What’s next in public transportation? Urban gondolas? The most expensive textbook ever. Osama Bin Laden on InTrade: you could have made a fortune. Maybe. Someone actually yelled “Stop the Presses” in 2011. The real reason machines and the internet won’t replace secretaries. Space shuttle launch delay has a big price tag.
Thanks to recent, hugely popular books about the development of expertise, the term deliberate practice is coming into common usage as the kind of practice that produces expertise.
Deliberate practice requires careful reflection on what worked and what didn’t work. A budding concert pianist may practice a particularly troublesome passage listening for places where his fingers do not flow smoothly. A chess student may spend hours analyzing one move of a world-championship chess match trying to see what the grandmasters saw. This kind of practice demands time for reflection and intense concentration, so intense that it is difficult to sustain for longer than 3 hours per day.
As I have learned more about deliberate practice, I often think about its lessons for the educational system. And they are not happy ones.
Today nearly every company and organization has a website—there are by some counts nearly half a billion of them (and a Google estimate suggested one trillion unique URLs). Yet if you search for the website of the most important law firm in Hollywood, Ziffren Brittenham, you won’t find it. (Disclosure: Ken Ziffren is a colleague and trustee at UCLA Law School).
Similarly, even a casual fan of TV and film knows that the Creative Artists Agency, or CAA, is one of the biggest power centers in Hollywood. CAA does have a website. But it doesn’t tell you anything beyond the addresses of the firm’s various offices.
Have these major Hollywood players not heard of the internet? Or do they have some other strategy?
I bought a round-trip ticket for a short train trip in the Netherlands, paying full price. Later I asked a colleague if there are discounts of any kind. Yes, she said, as long as you travel after 9 a.m. I assume this illustrates peak-load pricing, so I asked about traveling in the evening rush hour. It turns out the discount is good any time after 9 a.m.—there is no peak-load pricing for evening rush.
Two months ago, we migrated this blog away from nytimes.com, where it had lived for three-plus years. The migration was generally a success, but not totally. There were some early technical difficulties (servers issues, caching issues, and other things you don’t care about), but those were fixed relatively quickly. The bigger problem was that we weren’t crazy about our redesign — and, you, dear readers, were even less crazy about it than we were. It was too grid-dependent, photo-dependent, not readable enough, etc. So we’ve spent the past several weeks re-doing our re-do, and you can see the result as of today.
A new study of capital sentences handed down in first degree murder cases finds evidence of racial bias against minority defendants who killed white victims. The study (abstract here; pdf here) was conducted by Harvard economist Alberto Alesina and Eliana La Ferrara of Universita’ Bocconi. It finds that for sentences handed down to minority defendants convicted of killing white victims were as much as 9 percent more likely to be reversed than in cases involving a minority defendant killing a minority victim. The study examined the race of the defendant and of the victim(s) for all capital appeals that be came final in the U.S. between 1973 and 1995.
I’m back to inviting readers to submit quotations whose origins they want me to try to trace, using my book, The Yale Book of Quotations, and my more recent researches. Hugo asked: “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.” – Abe Lincoln. The Yale Book of Quotations has the following entry.
“Giving to Charity” is another myth we fervently uphold as part of the Great American Religion — just like “own a home” or “send your kids to college.” It’s time we stop blindly believing in mythology. I’m not saying don’t give. I’m not saying don’t be spiritual or don’t be good. But do it with thoughtfulness, with true spirit, with a true desire to help. More harm than good is done when you blindly throw money at most charities.
When the first version of this article came out (“How to Be a Superhero…or Why I Would Never Donate to a Major Charity”), I got a lot of criticism. So I’m going to answer some of the criticisms/questions that arose and I look forward to any comments or further suggestions.
We’ve written about prostitution more than a few times on this blog, and in SuperFreakonomics, we devoted an entire chapter to the economics of prostitution. Now comes an interesting bit of new academic research from India that draws similar conclusions: once you put aside your moral views, it’s not hard to see that entry into the profession is driven by salary and career options.
Former heavyweight champ Mike Tyson is famous for a lot of things, including biting off Evander Holyfield’s ear in a fight. A few years later he got this unusual tattoo on his face, also now famous.
Last week, Victor Whitmill, the tattoo artist who inked Tyson, filed suit against Warner Brothers, claiming they had infringed his copyright in Tyson’s tattoo. Which raises an interesting question: Can you copyright a tattoo?
There’s a growing sentiment among economists that GDP is a poor measure of a country’s well-being. (See our recent podcast on the topic; also, the research of Joseph Stiglitz.) The latest fad among European governments seeking to separate the overall health of citizens from sluggish economic data is to ask them if they’re happy. The results aren’t exactly encouraging. Less than half of British adults feel they are thriving. And France now ranks as the world’s most pessimistic country, with only 15 percent saying they expect things to get better in 2011.
Think back to high school. The quarterback on the football team had a legendary game over the weekend, and made everyone associated with the school so proud they could split their pants. On Monday, he’s treated like a hero.
But, interestingly, people find themselves thinking better of him not only for his athletic exploits. Suddenly, everything about him seems a cut above.