10 Things Your Commencement Speaker Won't Tell You by Charles Wheelan
My favourite:
8. Don’t model your life after a circus animal. Performing animals do tricks because their trainers throw them peanuts or small fish for doing so. You should aspire to do better. You will be a friend, a parent, a coach, an employee—and so on. But only in your job will you be explicitly evaluated and rewarded for your performance. Don’t let your life decisions be distorted by the fact that your boss is the only one tossing you peanuts. If you leave a work task undone in order to meet a friend for dinner, then you are “shirking” your work. But it’s also true that if you cancel dinner to finish your work, then you are shirking your friendship. That’s just not how we usually think of it.
A Japanese Soldier Who Continued Fighting WWII 29 Years After the Japanese Surrendered, Because He Didn’t Know
Much as I do not condone war, this is a remarkable display of loyalty and dedication. I am actually in awe.
Is Yale a Reliable Partner for the National University of Singapore?
“Yale and NUS are both “universities.” But they are not institutions of a “counterpart” nature. For all of the surface similarities between Yale and NUS, the term “university” has two fundamentally different meanings as applied to the two institutions. Recognition of this reality, and of the import and purpose of the Yale-NUS college in late-developing Singapore, has at least four direct implications, implications that Yale’s current leadership and its fast-dwindling band of allies on the Yale faculty should long since have made explicit.”
HOW MUCH LOVE CAN YOU CREATE IN AN FMRI IN 5 MINUTES?
In an interesting “1st Annual Love Competition” associated with The Stanford Center for Cognitive and Neurobiological Imaging, contestants had 5 minutes in an fMRI machine to love someone as hard as they could
In cancer science, many "discoveries" don't hold up
During a decade as head of global cancer research at Amgen, C. Glenn Begley identified 53 “landmark” publications — papers in top journals, from reputable labs — for his team to reproduce. Begley sought to double-check the findings before trying to build on them for drug development.
Result: 47 of the 53 could not be replicated. He described his findings in a commentary piece published on Wednesday in the journal Nature.
The academic reward system discourages efforts to ensure a finding was not a fluke. Nor is there an incentive to verify someone else’s discovery. As recently as the late 1990s, most potential cancer-drug targets were backed by 100 to 200 publications. Now each may have fewer than half a dozen.
Starbucks in Europe: its unique challenges
While a New Yorker might grab a coffee to go — carryout orders are one of the company’s biggest money makers — French friends tend to sit when they sip. So Starbucks is having to invest huge amounts to give its stores in France additional seating space, along with other renovations.
Last Two Speakers Of Dying Language Refuse To Talk To Each Other
The survival of an endangered language may depend on two people — and all they want to do is ignore each other.
Manuel Segovia and Isidro Velazquez, the last speakers of a language called Ayapaneco, live less than half a mile away from each other in Ayapa, Mexico. But no matter how precious the cultural implications of keeping their language alive are, they are not going to speak to each other.
Is our brain hardwired to produce God, or is our brain hardwired to perceive God
The neuroscience of religion. I haven’t gotten down to reading this since I found it while in the midst of researching for my NEUR1004 presentation about hallucinations and have to reluctantly tear myself away from it so as to focus on the task at hand. But yes.
Tissue engineering the mechanosensory circuit of the stretch reflex arc: Sensory neuron innervation of intrafusal muscle fibers
Only remotely related to current essay so I’ve got to put this aside for later reading. Cool stuff.
Now presenting: A mathematical equation to predict ponytail shapes!
HAHAHA SO BIZARRE, but hey. Original research paper here.
“The statistical physics of hair fibres…”
Architectural incubator of creativity: MIT's Building 20
Excerpts, particularly about a certain curious Building 20 in MIT:
After a few years at M.I.T., Chomsky revolutionized the study of linguistics by proposing that every language shares a “deep structure,” which reflects the cognitive structures of the mind. Chomsky’s work drew from disparate fields—biology, psychology, and computer science. At the time, the fields seemed to have nothing in common—except the hallways of Building 20. “Building 20 was a fantastic environment,” Chomsky says. “It looked like it was going to fall apart. But it was extremely interactive.” He went on, “There was a mixture of people who later became separate departments interacting informally all the time. You would walk down the corridor and meet people and have a discussion.”
Building 20, though, ranks as one of the most creative environments of all time, a space with an almost uncanny ability to extract the best from people. Among M.I.T. people, it was referred to as “the magical incubator.”
The lesson of Building 20 is that when the composition of the group is right—enough people with different perspectives running into one another in unpredictable ways—the group dynamic will take care of itself. All these errant discussions add up. In fact, they may even be the most essential part of the creative process. Although such conversations will occasionally be unpleasant—not everyone is always in the mood for small talk or criticism—that doesn’t mean that they can be avoided. The most creative spaces are those which hurl us together. It is the human friction that makes the sparks.
So how does Building 20 do that?
The space also forced solitary scientists to mix and mingle. Although the rushed wartime architects weren’t thinking about the sweet spot of Q or the importance of physical proximity when they designed the structure, they conjured up a space that maximized both of these features, allowing researchers to take advantage of Building 20’s intellectual diversity.
Stewart Brand, in his study “How Buildings Learn,” cites Building 20 as an example of a “Low Road” structure, a type of space that is unusually creative because it is so unwanted and underdesigned.
“In a vertical layout with small floors, there is less research variety on each floor. Chance meetings in an elevator tend to terminate in the lobby, whereas chance meetings in a corridor tended to lead to technical discussions.” The urban theorist Jane Jacobs described such incidental conversations as “knowledge spillovers.” … that the unpredictable nature of innovation meant that it couldn’t be prescribed in advance.
No Sleep
Apparently phenomenal writing. But it’s getting dark and I’m scared. And with the essay coming up I really don’t have the time to read so here it is for future reference!
Module Reviewing Site
I just chanced upon this very interesting module review site while searching for something and was surprised to find it is a local initiative with all (major, public-to-autonomous) tertiary institutions. Very nice find. I noticed of course that it is more relevant to the universities given their flexibility in choosing modules.
