General – Page 10 – Mark Shead

IT Conversations: Malcolm Gladwell – SXSW Interactive 2005

IT Conversations has a very interesting session posted with Malcolm Gladwell. I’m currently reading his book Blink, but this recording is a great way to see if you’d be interested in the book. Blink deals with the ways we make snap decisions and points out the ways we can be right and the ways we can be wrong.

In this session (and in the book) he uses a tremendous number of stories and examples which makes it facinating and easy to remember.

IT Conversations: Malcolm Gladwell – SXSW Interactive 2005 —
Snap decisions are much more complex than we think and even when we believe we are talking rational, well-thought out decisions we may still be largely driven by the initial snap judgment. We are always making snap judgments, as he illustrates in areas ranging from music audition to hiring CEOs and diagnosing heart attacks, and yet we know very little of what influences them. The more we learn how to control the stimuli for these judgments, the more likely that our judgments and decisions well be correct.

Motorized Couch

I think this is a great idea. You just drive your couch across campus picking up friends on the way. Of course if it rained you might have a problem, so I guess you’d need some sort of moble couch-port to cover it up. Maybe you could put a roof on it and a steering wheel. Then you could make it so the passengers faced forward or maybe backwards so they wouldn’t have to travel sideways….. oh wait. I guess that is called a golf cart.

Linksys Equipment

I’ve put up a listing of Linksys equipment that was pulled from Amazon’s web api. It is interesting to see how much information they are opening up to the world. Feel free to buy large expensive items from them through this link. :)

The Time Traveler Convention – May 7, 2005

The Time Traveler Convention – May 7, 2005
We need you to help PUBLICIZE the event so that future time travelers will know about the convention and attend. This web page is insufficient; in less than a year it will be taken down when I graduate, and futhermore, the World Wide Web is unlikely to remain in its present form permanently. We need volunteers to publish the details of the convention in enduring forms, so that the time travelers of future millennia will be aware of the convention. This convention can never be forgotten! We need publicity in MAJOR outlets, not just Internet news. Think New York Times, Washington Post, books, that sort of thing. If you have any strings, please pull them.

This is an interesting idea. I can’t go this year, but maybe in the future I’ll be able to go back and visit it.

The Dangers of Focusing on Diversity

Do you know how to make African American’s perform poorly on a test? Just make the first question “What is your race?”

Now I realize that the above statement sounds horrible and it is terribly politically incorrect, but it is the actual results of the experiment below. It suggests that we may be hindering people’s performance by focusing on race in areas where it irrelevant.

In “Stereotype threat and the intellectual test performance of African Americans” by Steele, Claude M. and Aronson, Joshua (Journal of Personality & Social Psychology. 1995 Nov Vol 69(5) 797-811) researchers found that blacks from Stanford performed better on a set of SAT questions if they were not asked about their race. The differences were not slight. The group that was not asked to record their race scored 7.7 while the group that was asked to record their race only scored 4.4. This means that on average, participants did 42% worse when race was somehow a factor than when it was not.

If putting an emphasis on race can so drastically alter performance in a test, what impact does it have in the work place? I’ve seen a lot of organizations who put tremendous amounts of effort into “creating diversity”. Generally this means they are trying to hire more black people. I’m sure this is done with good intentions, but is it possible that this focus is actually hurting people in a way similar to experiment above?

In most situations, if an organization is focused on the race of their employees, there is little positive that can result. Granted, there are areas where racism still exists, but in many places an undue focus on avoiding racism is what prevents companies from moving to a state where the color of your skin isn’t something that is even noticed.