commonplace book

The incompetent don’t know it

commonplace book, science / /

From “Unskilled and Unaware of It“:

It seems that the reason for this phenomenon is obvious: The more incompetent someone is in a particular area, the less qualified that person is to assess anyone’s skill in that space, including their own. When one fails to recognize that he or she has performed poorly, the individual is left assuming that they have performed well. As a result, the incompetent will tend to grossly overestimate their skills and abilities. A few years ago, two men from the Department of Psychology at Cornell University made an effort to determine just how profoundly one misoverestimates one’s own skills in relation to one’s actual abilities. They made four predictions, and executed four studies.

Justin Kruger and David Dunning made the following predictions before beginning their investigation:

  • Incompetent individuals, compared with their more competent peers, will dramatically overestimate their ability and performance relative to objective criteria.
  • Incompetent individuals will suffer from deficient metacognitive skills, in that they will be less able than their more competent peers to recognize competence when they see it–be it their own or anyone else’s.
  • Incompetent individuals will be less able than their more competent peers to gain insight into their true level of performance by means of social comparison information. In particular, because of their difficulty recognizing competence in others, incompetent individuals will be unable to use information about the choices and performances of others to form more accurate impressions of their own ability.
  • The incompetent can gain insight about their shortcomings, but this comes (paradoxically) by making them more competent, thus providing them the metacognitive skills necessary to be able to realize that they have performed poorly.

… In short, the study showed that the researchers’ predictions were spot-on. …

Also interestingly, the top performers tended to underestimate their own performance compared to their peers. The researchers found that those participants fell prey to the false-consensus effect, a phenomenon where one assumes that one’s peers are performing at least as well as oneself when given no evidence to the contrary.

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How to really practice to get better

business, commonplace book / /

From “How to be an expert“:

Maybe the “naaturally talented artist” was simply the one who practiced a hell of a lot more. Or rather, a hell of a lot more deliberately. Dr. K. Anders Ericsson, professor of psychology at Florida State University, has spent most of his 20+ year career on the study of genuises, prodigies, and superior performers. In the book The New Brain (it was on my coffee table) Richard Restak quotes Ericsson as concluding:

“For the superior performer the goal isn’t just repeating the same thing again and again but achieving higher levels of control over every aspect of their performance. That’s why they don’t find practice boring. Each practice session they are working on doing something better than they did the last time.”

So it’s not just how long they practice, it’s how they practice. Basically, it comes down to something like this:

Most of us want to practice the things we’re already good at, and avoid the things we suck at. We stay average or intermediate amateurs forever.

Yet the research says that if we were willing to put in more hours, and to use those hours to practice the things that aren’t so fun, we could become good. Great. Potentially brilliant. We need, as Restak refers to it, “a rage to master.” That dedication to mastery drives the potential expert to focus on the most subtle aspects of performance, and to never be satisfied. There is always more to improve on, and they’re willing to work on the less fun stuff.

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3500 forgotten cans

commonplace book, weird, writing ideas / /

From “Mental Health Association of Portland“:

Over 3,500 copper canisters like these hold the cremated remains of patients of the Oregon State Hospital that went unclaimed by their families and friends. They sit on shelves in an abandoned building on the grounds of the Oregon State Hospital. They symbolize the loneliness, isolation, shame and despair too many patients of the hospital experienced.

Our members are helping find a final resting place for the remains. We have helped families find their lost relatives. We’re pressing the hospital and the state to create a suitable memorial. We’ve demanded former, current and future patients be advised and consulted about the creation of a memorial, its site, design and any ceremony.

oregon_cans.jpg

From The New York Times‘ “Long-Forgotten Reminders Of the Mentally Ill in Oregon”:

Next to the old mortuary, where the dead were once washed and prepared for burial or cremation, is a locked room without a name.

Inside the room, in a dim and dusty corner of one of many abandoned buildings on the decaying campus of the Oregon State Hospital here, are 3,489 copper urns, the shiny metal dull and smeared with corrosion, the canisters turning green.

The urns hold the ashes of mental patients who died here from the late 1880’s to the mid-1970’s. The remains were unclaimed by families who had long abandoned their sick relatives, when they were alive and after they were dead.

The urns have engraved serial numbers pressed into the tops of the cans. The lowest number on the urns still stored in the room is 01, the highest 5,118. Over the decades, about 1,600 families have reclaimed urns containing their relatives’ ashes, but those left are lined up meticulously on wood shelves. Short strips of masking tape with storage information are affixed to each shelf: ”Vault #2, Shelf #36, plus four unmarked urns,” one piece of tattered tape says.

Most of the labels that once displayed the full names of the dead patients have been washed off by water damage or peeled away by time. Still, a few frayed labels are legible: among the urns stored on one shelf are a Bess, a Ben and an Andrew.

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A 4000 year old ship in the desert

commonplace book, history / /

From “World’s oldest ship timbers found in Egyptian desert“:

The oldest remains of seafaring ships in the world have been found in caves at the edge of the Egyptian desert along with cargo boxes that suggest ancient Egyptians sailed nearly 1,000 miles on rough waters to get treasures from a place they called God’s Land, or Punt.

Florida State University anthropology professor Cheryl Ward has determined that wooden planks found in the manmade caves are about 4,000 years old – making them the world’s most ancient ship timbers. Shipworms that had tunneled into the planks indicated the ships had weathered a long voyage of a few months, likely to the fabled southern Red Sea trading center of Punt, a place referenced in hieroglyphics on empty cargo boxes found in the caves, Ward said.

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An interesting way to look at DRM

commonplace book, technology / /

From “The Big DRM Mistake?“:

Fundamentally, DRM is a about persistent access control – it is a term for a set of technologies that allow for data to be protected beyond the file system of the original machine. Thus, for example, the read/write/execute access control on most *nix file systems will not only be applicable to the original machine but to all machines.

Stated in these terms, I agree with the aims of DRM. However, it is the ways in which large media and software businesses have mis-applied DRM that have ruined the associations most users have with the technology.

An interesting way to look at DRM Read More »

Better technical security increases personal risks

commonplace book, security / /

From The New York Times‘ “They Stole $92 Million, but Now What?“:

Just one week ago, Colin Dixon, the manager of a depot where bank notes are stored, was driving home on a quiet Tuesday evening when what he thought was a police car with flashing blue lights pulled him over.

It was the beginning, as it turned out, of Britain’s biggest ever cash caper. Seven days later, a staggering $92 million — around twice the previous record in a country that seems to specialize in mind-boggling robberies — seems simply to have disappeared.

The men who ordered Mr. Dixon, 51, to pull over were not police officers but hoodlums who bundled him into their Volvo and handcuffed him. According to police accounts, he was told that his wife, Lynn, 45, and son Craig, 8, would be shot if he did not cooperate.

Less than two hours later, more bogus police officers called at Mr. Dixon’s home in Herne Bay and told his wife that he had been in an accident. She and her son believed their story and walked into captivity. The family was reunited at a farmhouse, then driven to the depot at Tonbridge, in the county of Kent southeast of London, according to police accounts. Then their ordeal really began. …

The haul was enormous even by the standards of a land that likes to express its criminal landmarks through thefts of industrial proportions — more than twice the $45 million taken in a caper at Northern Bank in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in December 2004, at that time the biggest cash robbery on record. The Irish Republican Army was blamed for that robbery.

But one similarity between the robberies has raised worrisome questions about the way money is protected.

In both cases, employees and families were taken hostage, forcing managers to help the thieves. And so the most vulnerable point in guarding the cash has become the people who know the codes and procedures to bypass sophisticated security systems.

Such tactics “are part and parcel of the shift towards the technologized management of money,” said Tim Newburn, a professor of criminology at the London School of Economics.

According to the BBC, such abductions are known as tiger kidnappings, because the victims are stalked before they are seized. “Tiger kidnapping requires a detailed knowledge of staff — their journeys, their responsibilities and their families — which often comes with the help of a current or former employee.”

In other words, an inside job.

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The secret plans of Libertarians revealed

commonplace book, politics / /

From The New York Times‘ “1 Cafe, 1 Gas Station, 2 Roads: America’s Emptiest County“:

At last count (by Sheriff Hopper toting it up in his head), 16 people make Mentone their home and 55 others are spread throughout the rest of Loving County’s 645 square miles of parched, salty West Texas grassland and rattlesnakes — about one person for every nine square miles. …

Yet it is modest enough, as a plaque outside the courthouse confesses: “Mentone has no water system (water is hauled in) nor does it have a bank, doctor, hospital, newspaper, lawyer, civic club or cemetery.”

And since Mentone is the only town, neither does Loving County.

What it does have is the Boot Track Café (open mornings), a post office, a gas station and the yellow Deco two-story courthouse. There are two roads. There is no operating church, although the county’s oldest building, a 1910 schoolhouse, is open for nondenominational worship. Seven children ride a school bus 33 miles to Wink in the next county.

… The material described the plans of a Libertarian faction in its own words “to win most of the elected offices in the county administration” and “restore to freedom” Loving County. The blueprint, called “Restoring Loving County,” said that land was hard to come by but that a ranch had been split up and members were in the process of buying sections.

“The people who are living there will be able to register to vote,” it said. “They must swear that they intend to make Loving their home.”

The goal, said an e-mail message attributed to a group member, was to move in enough Libertarians “to control the local government and remove oppressive regulations (such as planning and zoning, and building code requirements) and stop enforcement of laws prohibiting victimless acts among consenting adults such as dueling, gambling, incest, price-gouging, cannibalism and drug handling.”

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30 years without sleep

commonplace book, science / /

From “Vietnam man handles three decades without sleep“:

Sixty-four-year-old Thai Ngoc, known as Hai Ngoc, said he could not sleep at night after getting a fever in 1973, and has counted infinite numbers of sheep during more than 11,700 consecutive sleepless nights.

“I don’t know whether the insomnia has impacted my health or not. But I’m still healthy and can farm normally like others,” Ngoc said. …

Ngoc often does extra farm work or guards his farm at night to prevent theft, saying he used three months of sleepless nights to dig two large ponds to raise fish.

Neighbor Vu said Ngoc volunteered to help beat a drum during the night and guard the house for the relatives of the dead during funeral ceremonies so that they could take a nap.

30 years without sleep Read More »

A historical ‘what if’

commonplace book, overheard / /

History is interesting. Do you know why Hitler had that little moustache? Because Charlie Chaplin had one. It’s true! He knew that Germans liked Charlie Chaplin, and he thought it would help them like him more, so he grew a moustache like Charlie Chaplin. Can you imagine how history would have changed if The Three Stooges would have been popular then? Who would have taken Hitler seriously if he’d decided to grow his hair like Larry? He never would have been elected Fuhrer with Larry hair!

A historical ‘what if’ Read More »

Which wires match the mouse test?

commonplace book, fiction, technology / /

From Computerworld’s “Q&A: A lost interview with ENIAC co-inventor J. Presper Eckert“:

What’s the zaniest thing you did while developing ENIAC?

The mouse cage was pretty funny. We knew mice would eat the insulation off the wires, so we got samples of all the wires that were available and put them in a cage with a bunch of mice to see which insulation they did not like. We only used wire that passed the mouse test.

Which wires match the mouse test? Read More »

A cared-for mummy

commonplace book, weird / /

From “Mummified woman died naturally“:

A woman whose mummified body was dressed in a white gown and placed in front of a television for 2½ years died from heart disease. …

Officials never suspected abuse or foul play after finding Johannas Pope, 61, in her Madisonville home Jan. 4.

Pope told her caretaker, Kathy Painter, she didn’t want to be buried because she believed she would come back to life. …

Painter left Pope’s body in a chair in an air-conditioned room on the second floor of their Davies Place home.

Investigators learned that Painter took care of Pope’s body – trying to preserve it.

Owens said Painter put on gloves and removed the maggots from Pope’s body daily.

He said she used bug spray when they became too numerous to remove by hand. Investigators found 17 cans of bug spray in the house, he said. …

Painter even bought Pope new clothes just before officials discovered her body.

“She bought new clothes because she thought this was the time period she was coming back,” Owens said.

Family members kept a window air conditioner running to keep Pope’s body cool until about two months ago, when it broke, Owens said. Heating vents were covered during winter.

Some friends and relatives who visited were told Pope was upstairs, ill, Owens said. …

There is no Ohio law mandating the reporting of a dead body.

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The last remaining Stone Age tribesmen

commonplace book, science, true stories / /

From “Stone Age tribe kills fishermen“:

ONE of the world’s last Stone Age tribes has murdered two fishermen whose boat drifted on to a desert island in the Indian Ocean.

The Sentinelese, thought to number between 50 and 200, have rebuffed all contact with the modern world, firing a shower of arrows at anyone who comes within range.

They are believed to be the last pre-Neolithic tribe in the world to remain isolated and appear to have survived the 2004 Asian tsunami. …

Fellow fishermen said they dropped anchor for the night on January 25 but fell into a deep sleep, probably helped by large amounts of alcohol. During the night their anchor, a rock tied to a rope, failed to hold their open-topped boat against the currents and they drifted towards the island.

“As day broke, fellow fishermen say they tried to shout at the men and warn them they were in danger,” said Samir Acharya, the head of the Society for Andaman and Nicobar Ecology, an environmental organisation. “However they did not respond – they were probably drunk – and the boat drifted into the shallows where they were attacked and killed.”

The Indian coast guard tried to recover the bodies using a helicopter but was met by a hail of arrows.

Photographs shot from the helicopter show the near-naked tribesmen rushing to fire. But the downdraught from its rotors exposed the two fishermen buried in shallow graves and not roasted and eaten, as local rumour suggested. …

Environmental groups urged the authorities to leave the bodies and respect the five-kilometre exclusion zone thrown around the island. In the 1980s and early 1990s many Sentinelese were killed in skirmishes with armed salvage operators who visited the island after a shipwreck. Since then the tribesmen have remained virtually undisturbed.

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Why can’t we remember our early childhoods?

commonplace book, science / /

From Dave Munger’s “Why do we forget our childhood?“:

… [Freud] did discover an important phenomenon which continues to be investigated today. Freud noted that adults do not remember childhood events occurring before they were as old as six. This period of childhood amnesia is now generally believed to end at about age three or four. Though current psychologists don’t put much stock in Freud’s explanation of the phenomenon (he believed the memories were repressed because they are too traumatic), there is still little agreement on what causes it.

Gabrielle Simcock and Harlene Hayne of the University of Otago noticed that the period of amnesia tends to end at about the time of the onset of language, so they devised an experiment to test whether language ability might be at the root of the problem (“Breaking the Barrier? Children Fail to Translate Their Preverbal Memories Into Language,” Psychological Science, 2002).

They created a memorable event for toddlers of ages ranging from two to three: a magical shrinking machine. …

Six months to a year later, the toddlers were revisited and asked about the experience. Most kids, regardless of their age, could say very little about the shrinking machine. However, when they were shown photos of the toys from the experiment along with decoys (for example, four teddy bears, only one of which was used in the game), they accurately identified the toys from the game most of the time. … The memory existed, but the words were not associated with the memory.

Simcock and Hayne argue that these memories simply are not ever encoded in language, and for that reason, never become part of an adult’s autobiographical memory.

Why can’t we remember our early childhoods? Read More »

Blogs as patio space

commonplace book, on writing, social software, tech in changing society / /

From Jim Hanas’ “The Story Doesn’t Care: An Interview with Sean Stewart“:

I grew up in Edmonton, Alberta, during the winter. There are two very essential conditions in Edmonton. There’s inside and outside, and there’s no real doubt about which is which. There’s a sharp line preserved between the two.

I now live in California. California is an interesting place to me—and reminds me a bit of the South, where I spent my summers—because in California, what with the weather being clement and the price of real estate being high, you spend a lot of time in this hybrid space. We could call it patio space or—if you’re in the South—front porch space. It’s clearly inside in some ways, but it’s public in other ways.

The world of the blog clearly exists in patio space, in porch space, in that “I’m going to invite you into a level of intimacy not usually accorded to strangers, and yet you’re still a stranger. I’m going to write a blog, and you and I will communicate with one another, sometimes with startling candor, and yet in this mixed, hybrid place.”

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Wordsworth’s “spots of time”

commonplace book, language & literature / /

From Wordsworth’s The Prelude 12.208-218 (1805 edition):

There are in our existence spots of time,
That with distinct pre-eminence retain
A renovating virtue, whence–depressed
By false opinion and contentious thought,
Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight,
In trivial occupations, and the round
Of ordinary intercourse–our minds
Are nourished and invisibly repaired;
A virtue, by which pleasure is enhanced,
That penetrates, enables us to mount,
When high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen.

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How a 75-year-old jewel thief did it

commonplace book, fiction / /

From MSNBC’s “75-year-old jewel thief looks back“:

When Doris Payne went to work, she stepped into her fancy dress, high heels and donned a wide-brimmed hat. Her creamy, mocha skin was made up just so, her handbag always designer. Sometimes a pair of plain gold earrings would do. Always, she looked immaculate, well-to-do. …

New York. Colorado. Nevada. California. They all beckoned, and so did Greece and France, England and Switzerland as she plied her trade over five decades. …

There was the February day, eight years ago, when she strolled into the Neiman Marcus store on the Las Vegas Strip and asked to see a pair of diamond earrings. …

Employee Linda Sbrocco showed her several — this one … no, this one … how about that one? Soon Sbrocco was swapping jewelry in and out of cases at a dizzying pace. Payne slipped rings on and off, and had Sbrocco do the same.

Then Payne was gone. And so was a $36,000 marquis cut, 2.48-carat diamond ring.

This was how Doris Payne went about her work as an international jewel thief. …

Every month or every other month — no one knows how many times over more than 50 years — she strolled into a jewelry store and strolled out with a ring worth thousands of dollars.

Occasionally, she was caught. Mostly, she was not. …

She grew up in Slab Fork, W.Va., where her daddy worked in the coal mines and her mother sewed dresses and did alterations for extra money. Payne was the baby, the youngest of six who liked school and loved to show her illiterate father places on the world maps she made out of salt and flour, places she would someday visit. …

“It’s not stealing because I’m only taking what they give me,” Payne said. …

The Jewelers Security Alliance, an industry trade group, got on to Payne in the 1970s. Bulletins went out, warning jewelry stores about a slick, well-dressed black woman who was stealing diamond rings.

Where others might hit a store for several pieces of jewelry, Payne only took one or two expensive rings at a time. But what really made Doris Payne different was that she was so prolific and so good. …

In the early 1970s, Payne tried her skills overseas. First Paris. Then Monte Carlo, where she flew in 1974 and paid a visit to Cartier, coming away with a platinum diamond ring. When she got to the airport in Nice, custom agents suspected she had the ring and stopped her. The ring was never found.

During the investigation, Payne says she was kept in a “fifth-rate motel” by the Mediterranean. One day she asked the woman in charge for nail clippers and for a needle and thread to mend her dress. She used the clippers to pry the ring from its setting, sewed the diamond into her girdle and then tossed the setting into the sea, she says.

She wore her girdle day and night, even when it was wet from washing. Her room was searched every day, but the diamond remained hidden.

She wasn’t always so lucky. She’s been arrested more times than she can remember. One detective said her arrest report is more than 6 feet long — she’s done time in Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia, Colorado and Wisconsin. …

Through the decades, she has used at least 22 aliases, among them Audrey Davis, Thelma White, Sonya Dowels, Marie Clements, Donna Gilbert.

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1,000,000 miles in 30 days

business, commonplace book, true stories / /

From MSNBC’s “Very, very frequent flyer hits 1 million goal“:

On his blog “The Great Canadian Mileage Run 2005,” [Marc] Tacchi reported on Wednesday that he had racked up 1,003,625 mileage points and spent 56 of the last 61 days in an airplane. …

The 30-year-old embarked on his venture using Air Canada’s North America Unlimited Pass — a C$7,000 ticket that allowed passengers limitless travel within the continent between October 1 and November 30. …

A typical day would start with a 10 a.m. flight to Victoria, British Columbia, about 70 km (45 miles) from Vancouver. He would fly back and fourth between the two cities about six times and then catch an overnight flight 4,300 km (2,700 miles) to Toronto.

In Toronto, he would immediately board a return flight. …

By reaching the 1 million mile goal, Tacchi gets the equivalent of about 10 round-trip business class flights from Canada to Australia, which he has estimated would normally cost about C$70,000.

He plans to redeem his travel points to take his family to Miami at Christmas, then maybe go to Hong Kong or Thailand.

When he wasn’t flying to collect travel points, Tacchi works as a contract pilot. Once a week, he flies a Boeing 747 cargo plane to Europe or Asia.

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How actors remember their lines

commonplace book / /

From “Research puts actors’ memory on center stage“:

According to the researchers, the secret of actors’ memories is, well, acting. An actor acquires lines readily by focusing not on the words of the script, but on those words’ meaning – the moment-to-moment motivations of the character saying them – as well as on the physical and emotional dimensions of their performance.

To get inside the character, an actor will break a script down into a series of logically connected “beats” or intentions. Good actors don’t think about their lines, but feel their character’s intention in reaction to what the other actors do, causing their lines to come spontaneously and naturally. The researchers quote the great British actor Michael Caine: “You must be able to stand there not thinking of that line. You take it off the other actor’s face.”

The key, the researchers have found, is a process called active experiencing, which they say uses “all physical, mental, and emotional channels to communicate the meaning of material to another person.” It is a principle that can be applied off-stage as well as on. For example, students who studied material by imagining conveying its meaning to somebody else who needed the information showed higher retention than those who tried to memorize the material by rote.

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New technologies & the urge to control

commonplace book, history, politics, tech in changing society, technology / /

From David L. Hudson, Jr.’s “Update on the Internet and the First Amendment“:

For example, as First Amendment scholar Rodney
Smolla explains, when Gutenberg developed the printing press
circa 1450, the Archbishop of Mainz created a censorship body,
and the Venice Inquisition issued a list of banned books.

The expansion of printing led English officials to pass
restrictive licensing laws that allowed the crown to impose
prior restraints on publication. When movies were first introduced
in the early 20th century, the United States government
argued for tight censorship controls because it was believed that
movies would easily influence children.

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kanso and shizen and presentations

business, commonplace book, teaching, technology / /

From Garr Reynolds’ “Gates, Jobs, & the Zen aesthetic“:

A key tenet of the Zen aesthetic is kanso or simplicity. In the kanso concept beauty, grace, and visual elegance are achieved by elimination and omission. Says artist, designer and architect, Dr. Koichi Kawana, “Simplicity means the achievement of maximum effect with minimum means.” …

The aesthetic concept of naturalness or shizen “prohibits the use of elaborate designs and over refinement” according to Kawana. Restraint, then, is a beautiful thing. … Restraint is hard. Complication and elaboration are easy…and are common. …

The Zen aesthetic values include (but are not limited to):

  • Simplicity
  • Subtlety
  • Elegance
  • Suggestive rather than the descriptive or obvious
  • Naturalness (i.e., nothing artificial or forced)
  • Empty space (or negative space)
  • Stillness, Tranquility
  • Eliminating the non-essential

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