Lone Gunman

You’ve heard of the Yale Goal-Setting Study, right? The one that goes like this:

In 1953 a team of researchers inter­viewed Yale’s grad­u­at­ing seniors, ask­ing them whether they had writ­ten down the spe­cific goals that they wanted to achieve in life. Twenty years later the researchers tracked down the same cohort and found that the 3% of peo­ple who had spe­cific goals all those years before had accu­mu­lated more per­sonal wealth than the other 97% of their class­mates com­bined. The study is used to illus­trate the power of focus.

Prof. Richard Wise­man, Uni­ver­sity of Hert­ford­shire psy­chol­o­gist and self-help myth-buster extra­or­di­naire, says it best:

There is just one small problem… the exper­i­ment never actu­ally took place.

A 2007 arti­cle in Fast Com­pany cor­rob­o­rates the stance, in a slightly more elo­quent (or should that be ver­bose?) manner:

Accord­ing to [Silas] Spen­gler [sec­re­tary of the Class of 1953 since grad­u­a­tion] — who listed his future occu­pa­tion in the Yale year­book as “per­son­nel admin­is­tra­tion fol­low­ing a course of busi­ness admin­is­tra­tion at Har­vard,” and who instead went into the navy and then to law school — he never wrote down any per­sonal goals, nor did he and his class­mates ever par­tic­i­pate in a research study on per­sonal goals.

As fur­ther evi­dence, Spen­gler pro­vided excerpts from the 1953 year­book. No one stated per­sonal goals, but most of the grad­u­ates pre­dicted their future lines of work: Roberto Goizueta, Coke’s CEO, pre­dicted his future would be with Cuba’s Com­pani Indus­trial del Trop­ico S.A.; William Don­ald­son and Dan Lufkin, founders of Wall Street’s Don­ald­son, Lufkin & Jen­rette, fore­cast futures in law. For­rest Mars, Jr., now chair­man and CEO of Mars, Inc., listed “no” for employ­ment possibilities.

Now that TED­G­lobal 2009 has drawn to a close and the videos are slowly mak­ing their way online, the lat­est Nature has an edi­to­r­ial on the TED phe­nom­e­non, sug­gest­ing that “those wish­ing to reveal sci­en­tific ideas should learn from the engag­ing style of TED con­fer­ence talks”.

TED suc­ceeds in part because par­tic­i­pants are encour­aged to talk about the unex­pected. […] But per­haps the most crit­i­cal key to suc­cess is the style of the talks. […]

The talks have a strict time limit of 18 min­utes — no inter­ac­tion with the audi­ence, and no ques­tions except the infor­mal ones asked in the extended con­ver­sa­tion breaks. […] For a gen­eral audi­ence, 18 min­utes is plenty for get­ting across con­text and key issues, while still forc­ing each speaker to focus on a mes­sage — whether it be advo­cacy or the cel­e­bra­tion of new knowledge.

There is also a wel­come absence of Pow­er­Point pre­sen­ta­tions. Instead there are plenty of images — but pre­cious few pro­fes­sional sci­en­tific dia­grams, which can quickly lose the audience’s atten­tion. This forces speak­ers to craft talks that can engage sophis­ti­cated but sci­en­tif­i­cally untu­tored lis­ten­ers at their level. And it also encour­ages speak­ers to try for a freely flow­ing, relaxed pre­sen­ta­tion style, with­out notes. […]

Sci­en­tists wish­ing to inspire non-scientists should look at a few of these talks online and learn a thing or two.

I would go one fur­ther: non-scientists wish­ing to inspire oth­ers should look to TED to learn a thing or two.

It seems you can’t spend five min­utes on the Inter­net with­out com­ing across an opin­ion piece on the end of tra­di­tional media or an arti­cle riff­ing on the age of the blog. I’ve so far refrained from not­ing (m)any of these arti­cles, mainly because the argu­ment is becom­ing stale and the arti­cles are so widespread.

Michael Mass­ing’s lat­est for The New York Review of Books is one worth your time, how­ever: it’s a bal­anced, detailed view on the new land­scape of report­ing—that of a sym­bio­sis between blogs, online media out­lets, and tra­di­tional national and inter­na­tional news­pa­pers. (It also serves as a good resource to some of the best blogs around.)

This, in response to David Simon (he of Bal­ti­more Sun and The Wire fame) liken­ing the Inter­net to a par­a­site “slowly killing the host”:

This image of the Inter­net as par­a­site has some foun­da­tion. With­out the vital news-gathering per­formed by estab­lished insti­tu­tions, many Web sites would sput­ter and die. In their sweep and scorn, how­ever, such state­ments seem as out­dated as they are defen­sive. Over the past few months alone, a remark­able amount of orig­i­nal, excit­ing, and cre­ative (if also chaotic and mad­den­ing) mate­r­ial has appeared on the Inter­net. The prac­tice of jour­nal­ism, far from being leeched by the Web, is being rein­vented there, with a vari­ety of fas­ci­nat­ing exper­i­ments in the gath­er­ing, pre­sen­ta­tion, and deliv­ery of news.

Lay­ing dor­mant at the bot­tom of my book­marks was this arti­cle Jason pointed out over four months ago: pho­tog­ra­pher Bruce Haley’s Tao of War Pho­tog­ra­phy.

1.  To begin with, prac­tice this sen­tence: “If I get out of here alive, I’ll never do this again.”  You’ll say this to your­self every sin­gle time an already dan­ger­ous sit­u­a­tion really turns to shit…

63. Always keep in mind the fol­low­ing when you pho­to­graph peo­ple in war zones and other awful places:
a. You’re there because you want to be — they aren’t…
b. You can leave — they can’t…

Beware, the Flash inter­face makes my eyes bleed.

Doing away with the divi­sion of labour and most other economies of pro­duc­tion, Thomas Thwaites’ Toaster Project is an exper­i­ment to “build a toaster, from scratch—beginning by min­ing the raw mate­ri­als and end­ing with a prod­uct that Argos sells for only £3.99″.

Many have men­tioned this already (Jason Kot­tke, Tyler Cowen on Mar­gin Rev­o­lu­tion, Radley Balko on Rea­son), but my favourite com­men­tary on the project comes from The Finan­cial Times’ Tim Harford:

The mod­ern mar­ket econ­omy is mind-bogglingly com­plex, pro­duc­ing bil­lions of prod­ucts, many vastly more com­plex than a toaster. The com­plex­ity of the soci­ety we have cre­ated for our­selves sur­rounds us so com­pletely that, instead of being dizzied, we tend to take it for granted.

Yet as we cel­e­brate our good for­tune to be born at a time of such aston­ish­ing mate­r­ial wealth, the toaster should give us pause for thought. It is a sym­bol of the sophis­ti­ca­tion of our world, but also a sym­bol of the obsta­cles that lie in wait for those who want to change it. Whether attempt­ing to deal with cli­mate change, social depri­va­tion, eco­nomic devel­op­ment or health­care, improv­ing faults in such a com­plex sys­tem is a task best approached with humility.

I believe it is oblig­a­tory at this point to men­tion Leonard Read’s 1958 essay, I, Pen­cil?