Stubborn Children Earn More (?)

Source: Time, Dec 2015

A recently completed study, which tracked students from their late primary years until well into adulthood, found that kids who frequently break the rules or otherwise defy their parents often go on to become educational over-achievers and high-earning adults.

Children between the ages of 8 and 12 years old were evaluated for non-cognitive personality traits like academic conscientiousness, entitlement and defiance. Forty years later, researchers checked back to see how they turned out; rule breaking and defiance of parental authority turned out to be the best non-cognitive predictor of high income as an adult.

Therapists say it’s true that strong willed kids are more willing to do what’s right, rather than what their friends are doing. If parents can motivate them and turn their drive to doing well at school or a real purpose, these kids can make motivated leaders who will do the right thing even if they have to do it solo.

Review: The Rise and Fall of American Growth

Source: NYTimes, Jan 2016

Robert J. Gordon, a distinguished macro­economist and economic historian at Northwestern, has been arguing for a long time against the techno-optimism that saturates our culture, with its constant assertion that we’re in the midst of revolutionary change. … , he has argued that the I.T. revolution is less important than any one of the five Great Inventions that powered economic growth from 1870 to 1970: electricity, urban sanitation, chemicals and pharmaceuticals, the internal combustion engine and modern communication.

he points out that genuinely major innovations normally bring about big changes in business practices, in what workplaces look like and how they function.

Related Resource: WSJ, Jan 2016

Mr. Gordon lists several <policies> at the end of his book, some conventional and others less so. They include:

1. Make the earned-income tax credit (a bonus paid by the government to low-wage workers) more comprehensive and generous, a complement to raising the minimum wage. The earned-income tax credit, most economists agree, encourages work.

2. Reduce the share of Americans who are in prison, which is costly, disproportionately hurts the poor, and has long-lasting negative effects on former prisoners and their families. Also, legalize drug use to save money on enforcement, raise tax revenue, and eliminate the negative consequence a criminal record has on employment.

3. Shift financing of K-12 schooling from local property taxes to statewide revenue sources to reduce inequality and improve outcomes. Shift college financing from loans to income-contingent repayment administered through the income tax system, which is what Australia does.

4. Roll back regulations that hurt the economy and the less affluent, including copyright and patent laws (which have gone too far), occupational licensing (which is a barrier to entry and employment), and zoning and land-use regulations (which boost housing costs).

5. Reform immigration laws to encourage high-skilled workers, including those trained at U.S. graduate schools.

Math that Changed the World

Source: Business Insider, Jan 2016

DC Snowball Fight

Source: Mashable, Jan 2016

 

Larry Page Explorations

Source: NYTimes, Jan 2016

Mr. Page’s new role is part talent scout and part technology visionary. He still has to find the chief executives of many of the other Alphabet businesses.

And he has said on several occasions that he spends a good deal of time researching new technologies, focusing on what kind of financial or logistic hurdles stand in the way of them being invented or carried out.

In the investor letter, he put it this way: “Sergey and I are seriously in the business of starting new things.”

“Even before he came to Stanford he was interested in cool technical things that could be done,” Mr. Winograd said. “What makes something interesting for him is a big technical challenge. It’s not so much where it’s headed but what the ride is like.”

Many former Google employees who have worked directly with Mr. Page said his managerial modus operandi was to take new technologies or product ideas and generalize them to as many areas as possible. Why can’t Google Now, Google’s predictive search tool, be used to predict everything about a person’s life? Why create a portal to shop for insurance when you can create a portal to shop for every product in the world?

Cal Newport: Deep Work

Source: Cal Newport website, Jan 2016

Deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It’s a skill that allows you to quickly master complicated information and produce better results in less time. Deep work will make you better at what you do and provide the sense of true fulfillment that comes from craftsmanship.

Related Resource: Business Insider, Jan 2016

Newport defines deep work as “professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit, [which then] create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to duplicate.”

Newport also quotes Isaacson’s 2014 book “The Innovators” to bolster his point. “The one trait that differentiated [Gates from Allen] was focus,” Isaacson writes. “Allen’s mind would flit between many ideas and passions, but Gates was a serial obsessor.”

A dedication to deep work requires setting aside stretches of time each week (of say an hour or two) when you work with urgency and your concentration is not disrupted by anything, not even a brief moment of daydreaming or getting up for a cup of coffee.

It’s about being constantly aware of what work is considered “shallow” and what is “deep,” and ensuring that shallow work doesn’t overtake your schedule.

“A commitment to deep work is not a moral stance and it’s not a philosophical statement — it is instead a pragmatic recognition that the ability to concentrate is a skill that gets valuable things done,” Newport writes. “Deep work is important, in other words, not because distraction is evil, but because it enabled Bill Gates to start a billion-dollar industry in less than a semester.”

Innovate the Innovation Process

Source: Creativity Post, Jan 2016

In 2014, 44 drugs were approved by the FDA. Of those, McKinsey estimates that only one third will be successful in the marketplace. With some luck, a few may eventually become blockbuster drugs, the improbable runaway successes that finance the greater enterprise of drug development.

Take, for example, the nearly mythical story about Steve Jobs visiting Xerox PARC in 1979. According to legend, the wily young entrepreneur had finagled an exclusive look at groundbreaking technologies, like the mouse and the graphical user interface, that led to the development of the Macintosh.

The truth is that he could have seen many of the same things in 1968, eleven years earlier, at a public presentation financed by the federal government. Now known as the The Mother of All Demos, it featured Douglas Engelbart’s vision of interactive computing, which led to the technologies that Apple later commercialized and made famous.

In just about every field, there are cloistered communities of researchers making potentially game changing discoveries that end up sitting on the shelf for years—or even decades. Clearly, we need to innovate the innovation process. We need to shift from a disjointed effort that puts researchers on one side of a great divide and industry on another, to a combined, interdisciplinary effort.