection of science. Indeed, it would have been far more surprising, from a scientific perspective, if the article had not found a link between conspiracist ideation and rejection of science.

Nonetheless, as some readers of this blog may remember, this article engendered considerable controversy.

The article also generated data.

Data, because for social scientists, public statements and publically-expressed ideas constitute data for further research. Cognitive scientists sometimes apply something called “narrative analysis” to understand how people, groups, or societies are organized and how they think.

In the case of the response to our earlier paper, we were struck by the way in which some of the accusations leveled against our paper were, well, somewhat conspiratorial in nature. We therefore decided to analyze the public response to our first paper with the hypothesis in mind that this response might also involve conspiracist ideation. We systematically collected utterances by bloggers and commenters, and we sought to classify them into various hypotheses leveled against our earlier paper. For each hypothesis, we then compared the public statements against a list of criteria for conspiracist ideation that was taken from the previous literature.

This follow-up paper was accepted a few days ago by Frontiers in Psychology, and a preliminary version of the paper is already available, for open access, here.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article following the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image: Area 51 – Warning sign near secret Area 51 base in Nevada. Courtesy of Wikipedia.[end-div]

Idea Soup

Nordic Noir and Scandinavian Cool

Apparently the world once thought of the countries that make up the Scandinavian region as dull and boring. Nothing much happened in Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark besides endless winters, ABBA, Volvo and utopian socialist experiments. Not any longer. Over the last couple of decades this region has become a hotbed of artistic, literary and business creativity.

[div class=attrib]From the Economist:[end-div]

TWENTY YEARS AGO the Nordic region was a cultural backwater. Even the biggest cities were dead after 8pm. The restaurants offered meatballs or pale versions of Italian or French favourites. The region did come up with a few cultural icons such as Ingmar Bergman and Abba, and managed to produce world-class architects and designers even at the height of post-war brutalism. But the few successes served only to emphasise the general dullness.

The backwater has now turned into an entrepot. Stockholm relishes its reputation as one of the liveliest cities in Europe (and infuriates its neighbours by billing itself as “the capital of Scandinavia”). Scandinavian crime novels have become a genre in their own right. Danish television shows such as “The Killing” and “Borgen” are syndicated across the world. Swedish music producers are fixtures in Hollywood. Copenhagen’s Noma is one of the world’s most highly rated restaurants and has brought about a food renaissance across the region.

Why has the land of the bland become a cultural powerhouse? Jonas Bonnier, CEO of the Bonnier Group, Sweden’s largest media company, thinks that it is partly because new technologies are levelling the playing field. Popular music was once dominated by British and American artists who were able to use all sorts of informal barriers to protect their position. Today, thanks to the internet, somebody sitting in a Stockholm attic can reach the world. Rovio’s Michael Hed suggests that network effects are much more powerful in small countries: as soon as one writer cracks the global detective market, dozens of others quickly follow.

All true. But there is no point in giving people microphones if they have nothing to say. The bigger reason why the region’s writers and artists—and indeed chefs and game designers—are catching the world’s attention is that they are so full of vim. They are reinventing old forms such as the detective story or the evening meal but also coming up with entirely new forms such as video games for iPads.

The cultural renaissance is thus part of the other changes that have taken place in the region. A closed society that was dominated by a single political orthodoxy (social democracy) and by a narrow definition of national identity (say, Swedishness or Finnishness) is being shaken up by powerful forces such as globalisation and immigration. All the Nordics are engaged in a huge debate about their identity in a post-social democratic world. Think-tanks such as Denmark’s Cepos flaunt pictures of Milton Friedman in the same way that student radicals once flaunted pictures of Che Guevara. Writers expose the dark underbelly of the old social democratic regime. Chefs will prepare anything under the sun as long as it is not meatballs.

The region’s identity crisis is creating a multicultural explosion. The Nordics are scavenging the world for ideas. They continue to enjoy a love-hate relationship with America. They are discovering inspiration from their growing ethnic minorities but are also reaching back into their own cultural traditions. Swedish crime writers revel in the peculiarities of their culture. Danish chefs refuse to use foreign ingredients. A region that has often felt the need to apologise for its culture—those bloodthirsty Vikings! Those toe-curling Abba lyrics! Those naff fishermen’s jumpers!—is enjoying a surge of regional pride.

Blood and snow

Over the past decade Scandinavia has become the world’s leading producer of crime novels. The two Swedes who did more than anyone else to establish Nordic noir—Stieg Larsson and Henning Mankell—have both left the scene of crime. Larsson died of a heart attack in 2004 before his three books about a girl with a dragon tattoo became a global sensation. Mr Mankell consigned his hero, Kurt Wallander, to Alzheimer’s after a dozen bestsellers. But their books continue to be bought in their millions: “Dragon Tattoo” has sold more than 50m, and the Wallander books collectively even more.

A group of new writers, such as Jo Nesbo in Norway and Camilla Lackberg in Sweden, are determined to keep the flame burning. And the crime wave is spreading beyond adult fiction and the written word. Sweden’s Martin Widmark writes detective stories for children. Swedish and British television producers compete to make the best version of Wallander. “The Killing” established a new standard for televised crime drama.

The region has a long tradition of crime writing. Per Wahloo and Maj Sjowall, a Swedish husband-and-wife team, earned a dedicated following among aficionados with their police novels in the 1960s and 1970s. They also established two of Nordic noir’s most appealing memes. Martin Beck is an illness-prone depressive who gets to the truth by dint of relentless plodding. The ten Martin Beck novels present Sweden as a capitalist hellhole that can be saved only by embracing Soviet-style communism (the crime at the heart of the novels is the social democratic system’s betrayal of its promise).

Today’s crime writers continue to profit from these conventions. Larsson’s Sweden, for example, is a crypto-fascist state run by a conspiracy of psychopathic businessmen and secret-service agents. But today’s Nordic crime writers have two advantages over their predecessors. The first is that their hitherto homogenous culture is becoming more variegated and their peaceful society has suffered inexplicable bouts of violence (such as the assassination in 1986 of Sweden’s prime minister, Olof Palme, and in 2003 of its foreign minister, Anna Lindh, and Anders Breivik’s murderous rampage in Norway in 2011). Nordic noir is in part an extended meditation on the tension between the old Scandinavia, with its low crime rate and monochrome culture, and the new one, with all its threats and possibilities. Mr Mankell is obsessed by the disruption of small-town life by global forces such as immigration and foreign criminal gangs. Each series of “The Killing” focuses as much on the fears—particularly of immigrant minorities—that the killing exposes as it does on the crime itself.

The second advantage is something that Wahloo and Sjowall would have found repulsive: a huge industry complete with support systems and the promise of big prizes. Ms Lackberg began her career in an all-female crime-writing class. Mr Mankell wrote unremunerative novels and plays before turning to a life of crime. Thanks in part to Larsson, crime fiction is one of the region’s biggest exports: a brand that comes with a guarantee of quality and a distribution system that stretches from Stockholm to Hollywood.

Dinner in Copenhagen can come as a surprise to even the most jaded foodie. The dishes are more likely to be served on slabs of rock or pieces of wood than on plates. The garnish often takes the form of leaves or twigs. Many ingredients, such as sea cabbage or wild flowers, are unfamiliar, and the more familiar sort, such as pike, are often teamed with less familiar ones, such as unripe elderberries.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article after the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image: ABBA, Eurovision, 1974. Courtesy of Time.[end-div]

Idea Soup, tD

Do Corporations Go to Heaven When They Die?

Perhaps heaven is littered with the disembodied, collective consciousness of Woolworth, Circuit City, Borders and Blockbuster. Similarly, it may be possible that Enron and Lehman Brothers, a little less fortunate due to the indiscretions of their leaders, have found their corporate souls to be forever tormented in business hell. And, what of the high tech start-ups that come and go in the beat of a hummingbird’s wing? Where are Webvan, Flooz, Gowalla, Beenz, Loopt, Kosmo, eToys and Pets.com? Are they spinning endlessly somewhere between the gluttons (third circle) and the heretics (sixth circle) in Dante’s concentric hell. And where are the venture capitalists and where will Burger King and Apple find themselves when they eventually pass to the other side?

This may all seem rather absurd. It is. Yet, the evangelical corporate crusaders such as Hobby Lobby and Chick Fil A would have us treat their corporations just as we do mere (im)mortals. Where is all this nonsense heading? Well, the Supreme Court of the United States, of course.

[div class=attrib]From the New York Times:[end-div]

David Green, who built a family picture-framing business into a 42-state chain of arts and crafts stores, prides himself on being the model of a conscientious Christian capitalist. His 525 Hobby Lobby stores forsake Sunday profits to give employees their biblical day of rest. The company donates to Christian counseling services and buys holiday ads that promote the faith in all its markets. Hobby Lobby has been known to stick decals over Botticelli’s naked Venus in art books it sells.

And the company’s in-house health insurance does not cover morning-after contraceptives, which Green, like many of his fellow evangelical Christians, regards as chemical abortions.

“We’re Christians,” he says, “and we run our business on Christian principles.”

This has put Hobby Lobby at the leading edge of a legal battle that poses the intriguing question: Can a corporation have a conscience? And if so, is it protected by the First Amendment.

The Affordable Care Act, a k a Obamacare, requires that companies with more than 50 full-time employees offer health insurance, including coverage for birth control. Churches and other purely religious organizations are exempt. The Obama administration, in an unrequited search for compromise, has also proposed to excuse nonprofit organizations such as hospitals and universities if they are affiliated with religions that preach the evil of contraception. You might ask why a clerk at Notre Dame or an orderly at a Catholic hospital should be denied the same birth control coverage provided to employees of secular institutions. You might ask why institutions that insist they are like everyone else when it comes to applying for federal grants get away with being special when it comes to federal health law. Good questions. You will find the unsatisfying answers in the Obama handbook of political expediency.

But these concessions are not enough to satisfy the religious lobbies. Evangelicals and Catholics, cheered on by anti-abortion groups and conservative Obamacare-haters, now want the First Amendment freedom of religion to be stretched to cover an array of for-profit commercial ventures, Hobby Lobby being the largest litigant. They are suing to be exempted on the grounds that corporations sometimes embody the faith of the individuals who own them.

“The legal case” for the religious freedom of corporations “does not start with, ‘Does the corporation pray?’ or ‘Does the corporation go to heaven?’ ” said Kyle Duncan, general counsel of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which is representing Hobby Lobby. “It starts with the owner.” For owners who have woven religious practice into their operations, he told me, “an exercise of religion in the context of a business” is still an exercise of religion, and thus constitutionally protected.

The issue is almost certain to end up in the Supreme Court, where the betting is made a little more interesting by a couple of factors: six of the nine justices are Catholic, and this court has already ruled, in the Citizens United case, that corporations are protected by the First Amendment, at least when it comes to freedom of speech. Also, we know that at least four members of the court don’t think much of Obamacare.

In lower courts, advocates of the corporate religious exemption have won a few and lost a few. (Hobby Lobby has lost so far, and could eventually face fines of more than $1 million a day for defying the law. The company’s case is now before the Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit.)

You can feel some sympathy for David Green’s moral dilemma, and even admire him for practicing what he preaches, without buying the idea that la corporation, c’est moi. Despite the Supreme Court’s expansive view of the First Amendment, Hobby Lobby has a high bar to get over — as it should.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article following the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image: Gluttony: The circle itself is a living abomination, a hellish digestive system revealing horrific faces with mouths ready to devour the gluttons over and over for eternity. Picture: Mihai Marius Mihu / Rex Features / Telegraph. To see more of the nine circles of hell from Dante’s Inferno recreated in Lego by artist Mihai Mihu jump here.[end-div]

Idea Soup

Better Relaxation Equals Higher Productivity

A growing body of research shows that employees who are well rested and relaxed are generally more productive. Isn’t this just common sense? But the notion that employees who are happier and less-stressed outside the workplace can be more effective within the workplace still seems to evade most employers.

[div class=attrib]From the New York Times:[end-div]

THINK for a moment about your typical workday. Do you wake up tired? Check your e-mail before you get out of bed? Skip breakfast or grab something on the run that’s not particularly nutritious? Rarely get away from your desk for lunch? Run from meeting to meeting with no time in between? Find it nearly impossible to keep up with the volume of e-mail you receive? Leave work later than you’d like, and still feel compelled to check e-mail in the evenings?

More and more of us find ourselves unable to juggle overwhelming demands and maintain a seemingly unsustainable pace. Paradoxically, the best way to get more done may be to spend more time doing less. A new and growing body of multidisciplinary research shows that strategic renewal — including daytime workouts, short afternoon naps, longer sleep hours, more time away from the office and longer, more frequent vacations — boosts productivity, job performance and, of course, health.

“More, bigger, faster.” This, the ethos of the market economies since the Industrial Revolution, is grounded in a mythical and misguided assumption — that our resources are infinite.

Time is the resource on which we’ve relied to get more accomplished. When there’s more to do, we invest more hours. But time is finite, and many of us feel we’re running out, that we’re investing as many hours as we can while trying to retain some semblance of a life outside work.

Although many of us can’t increase the working hours in the day, we can measurably increase our energy. Science supplies a useful way to understand the forces at play here. Physicists understand energy as the capacity to do work. Like time, energy is finite; but unlike time, it is renewable. Taking more time off is counterintuitive for most of us. The idea is also at odds with the prevailing work ethic in most companies, where downtime is typically viewed as time wasted. More than one-third of employees, for example, eat lunch at their desks on a regular basis. More than 50 percent assume they’ll work during their vacations.

In most workplaces, rewards still accrue to those who push the hardest and most continuously over time. But that doesn’t mean they’re the most productive.

Spending more hours at work often leads to less time for sleep and insufficient sleep takes a substantial toll on performance. In a study of nearly 400 employees, published last year, researchers found that sleeping too little — defined as less than six hours each night — was one of the best predictors of on-the-job burn-out. A recent Harvard study estimated that sleep deprivation costs American companies $63.2 billion a year in lost productivity.

The Stanford researcher Cheri D. Mah found that when she got male basketball players to sleep 10 hours a night, their performances in practice dramatically improved: free-throw and three-point shooting each increased by an average of 9 percent.

Daytime naps have a similar effect on performance. When night shift air traffic controllers were given 40 minutes to nap — and slept an average of 19 minutes — they performed much better on tests that measured vigilance and reaction time.

Longer naps have an even more profound impact than shorter ones. Sara C. Mednick, a sleep researcher at the University of California, Riverside, found that a 60- to 90-minute nap improved memory test results as fully as did eight hours of sleep.

MORE vacations are similarly beneficial. In 2006, the accounting firm Ernst & Young did an internal study of its employees and found that for each additional 10 hours of vacation employees took, their year-end performance ratings from supervisors (on a scale of one to five) improved by 8 percent. Frequent vacationers were also significantly less likely to leave the firm.

As athletes understand especially well, the greater the performance demand, the greater the need for renewal. When we’re under pressure, however, most of us experience the opposite impulse: to push harder rather than rest. This may explain why a recent survey by Harris Interactive found that Americans left an average of 9.2 vacation days unused in 2012 — up from 6.2 days in 2011.

The importance of restoration is rooted in our physiology. Human beings aren’t designed to expend energy continuously. Rather, we’re meant to pulse between spending and recovering energy.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article following the jump.[end-div]

Idea Soup

Geeks As Guardians of (Some of) Our Civil Liberties

It’s interesting to ponder what would have been if the internet and social media had been around during those more fractious times in Seneca Falls, Selma and Stonewall. Perhaps these tools would have helped accelerate progress.

[div class-attrib]From Technology Review:[end-div]

A decade-plus of anthropological fieldwork among hackers and like-minded geeks has led me to the firm conviction that these people are building one of the most vibrant civil liberties movements we’ve ever seen. It is a culture committed to freeing information, insisting on privacy, and fighting censorship, which in turn propels wide-ranging political activity. In the last year alone, hackers have been behind some of the most powerful political currents out there.

Before I elaborate, a brief word on the term “hacker” is probably in order. Even among hackers, it provokes debate. For instance, on the technical front, a hacker might program, administer a network, or tinker with hardware. Ethically and politically, the variability is just as prominent. Some hackers are part of a transgressive, law-breaking tradition, their activities opaque and below the radar. Other hackers write open-source software and pride themselves on access and transparency. While many steer clear of political activity, an increasingly important subset rise up to defend their productive autonomy, or engage in broader social justice and human rights campaigns.

Despite their differences, there are certain  websites and conferences that bring the various hacker clans together. Like any political movement, it is internally diverse but, under the right conditions, individuals with distinct abilities will work in unison toward a cause.

Take, for instance, the reaction to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), a far-reaching copyright bill meant to curtail piracy online. SOPA was unraveled before being codified into law due to a massive and elaborate outpouring of dissent driven by the hacker movement.

The linchpin was a “Blackout Day”—a Web-based protest of unprecedented scale. To voice their opposition to the bill, on January 17, 2012, nonprofits, some big Web companies, public interest groups, and thousands of individuals momentarily removed their websites from the Internet and thousands of other citizens called or e-mailed their representatives. Journalists eventually wrote a torrent of articles. Less than a week later, in response to these stunning events, SOPA and PIPA, its counterpart in the Senate, were tabled (see “SOPA Battle Won, but War Continues”).

The victory hinged on its broad base of support cultivated by hackers and geeks. The participation of corporate giants like Google, respected Internet personalities like Jimmy Wales, and the civil liberties organization EFF was crucial to its success. But the geek and hacker contingent was palpably present, and included, of course, Anonymous. Since 2008, activists have rallied under this banner to initiate targeted demonstrations, publicize various wrongdoings, leak sensitive data, engage in digital direct action, and provide technology assistance for revolutionary movements.

As part of the SOPA protests, Anonymous churned out videos and propaganda posters and provided constant updates on several prominent Twitter accounts, such as Your Anonymous News, which are brimming with followers. When the blackout ended, corporate players naturally receded from the limelight and went back to work. Anonymous and others, however, continue to fight for Internet freedoms.

In fact, just the next day, on January 18, 2012, federal authorities orchestrated the takedown of the popular file-sharing site MegaUpload. The company’s gregarious and controversial founder Kim Dotcom was also arrested in a dramatic early morning raid in New Zealand. The removal of this popular website was received ominously by Anonymous activists: it seemed to confirm that if bills like SOPA become law, censorship would become a far more common fixture on the Internet. Even though no court had yet found Kim Dotcom guilty of piracy, his property was still confiscated and his website knocked off the Internet.

As soon as the news broke, Anonymous coordinated its largest distributed denial of service campaign to date. It took down a slew of websites, including the homepage of Universal Music, the FBI, the U.S. Copyright Office, the Recording Industry Association of America, and the Motion Picture Association of America.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article after the jump.[end-div]

Idea Soup

Light Breeze Signals the Winds of Change

The gods of Norse legend are surely turning slowly in their graves. A Reykjavik, Iceland, court recently granted a 15-year-old the right to use her given name. Her first name, “Blaer” means “light breeze” in Icelandic, and until the ruling was not permitted to use the name under Iceland’s strict cultural preservation laws. So, before you name your next child Shoniqua or Te’o or Cruise, pause for a few moments to think how lucky you are that you live elsewhere (with apologies to our readers in Iceland).

[div class=attrib]From the Guardian:[end-div]

A 15-year-old Icelandic girl has been granted the right to legally use the name given to her by her mother, despite the opposition of authorities and Iceland’s strict law on names.

Reykjavik District Court ruled Thursday that the name “Blaer” can be used. It means “light breeze.”

The decision overturns an earlier rejection by Icelandic authorities who declared it was not a proper feminine name. Until now, Blaer Bjarkardottir had been identified simply as “Girl” in communications with officials.

“I’m very happy,” she said after the ruling. “I’m glad this is over. Now I expect I’ll have to get new identity papers. Finally I’ll have the name Blaer in my passport.”

Like a handful of other countries, including Germany and Denmark, Iceland has official rules about what a baby can be named. Names are supposed to fit Icelandic grammar and pronunciation rules — choices like Carolina and Christa are not allowed because the letter “c” is not part of Iceland’s alphabet.

Blaer’s mother, Bjork Eidsdottir, had fought for the right for the name to be recognized. The court ruling means that other girls will be also allowed to use the name in Iceland.

In an interview earlier this year, Eidsdottir said she did not know the name “Blaer” was not on the list of accepted female names when she gave it to her daughter. The name was rejected because the panel viewed it as a masculine name that was inappropriate for a girl.

The court found that based on testimony and other evidence, that the name could be used by both males and females and that Blaer had a right to her own name under Iceland’s constitution and Europe’s human rights conventions. It rejected the government’s argument that her request should be denied to protect the Icelandic language.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article after the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image: Odin holds bracelets and leans on his spear while looking towards the völva in Völuspá. Gesturing, the völva holds a spoon and sits beside a steaming kettle. Published in Gjellerup, Karl (1895). Courtesy of Wikipedia.[end-div]

Idea Soup

Sales Performance and Extroversion

There is a common urban legend that to be successful in most deeds one needs to be an extrovert. In business, many of us are led to believe that all successful CEOs and corporate-titans are extroverts. We also tend to think that to be a top-flight sales person one also needs to be an out-and-out party-animal. Well it is a myth, now backed up by the most comprehensive meta-study (a study of studies) to date on extroversion and business performance.

[div class=attrib]From the Washington Post:[end-div]

Spend a day with any leader in any organization, and you’ll quickly discover that the person you’re shadowing, whatever his or her official title or formal position, is actually in sales. These leaders are often pitching customers and clients, of course. But they’re also persuading employees, convincing suppliers, sweet-talking funders or cajoling a board. At the core of their exalted work is a less glamorous truth: Leaders sell.

So what kind of personality makes the best salesperson — and therefore, presumably, the most effective leader?

Most of us would say extroverts. These wonderfully gregarious folks, we like to think, have the right stuff for the role. They’re at ease in social settings. They know how to strike up conversations. They don’t shrink from making requests. Little wonder, then, that scholars such as Michael Mount of the University of Iowa and others have shown that hiring managers select for this trait when assembling a sales force.

The conventional view that extroverts make the finest salespeople is so accepted that we’ve overlooked one teensy flaw: There’s almost no evidence it’s actually true.

When social scientists have examined the relationship between extroverted personalities and sales success — that is, how often the cash register rings — they’ve found the link to be, at best, flimsy. For instance, one of the most comprehensive investigations, a meta-analysis of 35 studies of nearly 4,000 salespeople, found that the correlation between extroversion and sales performance was essentially zero (0.07, to be exact).

Does this mean instead that introverts, the soft-spoken souls more at home in a study carrel than on a sales call,are more effective? Not at all.

The answer, in new research from Adam Grant, the youngest tenured professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Management, is far more intriguing. In a study that will be published later this year in the journal Psychological Science, Grant collected data from sales representatives at a software company. He began by giving reps an often-used personality assessment that measures introversion and extroversion on a 1-to-7 scale, with 1 being most introverted and 7 being most extroverted.

Then he tracked their performance over the next three months. The introverts fared worst; they earned average revenue of $120 per hour. The extroverts performed slightly better, pulling in $125 per hour. But neither did nearly as well as a third group: the ambiverts.

Ambi-whats?

Ambiverts, a term coined by social scientists in the 1920s, are people who are neither extremely introverted nor extremely extroverted. Think back to that 1-to-7 scale that Grant used. Ambiverts aren’t 1s or 2s, but they’re not 6s or 7s either. They’re 3s, 4s and 5s. They’re not quiet, but they’re not loud. They know how to assert themselves, but they’re not pushy.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article following the jump.[end-div]

Idea Soup, tD

Someone Has to Stand Up to Experts

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“Someone has to stand up to experts!”. This is what Don McLeroy would have you believe about scientists. We all espouse senseless rants once in a while, so we should give McLeroy the benefit of the doubt – perhaps he had slept poorly the night before this impassioned, irrational plea. On the other hand, when you learn that McLeroy’s statement came as chairman of the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) in 2010, then you may wish to think again, especially if you have children in the school system of the Lone Star State.

McLeroy and his fellow young-Earth creationists including Cynthia Dunbar are the subject of a documentary out this week titled The Revisionaries. It looks at the messy and yet successful efforts of the SBOE to revise the curriculum standards and the contents of science and social studies textbooks in their favor. So, included in a list of over 100 significant amendments, the non-experts did the following: marginalized Thomas Jefferson for being a secular humanist; watered down the historically accepted rationale for separation of church and state; stressed the positive side of the McCarthyist witchhunts; removed references to Hispanics having fought against Santa Anna in the battle of the Alamo; added the National Rifle Association as a key element in the recent conservative resurgence; and of course, re-opened the entire debate over the validity of evolutionary theory.

While McLeroy and some of his fellow non-experts lost re-election bids, their influence on young minds is likely to be far-reaching — textbooks in Texas are next revised in 2020, and because of Texas’ market power many publishers across the nation tend to follow Texas standards.

[div class=attrib]Video clip courtesy of The Revisionaries, PBS.[end-div]

Idea Soup

Letters of Love to Strangers

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It seems impossible to halt the spread of random acts of senseless kindness. This is a good thing. The latest good deeds come courtesy of Hannah Brencher and her army, which now numbers over 10,000 strong. What Hannah does is simple — she writes happy letters to strangers. What began as a sole endeavor is now a growing movement, replete with a starter kit for novice letter-writers, a TED (Technology Entertainment and Design) presentation, and its own website, of course, at The World Needs More Love Letters.

[div class=attrib]From the Guardian:[end-div]

When 24-year-old Hannah Brencher moved to New York after college, she was hit by depression and overwhelming loneliness. One day she felt so alone, she wanted to reach out to someone. And so she put pen to paper and started writing letters. Letters to complete strangers.

But these weren’t sad letters about how she was feeling. They were happy letters, all about the other person, not her. She would write messages for people to have a “bright day” and tell strangers how brilliant they were, even if they thought no one else had noticed. Brencher began dropping the notes all over New York, in cafes, in library books, in parks and on the subway. It made her feel better, knowing that she might be making somebody’s day through just a few short, sweet words. It gave her something to focus on. And so, The World Needs More Love Letters was born.

The World Needs More Love Letters is all about writing letters – not emails, but proper, handwritten letters. Not conventional love letters, written to a real beloved, but surprise letters for strangers. They don’t necessarily say “I love you”, but they are full of kindness (that’s the love Brencher’s talking about) – telling people they are remarkable and special and all-round amazing. It’s the sort of stuff that most people don’t really say out loud even to the people they care about, let alone a total stranger.

Brencher’s initiative has now exploded. She has personally written hundreds, if not thousands of letters. Last year, she did a Ted talk. In it, she talks about a woman whose husband, a soldier, comes back from Afghanistan and they struggle to reconnect – “So she tucks love letters throughout the house as a way to say: ‘Come back to me. Find me when you can'” – and a university student who slips letters around her campus, only to suddenly find everyone is writing them and there are love letters hanging from the trees.

Now there are more than 10,000 people who join in all over the world. Sometimes, they write letters to order, to people who are lonely and down and just want someone to tell them that everything will be OK. Mostly, though, they scribble notes and leave them somewhere unlikely, for somebody to find.

It’s a very cute idea. It also sounds, well, a bit American touchy-feely. I’m not sure that’s something us Brits do well (although this chap from Aberdeen did it for a while, to some success judging by the feedback on his blog. Even if his notes were printouts and not charmingly done by hand). But I know that if I was on the receiving end of a letter like that, it almost certainly might put a smile on my face. So I decide to give it a try and see if I might do the same for someone else.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article after the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Video courtesy of The World Needs More Love Letters / TED.[end-div]

Idea Soup, Literature

Orwell Lives On

George Orwell passed away on January 21, 1950 — an untimely death. He was only 46 years old. The anniversary of his death leads some to wonder what the great author would be doing if he were still alive. Some believe that he would be a food / restaurant critic. Or perhaps he would still, at the age of 109, be writing about injustice, falsehood and hypocrisy. One suspects that he might still be speaking truth to power as he did back in the 1940s, the difference being that this time power is in private hands versus the public sector. Corporate Big Brother is now watching you.

[div class=attrib]From the Guardian:[end-div]

What if George Orwell hadn’t died of tuberculosis in 1950? What if, instead of expiring aged 46 in University College hospital, he had climbed from his sick-bed, taken the fishing rod a friend had brought him for his convalescence and checked out? What if today he was alive and well (perhaps after a period in cryogenic storage – the details aren’t important now)? What would he think of 2013? What, if anything, would he be writing about?

In many respects Orwell is ubiquitous and more relevant than ever. His once-visionary keywords have grotesque afterlives: Big Brother is a TV franchise to make celebrities of nobodies and Room 101 a light-entertainment show on BBC2 currently hosted by Frank Skinner for celebrities to witter about stuff that gets their goat. Meanwhile, Orwellian is the second-most-overused literary-generated adjective (after Kafkaesque). And now St Vince of Cable has been busted down from visionary analyst of recession to turncoat enabler of George Osborne’s austerity measures. Orwell is the go-to thinker to account for our present woes – even though he is 63 years dead. Which, in the Newspeak of 1984, is doubleplusgood.

As we celebrate the first Orwell Day this week, it’s irresistible to play the game of “what if”? If Orwell was fighting in a war akin to the Spanish civil war in 2012, where would he be – Syria? Would he write Homage to Aleppo, perhaps? Or would he have written Homage to Zuccotti Park or Tottenham? If he was writing Down and Out in Paris and London today would it be very different – and, if so, how? If he took a journey to Wigan pier in 2013, what would he find that would resemble the original trip and what would be different? Would there still be a full chamber pot under his hosts’ breakfast table? Let’s hope not.

Would he be working in a call centre rather than going down a mine? Would he feel as patriotic as he did in some of his essays? Would the man born Eric Arthur Blair have spent much of the past decade tilting at the man born Anthony Charles Lynton Blair? The answers to the last three questions are, you’d hope: yes, probably not, and oh, please God, yes.

“It’s almost impossible to imagine,” says Orwell’s biographer, the novelist and critic DJ Taylor. “One of his closest friends, the novelist Anthony Powell, suggested in his journals that Orwell’s politics would have drifted rightwards. He would have been anti-CND, in favour of the Falklands war, disapproved of the miners’ strikes. Powell was a high Tory right winger, but he was very close to Orwell and so those possibilities of what he would have been like had he lived on shouldn’t be dismissed.”

Adam Stock, an Orwell scholar at Newcastle University who did his PhD on mid-20th-century dystopian fiction and political thought, says: “If he were alive today, then Orwell would surely be writing about many of the sorts of areas you identify, bringing to light inequalities, injustices and arguing for what he termed ‘democratic socialism’, and I would like to think – though this may be projection on my part – that at this moment he would be writing specifically in defence of the welfare state.”

You’d hope. But Stock reckons that in 2013 Orwell would also be writing about the politics of food. “Orwell’s novels are marked by their rich detailing of taste, touch and especially smell. Tinned and processed food is a recurring image in his fiction, and it often represents a smoothing out of difference and individuality, a process which mirrors political attempts to make people conform to certain ideological visions of the world in the 1930s and 1940s,” says Stock.

Indeed, during last week’s horsemeat scandal, Stock says a passage from Orwell’s 1939 novel Coming Up for Air came to mind. The character George Bowling bites into a frankfurter he has bought in an milk bar decorated in chrome and mirrors: “The thing burst in my mouth like a rotten pear. A sort of horrible soft stuff was oozing all over my tongue. But the taste! For a moment I just couldn’t believe it. Then I rolled my tongue round it again and had another try. It was fish! A sausage, a thing calling itself a frankfurter, filled with fish! I got up and walked straight out without touching my coffee. God knows what that might have tasted of.”

What’s the present-day significance of that? “The point, I think, is that appearances mask quite different realities in the milk-bar modernity of mirrors in which the character is sitting, trapped between endless reflections,” says Stock. “Orwell had an abiding interest in the countryside, rural life and growing his own food. One thing I suspect he would be campaigning vociferously about in our time is issues surrounding big agribusiness and the provenance of our food, the biological commons, and particularly the patenting of GM crops.”

[div class=attrib]Read more after the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image: George Orwell. Courtesy of the BBC.[end-div]

Idea Soup

Gun Deaths in the U.S

Despite the recent atrocity in Newtown, Connecticut, at the hands of a madman carrying an assault weapon, death by gun continues unabated in the United States. Yet, accurate statistics are hard to come by. So, Slate and the Twitter feed @GunDeaths are collecting data to put this in perspective. Just over a month has passed since 20 children and 7 adults were gunned-down at Sandy Hook Elementary School. And since then at least 1,019 more people have died at the hands of a gun in the United States. That’s more than most other civilized countries record in a decade.

You can follow the interactive chart as it is updated daily here; another 4 deaths just today, January 17, 2013. According to the map, North Dakota and Wyoming have been the best States to avoid getting shot — both have recorded no deaths from gun violence since mid-December.

[div class=attrib]Image: partial snapshot of Slate and @GunDeaths interactive graphic. Courtesy of Slate.[end-div]

BigBang, Idea Soup

Politics Driven by Science

Imagine a nation, or even a world, where political decisions and policy are driven by science rather than emotion. Well, small experiments are underway, so this may not be as far off as many would believe, or even dare to hope.

[div class=attrib]From the New Scientist:[end-div]

In your wildest dreams, could you imagine a government that builds its policies on carefully gathered scientific evidence? One that publishes the rationale behind its decisions, complete with data, analysis and supporting arguments? Well, dream no longer: that’s where the UK is heading.

It has been a long time coming, according to Chris Wormald, permanent secretary at the Department for Education. The civil service is not short of clever people, he points out, and there is no lack of desire to use evidence properly. More than 20 years as a serving politician has convinced him that they are as keen as anyone to create effective policies. “I’ve never met a minister who didn’t want to know what worked,” he says. What has changed now is that informed policy-making is at last becoming a practical possibility.

That is largely thanks to the abundance of accessible data and the ease with which new, relevant data can be created. This has supported a desire to move away from hunch-based politics.

Last week, for instance, Rebecca Endean, chief scientific advisor and director of analytical services at the Ministry of Justice, announced that the UK government is planning to open up its data for analysis by academics, accelerating the potential for use in policy planning.

At the same meeting, hosted by innovation-promoting charity NESTA, Wormald announced a plan to create teaching schools based on the model of teaching hospitals. In education, he said, the biggest single problem is a culture that often relies on anecdotal experience rather than systematically reported data from practitioners, as happens in medicine. “We want to move teacher training and research and practice much more onto the health model,” Wormald said.

Test, learn, adapt

In June last year the Cabinet Office published a paper called “Test, Learn, Adapt: Developing public policy with randomised controlled trials”. One of its authors, the doctor and campaigning health journalist Ben Goldacre, has also been working with the Department of Education to compile a comparison of education and health research practices, to be published in the BMJ.

In education, the evidence-based revolution has already begun. A charity called the Education Endowment Foundation is spending £1.4 million on a randomised controlled trial of reading programmes in 50 British schools.

There are reservations though. The Ministry of Justice is more circumspect about the role of such trials. Where it has carried out randomised controlled trials, they often failed to change policy, or even irked politicians with conclusions that were obvious. “It is not a panacea,” Endean says.

Power of prediction

The biggest need is perhaps foresight. Ministers often need instant answers, and sometimes the data are simply not available. Bang goes any hope of evidence-based policy.

“The timescales of policy-making and evidence-gathering don’t match,” says Paul Wiles, a criminologist at the University of Oxford and a former chief scientific adviser to the Home Office. Wiles believes that to get round this we need to predict the issues that the government is likely to face over the next decade. “We can probably come up with 90 per cent of them now,” he says.

Crucial to the process will be convincing the public about the value and use of data, so that everyone is on-board. This is not going to be easy. When the government launched its Administrative Data Taskforce, which set out to look at data in all departments and opening it up so that it could be used for evidence-based policy, it attracted minimal media interest.

The taskforce’s remit includes finding ways to increase trust in data security. Then there is the problem of whether different departments are legally allowed to exchange data. There are other practical issues: many departments format data in incompatible ways. “At the moment it’s incredibly difficult,” says Jonathan Breckon, manager of the Alliance for Useful Evidence, a collaboration between NESTA and the Economic and Social Research Council.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article after the jump.[end-div]

Idea Soup, tD

Time for Some Pigovian Taxes

Leaving the merits of capitalism or socialism aside for a moment, let’s consider the case for taxing bad behavior versus good. Adam Davidson, economics columnist and founder of NPR’s Planet Money, reviews the case now being made by a growing number of economists on both the left and the right. They all come to a similar conclusion: Forget about taxing good or constrictive behavior such as entrepreneurialism. Rather, it’s time to tax people for doing destructive and damaging things.

Arthur Pigou, the early-20th century economist, for whom Pigovian taxes are so named, argued that people should face the consequences of externalities. An externality covers an action that we take and that affects others, but to which the market cannot, yet, assign a price. Here’s an example. Say on your morning commute to work your bad habit of driving while using a mobile phone causes an accident followed by an hour-long traffic jam — the lost productivity from all those stuck behind you on the highway is an externality. So, the thinking goes, what if we were to tax such errant behavior? Not only would governments secure an alternate, or — sigh — yet another form of revenue, but we could also collectively discourage bad behavior through monetary means. Taxes on tobacco are a good example — more so due to the addictive nature of nicotine.

Perhaps it’s time for a tax on burgers and fries, a tax on sneezing and coughing in public, and, why not, a tax on those who sing out of tune.

[div class=attrib]From the New York Times:[end-div]

Driving home during the holidays, I found myself trapped in the permanent traffic jam on I-95 near Bridgeport, Conn. In the back seat, my son was screaming. All around, drivers had the menaced, lifeless expressions that people get when they see cars lined up to the horizon. It was enough to make me wish for congestion pricing — a tax paid by drivers to enter crowded areas at peak times. After all, it costs drivers about $16 to enter central London during working hours. A few years ago, it nearly caught on in New York. And on that drive home, I would have happily paid whatever it cost to persuade some other drivers that it wasn’t worth it for them to be on the road.

Instead, we all suffered. Each car added an uncharged burden to every other person. In fact, everyone on the road was doing all sorts of harm to society without paying the cost. I drove about 150 miles that day and emitted, according to E.P.A. data, about 140 pounds of carbon dioxide. My very presence also increased (albeit infinitesimally) the likelihood of a traffic accident, further dependence on foreign oil and the proliferation of urban sprawl. According to an influential study by the I.M.F. economist Ian Parry, my hours on the road cost society around $10. Add up all the cars in all the traffic jams across the country, and it’s clear that drivers are costing hundreds of billions of dollars a year that we don’t pay for.

This is how economists think, anyway. And that’s why a majority of them support some form of Pigovian tax, named after Arthur Pigou, the early-20th-century British economist. Pigou developed the idea of externalities: the things we do that affect others and that the market is unable to price. A negative externality is like the national equivalent of what happens when you go to dinner with three friends and, knowing that you’ll pay only a fourth of the bill, decide to order an expensive entree. Pigou argued that there are so many damaging things that we do — play music too loudly, drive aggressively — and that we’d probably do less if we had to pay for them.

The $10 I cost the economy was based on Parry’s algorithm, which calculates that drivers should pay a tax of at least $1.25 a gallon. Forty percent of that price, he says, is the cost that each vehicle adds to congestion. Another 40 cents or so offsets the price of accidents if we divided the full cost — more than $400 billion annually — by each gallon of gas consumed. (Only about 32 cents would be needed to offset the impact on the environment.) According to Parry’s logic, if we paid a tax of $1.25 per gallon instead of the current average of 50 cents, the price of gas would increase by about 25 percent to around $4 a gallon, which is still well below what much of Europe pays. But it would still encourage us to drive less, pollute less, crash less, lower the country’s dependence on foreign oil and make cities more livable. Not surprisingly, several studies have found that people — especially in Europe, where the gas tax is around $3 a gallon — drive a lot less when they have to pay a lot more for gas.

The idea of raising taxes to help society might sound like the ravings of a left-wing radical, or an idea that would destroy American industry. Yet the nation’s leading proponent of a Pigovian gas tax is N. Gregory Mankiw, chairman of President George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers and a consultant to Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign. Mankiw keeps track of others who support Pigovian taxes, and his unofficial Pigou Club is surely the only group that counts Ralph Nader and Al Gore along with leading conservatives like Charles Krauthammer, Alan Greenspan and Gary Becker as members.

Republican economists, like Mankiw, normally oppose tax increases, but many support Pigovian taxes because, in some sense, we are already paying them. We pay the tax in the form of the overcrowded roads, higher insurance premiums, smog and global warming. Adding an extra fee at the pump simply makes the cost explicit. Pigou’s approach, Mankiw argues, also converts a burden into a benefit. Imposing taxes on income and capital gains, he notes, punishes the work and investment that improve society; taxing negative externalities allows the government to make money while discouraging activity that hurts the overall economy.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article after the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image: Arthur Cecil Pigou, 1943. Courtesy of Ramsey and Muspratt Collection.[end-div]

Idea Soup

From 7 Up to 56 Up

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The classic documentary and social experiment continues with the release this week of “56 Up”. Michael Apted began this remarkable process with a documentary called “7 Up” in 1964. It followed the lives of 14 British children aged 7, from different socio-economic backgrounds. Although the 7 Up documentary was initially planned to be a one-off, subsequent installments followed in seven-year cycles. Each time Apted would bring us up to date with the lives of his growing subjects. Now, they are all turning 56 years old. Fifty-six years on the personal stories are poignant and powerful, yet class divisions remain.

[div class=attrib]From the Telegraph:[end-div]

Life rushes by so fast, it flickers today and is gone tomorrow. In “56 Up” — the latest installment in Michael Apted’s remarkable documentary project that has followed a group of Britons since 1964, starting when they were 7 — entire lifetimes race by with a few edits. One minute, a boy is merrily bobbing along. The next, he is 56 years old, with a wife or an ex, a few children or none, a career, a job or just dim prospects. Rolls of fat girdle his middle and thicken his jowls. He has regrets, but their sting has usually softened, along with everything else.

In a lot of documentaries you might not care that much about this boy and what became of him. But if you have watched any of the previous episodes in Mr. Apted’s series, you will care, and deeply, partly because you watched that boy grow up, suffer and triumph in a project that began as a news gimmick and social experiment and turned into a plangent human drama. Conceived as a one-off for a current-affairs program on Granada Television, the first film, “Seven Up!,” was a 40-minute look at the lives of 14 children from different backgrounds. Britain was changing, or so went the conventional wisdom, with postwar affluence having led the working class to adapt middle-class attitudes and lifestyles.

In 1963, though, the sociologists John H. Goldthorpe and David Lockwood disputed this widely held “embourgeoisement thesis,” arguing that the erosion of social class had not been as great as believed. In its deeply personal fashion, the “Up” series went on to make much the same point by checking in with many of the same boys and girls, men and women, every seven years. Despite some dropouts, the group has remained surprisingly intact. For better and sometimes worse, and even with their complaints about the series, participants like Tony Walker, who wanted to be a jockey and found his place as a cabby, have become cyclical celebrities. For longtime viewers they have become something more, including mirrors.

It’s this mirroring that helps make the series so poignant. As in the earlier movies, Mr. Apted again folds in older material from the ages of 7, 14 and so on, to set the scene and jog memories. The abrupt juxtapositions of epochs can be jarring, unnerving or touching — sometimes all three — as bright-faced children bloom and sometimes fade within seconds. An analogous project in print or even still photographs wouldn’t be as powerful, because what gives the “Up” series its punch is not so much its longevity or the human spectacle it offers, but that these are moving images of touchingly vibrant lives at certain moments in time and space. The more you watch, the more the movies transform from mirrors into memory machines, ones that inevitably summon reflections of your own life.

Save for “Seven Up!,” filmed in gorgeous black and white, the documentaries are aesthetically unremarkable. Shot in digital, “56 Up” pretty much plays like the earlier movies, with its mix of interviews and location shooting. Every so often you hear someone off screen, presumably Mr. Apted, make a comment, though mostly he lets his choice of what to show — the subjects at work or play, with family or friends — and his editing do his editorializing. In the past he has brought participants together, but he doesn’t here, which feels like a missed opportunity. Have the three childhood friends from the East End of London, Jackie Bassett, Lynn Johnson and Sue Sullivan, two of whom have recently endured heart-rendingly bad times, remained in contact? Mr. Apted doesn’t say.

With few exceptions and despite potential path-changing milestones like marriages and careers, everyone seems to have remained fairly locked in his or her original social class. At 7, Andrew Brackfield and John Brisby already knew which universities they would or should attend. “We think,” John said in “Seven Up!, “I’m going to Cambridge and Trinity Hall,” though he landed at Oxford. Like Mr. Brackfield, who did attend Cambridge, Mr. Brisby became a lawyer and still sounds to the manner born, with an accent that evokes old-fashioned news readers and Bond villains. The two hold instructively different views about whether the series corroborates the first film’s thesis about the rigidity of the British class structure, never mind that their lives are strong evidence that little has changed.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article following the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Video: 7 Up – Part 1. Courtesy of World in Action, Granada TV.[end-div]

Idea Soup

So You Wanna Be a Rockstar?

Many of us harbor dreams, often secret ones, of becoming a famous rockstar. Well, if you want to live well passed middle age, think again. Being a rockstar and living a long life are not statistically compatible, especially if you’re American. You choose.

[div class=attrib]From ars technica:[end-div]

Hedonism. Substance abuse. Risky behavior. Rock stars from Elvis Presley to Amy Winehouse have ended up famous not only for their music but for the decadent lifestyle it enabled, one that eventually contributed to their deaths. But how much does the rock lifestyle really hurt?

Quite a bit. That’s the conclusion of a new study that tracked nearly 1,500 chart-topping musicians and found that their life expectancy after fame really was lower than that of the general population. North American solo musicians seem to have it especially bad.

This wasn’t necessarily what you’d expect. A huge number of studies have shown that wealth is generally associated with greater longevity, possibly as a result of better health care, better diet, and lower stress. Not only are rock musicians dying faster than the general populace, but they’re completely negating the impact of any wealth that their fame brought to them.

To get a collection of rock stars for their study, the authors combed the charts and took advantage of a large poll that listed the top 1,000 albums of all time. Altogether, their subjects reached fame between the years of 1956 and 2006 and included everyone from Elvis Presley to Regina Spektor to the Arctic Monkeys. From there, the authors searched the news and Wikipedia, looking for reports of death. With that information in hand, they compared the artists’ life expectancies to those of the general population.

Only about two-thirds of North American stars were still alive 40 years after their first brush with fame, compared with about 80 percent of a matched population—and there was never a point at which they outlived their non-famous peers. Typically, Europeans have greater life expectancies, but European stars did not, tracking the longevity of average North Americans for the first few decades.

Oddly, however, once they survived 20 years after hitting the big time, European rock stars started to do better, outliving the typical North American. And, by 35 years, they caught up with the average European’s life expectancy. (No word from the authors on whether this trend would stay the same if the analysis excluded the members of the Rolling Stones.) On both continents, solo performers did worse than members of a band.

So what’s killing the famous? The authors identified cause of death wherever possible and classified it as either “other” or “substance use or risk-related deaths.” The latter category included “drug or alcohol-related chronic disorder, overdose or accident, and other risk-related causes that may or may not have been related to substance use, i.e., suicide and violence.” They also tried to determine (using biographical data) whether any of the deceased stars had suffered adverse childhood experiences, such as a substance abusing or a mentally ill parent.

Of those without any obvious childhood issues, under a third died of substance abuse or other risky behavior. Adding a single adverse childhood influence raised that rate to 42 percent. Two or more adverse events, and the rate shot up to about 80 percent.

These same sorts of childhood problems tend to lead to substance abuse and other troubles in the general population as well, and the authors conclude that the hedonism we associate with rock stars is less a lifestyle choice and more an outcome of early life issues.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article after the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image: Spinal Tap backstage at CBGB’s in New York City. Photograph: Ebet Roberts/Redferns / Guardian.[end-div]

Idea Soup

For Sale – Year in Review

Now is the time of year to review all that has passed during 2012. You know how it goes: celebrity marriages, celebrity divorces, extreme weather records, deaths, best and worst movies. Our favorite moments come courtesy of postings on Craigslist. Annually, Craigslist users nominate their favorites for inclusion in the “Best Of” category. A recent favorite of ours from Pensacola, Florida:

guy with skid mark, bought gallon of whole milk, circle k – w4m

i was in my bikini at the circle k, you came in with your short shirt and your bike shorts on. they were white and you had a pretty sexy skid mark staining your behind. you got 11 sticks of beef jerky and a gallon of whole milk, then rode off on your bicycle. i will know its you because you paid in pennies.

[div class=attrib]From Wired:[end-div]

Homer Simpson’s famous ode to alcohol—”The cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems”—might apply in equal measure to Craigslist, the wildly popular, barebones site where one can find all of life’s problems and solutions, including: a freelance writing gig, roommates, a sex partner, a man-sized fiberglass chili pepper, a lifetime supply of hot sauce, and coffee beans that have been ingested, digested, and excreted by someone living in Portland.

Each year, Craigslist users across the country flag their favorite classified ads for inclusion in the “best of” category. The bar to inclusion is high, but somehow each year America comes through with memorable postings that remind us just why we went ahead with this whole Web 2.0 thing.

This year was no exception. Here are a few of our favorites.

Paging Michelangelo

“Artist needed. Must love owls,” said one September post, which had something quite specific in mind.

We need an artist to depict the following: an owl skeleton with a parrot on its shoulder. The parrot is not a skeleton and is very colorful. The parrot has a peg leg, with a pirate hat on. The owl has an eye patch and a gold chain necklace with a skull on the pendant of said necklace. The skull in the pendant has an eye patch on the opposite eye of the owl (long story there don’t ask). The owl skeleton also has on a wizard’s hat with that typical wizard hat wrinkle. The owl is standing on a cowboy hat from a whale’s spout. This all is within a snow globe. That santa is holding with his only good hand because his other hand is a hook. Mrs. Clause is pulling on Mr. Clause’s coat with one of those dinosaur mouth grabbers that all 80’s children know.

The artist who could handle the commission would get both some cash and “a prize.”

(Side note: the oddly specific nature of this image request parallels those often received by our own creative director, Aurich Lawson, who has fielded article image suggestions that make this one look absolutely normal by comparison.)

Needed: one lap for aging cat

Next up, the “feline lap surrogate,” which I want to believe is a joke but fear is not. This job post is exactly what it sounds like, viz., the surrogate goes to a home each morning from 8am-12pm and gets paid $15 an hour to sit in a chair and “allow my cat to sit on their lap (the cat is attention seeking, and has been decreasing my productivity as of late).” The ideal candidate must have cat handling experience and no allergies.

“I do not need anyone in the afternoon since the sun warms the window sill by that point, and the cat will prefer the window sill to a lap,” the ad concludes. “Breakfast and lunch will be provided each day.”

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article after the jump.[end-div]

Idea Soup

British? May the Force be With You

Recent census figures from the United Kingdom show that Jedi is the seventh most popular faith overall, with just over 176,000 followers.

While this is down from a high of around 400,000 in the previous census (2001) it does suggest that George Lucas, creator of the Star Wars franchise, would still be a good stand-in for God in some parts of the U.K.

To learn more about Jediism point your browser here.

[div class=attrib]From the Telegraph:[end-div]

The new figures reveal that the lightsabre-wielding disciples are only behind Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism, Judaism and Buddhism in the popularity stakes, excluding non-religious people and people who did not answer.

Following a nationwide campaign, Jedi made it onto the 2001 census, with 390,127 people identifying themselves a decade ago as followers of the fictional Star Wars creed.

Although the number of Jedis has dropped by more than 50 per cent over the past 10 years, they are still the most selected “alternative” faith on the Census, and constitute 0.31% of all people’s stated religious affiliation in England and Wales.

The latest official population survey also revealed 6,242 people subscribe to the Heavy Metal religion, which was set up in 2010 by the Rock magazine, Metal Hammer.

The number of people specifically identifying as Atheists was 29,267, while over 13.8 million refused to identify with a faith at all, ticking the “No religion” box on the census form.

Norwich was revealed as the area with the highest proportion of non-religious people, with 41.5% of residents refusing to identify with a faith. The city also possesses the highest proportion of Heavy Metal followers and the 3rd highest proportion of Jedi Knights.

Other non-mainstream religions that had followers in significant numbers included 56,620 Paganists, 39,061 Spiritualists, 2,418 Scientologists and 20,288 Jainists, some of whom sweep the floor with a broom made of cotton threads as they walk along so as not to kill any insects.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article after the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image: Star Wars Jedi Knights, Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan Kenobi. Courtesy of Wikipedia / Lucas Films.[end-div]

Idea Soup

E or I, T or F: 50 Years of Myers-Briggs

Two million people annually take the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator assessment. Over 10,000 businesses and 2,500 colleges in the United States use the test.

It’s very likely that you have taken the test at some point in your life: during high school, or to get into university or to secure your first job. The test categorizes humans along 4 discrete axes (or dichotomies) of personality types: Extraversion (E) and Introversion (I); Sensing (S) and Intuition (N); Thinking (T) and Feeling (F); Judging (J) and Perceiving (P). If your have a partner it’s likely that he or she has, at sometime or another, (mis-)labeled you as an E or an I, and as a “feeler” rather than a “thinker”, and so on. Countless arguments will have ensued.

[div class=attrib]From the Washington Post:[end-div]

Some grandmothers pass down cameo necklaces. Katharine Cook Briggs passed down the world’s most widely used personality test.

Chances are you’ve taken the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, or will. Roughly 2 million people a year do. It has become the gold standard of psychological assessments, used in businesses, government agencies and educational institutions. Along the way, it has spawned a multimillion-dollar business around its simple concept that everyone fits one of 16 personality types.

Now, 50 years after the first time anyone paid money for the test, the Myers-Briggs legacy is reaching the end of the family line. The youngest heirs don’t want it. And it’s not clear whether organizations should, either.

That’s not to say it hasn’t had a major influence.

More than 10,000 companies, 2,500 colleges and universities and 200 government agencies in the United States use the test. From the State Department to McKinsey & Co., it’s a rite of passage. It’s estimated that 50 million people have taken the Myers-Briggs personality test since the Educational Testing Service first added the research to its portfolio in 1962.

The test, whose first research guinea pigs were George Washington University students, has seen financial success commensurate to this cultlike devotion among its practitioners. CPP, the private company that publishes Myers-Briggs, brings in roughly $20 million a year from it and the 800 other products, such as coaching guides, that it has spawned.

Yet despite its widespread use and vast financial success, and although it was derived from the work of Carl Jung, one of the most famous psychologists of the 20th century, the test is highly questioned by the scientific community.

To begin even before its arrival in Washington: Myers-Briggs traces its history to 1921, when Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist, published his theory of personality types in the book “Psychologische Typen.” Jung had become well known for his pioneering work in psychoanalysis and close collaboration with Sigmund Freud, though by the 1920s the two had severed ties.

Psychoanalysis was a young field and one many regarded skeptically. Still, it had made its way across the Atlantic not only to the university offices of scientists but also to the home of a mother in Washington.

Katharine Cook Briggs was a voracious reader of the new psychology books coming out in Europe, and she shared her fascination with Jung’s latest work — in which he developed the concepts of introversion and extroversion — with her daughter, Isabel Myers. They would later use Jung’s work as a basis for their own theory, which would become the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. MBTI is their framework for classifying personality types along four distinct axes: introversion vs. extroversion, sensing vs. intuition, thinking vs. feeling and judging vs. perceiving. A person, according to their hypothesis, has one dominant preference in each of the four pairs. For example, he might be introverted, a sensor, a thinker and a perceiver. Or, in Myers-Briggs shorthand, an “ISTP.”

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article following the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image: Keirsey Temperament Sorter, which utilizes Myers-Briggs dichotomies to group personalities into 16 types. Courtesy of Wikipedia.[end-div]

Idea Soup, tD

Single-tasking is Human

If you’re an office worker you will relate. Recently, you will have participated on a team meeting or conference call only to have at least one person say, when asked a question, “sorry can you please repeat that, I was multitasking.”

Many of us believe, or have been tricked into believing, that doing multiple things at once makes us more productive. This phenomenon was branded by business as multitasking. After all, if computers could do it, then why not humans. Yet, experience shows that humans are woefully inadequate at performing multiple concurrent tasks that require dedicated attention. Of course, humans are experts at walking and chewing gum at the same time. However, in the majority of cases these activities require very little involvement from the higher functions of the brain. There is a growing body of anecdotal and experimental evidence that shows poorer performance on multiple tasks done concurrently versus the same tasks performed sequentially. In fact, for quite some time, researchers have shown that dealing with multiple streams of information at once is a real problem for our limited brains.

Yet, most businesses seem to demand or reward multitasking behavior. And damagingly, the multitasking epidemic now seems to be the norm in the home as well.

[div class=attrib]From the WSJ:[end-div]

In the few minutes it takes to read this article, chances are you’ll pause to check your phone, answer a text, switch to your desktop to read an email from the boss’s assistant, or glance at the Facebook or Twitter messages popping up in the corner of your screen. Off-screen, in your open-plan office, crosstalk about a colleague’s preschooler might lure you away, or a co-worker may stop by your desk for a quick question.

And bosses wonder why it is tough to get any work done.

Distraction at the office is hardly new, but as screens multiply and managers push frazzled workers to do more with less, companies say the problem is worsening and is affecting business.

While some firms make noises about workers wasting time on the Web, companies are realizing the problem is partly their own fault.

Even though digital technology has led to significant productivity increases, the modern workday seems custom-built to destroy individual focus. Open-plan offices and an emphasis on collaborative work leave workers with little insulation from colleagues’ chatter. A ceaseless tide of meetings and internal emails means that workers increasingly scramble to get their “real work” done on the margins, early in the morning or late in the evening. And the tempting lure of social-networking streams and status updates make it easy for workers to interrupt themselves.

“It is an epidemic,” says Lacy Roberson, a director of learning and organizational development at eBay Inc. At most companies, it’s a struggle “to get work done on a daily basis, with all these things coming at you,” she says.

Office workers are interrupted—or self-interrupt—roughly every three minutes, academic studies have found, with numerous distractions coming in both digital and human forms. Once thrown off track, it can take some 23 minutes for a worker to return to the original task, says Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, who studies digital distraction.

Companies are experimenting with strategies to keep workers focused. Some are limiting internal emails—with one company moving to ban them entirely—while others are reducing the number of projects workers can tackle at a time.

Last year, Jamey Jacobs, a divisional vice president at Abbott Vascular, a unit of health-care company Abbott Laboratories learned that his 200 employees had grown stressed trying to squeeze in more heads-down, focused work amid the daily thrum of email and meetings.

“It became personally frustrating that they were not getting the things they wanted to get done,” he says. At meetings, attendees were often checking email, trying to multitask and in the process obliterating their focus.

Part of the solution for Mr. Jacobs’s team was that oft-forgotten piece of office technology: the telephone.

Mr. Jacobs and productivity consultant Daniel Markovitz found that employees communicated almost entirely over email, whether the matter was mundane, such as cake in the break room, or urgent, like an equipment issue.

The pair instructed workers to let the importance and complexity of their message dictate whether to use cellphones, office phones or email. Truly urgent messages and complex issues merited phone calls or in-person conversations, while email was reserved for messages that could wait.

Workers now pick up the phone more, logging fewer internal emails and say they’ve got clarity on what’s urgent and what’s not, although Mr. Jacobs says staff still have to stay current with emails from clients or co-workers outside the group.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article after the jump, and learn more in this insightful article on multitasking over at Big Think.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image courtesy of Big Think.[end-div]