Tag Archives: health

Shirky confirms Shenk

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Clay Shirky, in a recent talk at Web 2.0 Expo New York, challenged us to stop talking about information overload as an excuse, recognize it as a fact (one that’s existed for a long time and will not diminish in the future), and to work on building better filters.

Watch Clay Shirky on information overload versus filter failure:

Titles like the Boing Boing one are kinda unfortunate because they frame Shirky’s view to be one that would be in opposition to lets say, David Shenk’s from his book “Data Smog”.

Far from it.

David Shenk attempted to identify the information landscape we are living in now way back in 1997. In a 2007 piece in Slate he took a critical look back.

As with any look forward, the book wildly missed the mark with some of its more grim predictions, but in many ways still has much to offer and think about.

In particular, towards the end of the book Shenk proposed a personal call to action for building better filters (learning to be our own for example) and to be better information producing citizens (being our own editors). Big foreshadowing of Shirky’s talk there.

Most reviews of the book focussed on Shenk’s definition of the problem and pooh-poohed his suggestions. So here we are, many years down the line, and most of the focus is *still* grousing about ‘information overload’.

Clay Shirky’s point is its high time to stop doing that and get busy building the tools, protocols, customs and businesses that will help us not only deal with it, but thrive from it.

When housing homeless people isn’t enough

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Monica Yant Kinney, in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer, shares the story of ‘Mary’ a Pathways to Housing client, and the difficulties she and her neighbors are facing.

Many of the chronically homeless have mental illnesses that, like many disabilities, require them to have special services available to be able to live their lives independently. Where someone with a wheelchair might require a special transportation to get about, a person facing these difficulties might require a technician to visit daily to insure they are taking their medication. Provided the right tools and structure, many do very well.

Kinney’s article, and ‘Mary”s story, raise hard questions for which there are no easy answers.

My Mom, our family, was thankful for the efforts of Carelink which provided similar services for her. Many deal with the effects of dementia in their loved ones as they age, and for her, the last few years of her life were probably her most lucid and clear with their help.

Everyone deserves a life of dignity.

The secret of achievement is persistence – a ‘growth mindset’ over a ‘fixed mindset’

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Wow does this headline sounds like so much self-help crap! But read the stories linked with an open mind. The research is thought provoking and inspiring.

Stanford Psychology professor and author of “Mindset: The New Psychology of Success”, Carol Dweck has spent decades researching the question “What makes a really capable child give up in the face of failure, where other children may be motivated by the failure?”.

Her research and a body inspired from it has implications for how we raise our children, how we manage employees, how we work to overcome difficulties, how we think of ourselves.

In April 2007 Stanford Magazine wrote up a profile of her titled, “The Effort Effect”.

Po Bronson referenced her work in a well-linked NY Magazine piece, “The Power (and Peril) of Praising Your Kids”.

That Bronson’s piece came out in 2007 and it influenced what I’ve come to believe about instilling a belief in Emma that she or me isn’t ‘smart’ – but that it’s smart to try and try again to figure something out, to learn something by practice and experimentation.

Dweck believes that we tend to have one of two mindsets when it comes to seeing achievement in others and ourselves: a ‘fixed’ mindset that tells us when we see someone’s mastery over something it is from innate talent, or a ‘growth’ mindset that tells us that person must have worked hard to achieve it.

People who believe others are born with certain talents tend to do worst than those that believe we can grow and change.

In order to believe someone can grow and change, including ourselves, we need to believe that failures have lessons and that if we keep at something, we can improve.

Just keeping that as a core belief can make all the difference in our lives and in how we see others. It calls on us to give ourselves a chance, to give others a chance. To be empathetic, to empower. And to keep on keepin’ on. This may sound a bit too ‘new agey’. But its more a call to action. Because yes, the world isn’t fair, but if we try and try again, we might raise our lives to a better place, and better yet, the lives of those around us.

Related:

Recently Po Bronson has co-authored with Ashley Merryman a new book I’ve been meaning to read that incorporates some of these lessons in parenting.

Science Daily 12/10/2009: First Evidence of Brain Rewiring in Children: Reading Remediation Positively Alters Brain Tissue

NPR: 12/9/2009: Reading Practice Can Strengthen Brain ‘Highways’

Nurture Shock: Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman: 12/10/09: New Research: $13 Christmas gifts = 13 point gain in kids’ IQ

The Atlantic: David Dobbs: December 2009: The Science of Success

“Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will.” | MetaFilter

Can’t get it out of my head: A father’s yearlong quest to grasp the infant musical mind

TED.com: Video: “Martin Seligman on positive psychology”

New Yorker: Malcolm Gladwell: “GETTING OVER IT: The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit put the war behind him. Why can’t we?”

Finally, quote from Calvin Coolidge I’ve kept in my wallet for over 10 years:

“Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination are omnipotent. The slogan press on has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.”

It’s cold out – what you can do to help homeless in Philadelphia

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Write 1.215.232.1984 on a piece of paper and put it in your wallet or purse.

If you see a homeless person living on the streets in the cold please call that number.

Its Project H.O.M.E.’s Outreach Hotline.

If you happen to be homeless, in need of services, and have access to a phone, call 1.877.222.1984.

It’s that simple.

If you have more time or resources, think about volunteering or donating to Project H.O.M.E..

This post inspired by Garret Vreeland‘s recent link to CNN story “How to help the homeless in the cold”.

40 year old ongoing study into preschool still providing insight

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American RadioWorks: Emily Hanford: Early Lessons: “doing well in school, and in life, is about more than a test score.”:

“Now you’re getting into something really deep,” says economist James Heckman. “How is it that motivation is affected? What causes motivation?”

Heckman is a Nobel laureate who teaches at the University of Chicago. Preschool was not among his interests until he came across the Perry Study several years ago. What caught his attention is the apparent paradox at its core: The people who went to preschool were not “smarter” than their peers, but they did better.

The assumption at the heart of a lot of economic theory is that measured intelligence is the key to everything. But with the Perry Preschool children, something else made the difference. It was not IQ. Heckman is now working with psychologists to try to understand how the preschool may have affected the development of what he calls “non-cognitive” skills, things like motivation, sociability and the ability to work with others.

These are critical skills that help people succeed at school, at work – and in life.

And as it turns out, the Perry preschool children did do better in life.

Thinking About Flow

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If you make a living programming, you know how productive, how creative, how enjoyable this state is: you + the task at hand – any other thought in the world. Focus, flow, mindfulness only of the moment you are in.

Flow can be found in the most mundane moments (there are no mundane moments if you become aware of this): from playing a game of basketball, to playing your guitar, to a late night World of Warcraft session, to gazing at your wife, or laughing with your daughter.

Time slows when you are in flow. Anxiety about the future transforms into passion about the now. Thoughts about the past do not get a chance to play on your conscious mind.

Flow is an extreme form of the feedback I’d give my Mom, when she was falling into a bad state, and concentrating too much on mistakes made or horrors visited upon her in the past.

“All that matters is the here and now. You, right here, are safe and well. We are doing well. All of us are blessed. Don’t let what happened 20 years ago defeat you. It doesn’t matter. Besides – its kinda insulting to your current circumstances to think anything more of the past other than it helped you get to here. Now is all that matters.”

(I need to tell myself this more often!)

This doesn’t jibe so well with a lot of psychological talk about how people need to face their pasts to over come them. That’s true in many cases. In many cases we *do* need to deal with the demons in our hearts in order to achieve our potential. But Mom had already faced her past. In countless therapy sessions, with countless doctors. She had a condition. And her doctors had, at one time wrote her off as hopeless – doomed to a downward spiral of psychotic episodes.

Becoming mindful of her own thoughts was part of a larger set of solutions that helped her be very “with it” the last few years of her life before leaving us. She succeeded to the point of being aware of threatening ‘bad thoughts’ and seeking out help before cycling and requiring hospitalization. Before this, once you saw the signs, you knew it was a hospitalization that would be the result.

Its funny, when you think about it. Because while we find flow in a great many positive things, the state of flow is just as likely found in the neutral or even the negative.

We spend millions of dollars, our time and attention, following gurus of various ideologies, taking up crazy religious practices, pursuing sex and drugs, creation and destruction, creating drama upon ourselves and our fellow man – just to be in it.

Flow is so primal a force in our adult lives because its something we literally swam in 100% of the time as children.

Our schools and our parents barked it out of us as they taught us to ‘pay attention’ for the *next* moment. We shaked it out of our own hearts as we let ourselves become more and abiding to scheduling. Most of all, as we get older, time simply seems to speed up as we become aware of our looming mortality.

Psychology Today: Finding flow:

…A deprived childhood, abusive parents, poverty, and a host of other external reasons may make it difficult for a person to find joy in everyday life. On the other hand, there are so many examples of individuals who overcame such obstacles that the belief that the quality of life is determined from the outside is hardly tenable. How much stress we experience depends more on how well we control attention than on what happens to us. The effect of physical pain, a monetary loss, or a social snub depends on how much attention we pay to it. To deny, repress, or misinterpret such events is no solution either, because the information will keep smoldering in the recesses of the mind. It is better to look suffering straight in the eye, acknowledge and respect its presence, and then get busy as soon as possible focusing on things we choose to focus on.

To learn to control attention, any skill or discipline one can master on one’s own will serve: meditation and prayer, exercise, aerobics, martial arts. The important thing is to enjoy the activity for its own sake, and to know that what matters is not the result, but the control one is acquiring over one’s attention.

It is also important to develop the habit of doing whatever needs to be done with concentrated attention. Even the most routine tasks, like washing dishes, dressing, or mowing the lawn, become more rewarding if we approach them with the care it would take to make a work of art.

…Flow is a source of mental energy in that it focuses attention and motivates action. Like other forms of energy, it can be used for constructive or destructive purposes. Teenagers arrested for vandalism or robbery often have no other motivation than the excitement they experience stealing a car or breaking into a house. War veterans say that they never felt such intense flow as when they were behind a machine gun on the front lines. Thus, it is not enough to strive for enjoyable goals, but one must also choose goals that will reduce the sum total of entropy in the world.

Find your flow and you slow down time. Find your flow and time has no meaning. Find your flow and find your love.

These are things I am saying as much to myself as I am you.

Related Links:

A lot of time to think when you have the flu

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It’s been a long week. Last Sunday I started to come down with symptoms of the flu. Classic symptoms. High fever, chills, aches and pains, cough, a gurgle coming from the chest when I breath out here and there, feeling run down. So this week I’ve been spending time basically doing a few things:

  1. Sleeping
  2. Being a pain in the ass to Richelle
  3. Over-sharing on Twitter and Facebook
  4. Trying to answer email from work whenever awake.
  5. Watching Babylon 5’s first season for the first time.
  6. Reading Logicomix
  7. Watching the Phillies take the National League Championship and move on to the World Series!

Along the way I’ve had time to reflect on how blessed I am. Sure, this flu came down during a very, very bad week – things are running tight on a project I’m part of at work and I feel like my body has let people down. But then again, I haven’t caught the flu in years. I guess I was due. The problem is – it comes on the tail end of a nasty cold. So I haven’t been running 100% for over a month. A crucial month.

I’ll be heading back to work soon (if not Monday, then very close to that), and I know it will be a challenge. But it has to be better than the throbbing in my head that I feel even now, a week after coming down with this thing.

Phillies + Flu == Cheers?

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Monday night I went to the ER as suggested by my family doctor for flu symptoms. It was a long night. The ER was overrun and understaffed. Nerves were frayed in the waiting room as minutes turned to hours.

One thing that helped pass the time was the Phillies/Dodgers game. Rooting for the Phillies took some of the edge off, but after an early lead, the Dodgers not only caught up, but looked to win.

Later that night, in the patient room I was finally assigned to, waiting for the doctor to visit to give me his five minute diagnosis (yes I have the flu, here’s a prescription for Tamiflu) the 9th inning was coming to a close.

The buzz in the ER slowed down for a moment as Jimmy Rollins came to the plate.

I was on the phone with Richelle giving her my status, taking pause to watch.

I pretty much screamed into the phone as yells of joy erupted around me as his 2 run double brought people home and the Phillies won the game.

A great night.

Some personal growth pieces to read and re-read

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Just some recent links that have connected with me as of late:

Derek Sivers: If you think you haven’t found your passion…:

If you keep thinking about something like putting on a huge conference or being a Hollywood screenwriter and you find the idea terrifies but intrigues you, it’s probably a worthy endeavor for you.

You grow by doing what excites you and what scares you.

t3rmin4t0r: A Simple Survival Guide for your Inner Child:

There are only two basic rules of survival for the individual:

  • Work the system
  • Fuck with the system

It doesn’t get any more contradictory than that.

Howard Weaver – with echos of “Data Smog”, by David Shenk – : Infobesity: the result of poor information nutrition

Chris Dixon: What carries you up will also bring you down

Pace and Kyeli Smith: The Freak Manifesto

Institute for Artificial Intelligence: Michael A. Covington: How to Write More Clearly, Think More Clearly, and Learn Complex Material More Easily

Michael Montoure: Hack Yourself:

Stop assigning blame. This is the first step. Stop assigning blame and leave the past behind you.

You know whose fault it is that your life isn’t perfect. Your boss. Your teachers. Your ex-lovers. The ones who hurt you, the ones who abused you, the ones who left you bleeding. Or even yourself. You know whose fault it is — you’ve been telling yourself your whole life. Knowing whose fault it is that your life sucks is an excellent way to absolve yourself of any reponsibility for taking your life into your own hands.

Forget about it. Let it go. The past isn’t real. “That was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead.” If we’re not talking about something that is real and present and in your life right now, then it doesn’t matter. Nothing can be done about it. If nothing can be done about it, then don’t spend your energy dwelling on it — you have other things to do.

“Programming is an exercise in overcoming how wrong you’ve been in the past.”

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Kickingbear: “Blog Archive » Don’t Be A Dick: Compiled Flash and You.”:

Programming is an exercise in overcoming how wrong you’ve been in the past. At first you’ll overcome the syntax errors, then you’ll overcome the structural errors, and then you’ll come to align your code with the standards of a greater community and you’ll feel safe and like you’ve made it. You haven’t – you’re still wrong because you’re always wrong. You are playing a game you cannot win. And let’s face it – if it was a game you could win you’d not be playing at all.

via Arpit’s Web Quotes tumblr