Productivity struggles

/

E.B. White once wrote: “I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.” But in my research, I’ve found that productive people don’t agonize about which desire to pursue. They go after both simultaneously, gravitating toward projects that are personally interesting and socially meaningful.

Often our productivity struggles are caused not by a lack of efficiency, but a lack of motivation. Productivity isn’t a virtue. It’s a means to an end. It’s only virtuous if the end is worthy. If productivity is your goal, you have to rely on willpower to push yourself to get a task done. If you pay attention to why you’re excited about the project and who will benefit from it, you’ll be naturally pulled into it by intrinsic motivation.

Adam Grant, writing in the New York Times

Venting reinforces negative emotions

/

Think of our brain circuitry like hiking trails. The ones that get a lot of traffic get smoother and wider, with brush stomped down and pushed back. The neural pathways that sit fallow grow over, becoming less likely to be used. Kindergarten teachers are thus spot on when they say, “The thoughts you water are the ones that grow.” This is also true for emotions, like resentment, and the ways we respond to them, like venting. The more we vent, the more likely we are to vent in the future. 

Gail Cornwall & Juli Fraga writing in Slate

Burnout

/

I know the signs of burnout. It’s not like one morning you wake up, and you’re burnt. You’re noticing more emotional exhaustion. You’re noticing what researchers call depersonalization. You get annoyed with people more quickly. You immediately assume someone’s intentions are bad. You start feeling ineffective. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t noticing those things in myself. I can’t be telling my students, “Oh, take time off if you’re overwhelmed” if I’m ignoring those signals. You can’t just power through and wish things weren’t happening. 

Yale cognitive scientist Laurie Santos, quoted in the New York Times

Lasting Happiness

/

Researchers have found that the happiness produced by acquiring material things such as cars, jewelry, and gadgets decreases over time. By contrast, the satisfaction associated with experiential purchases— like vacationing with a spouse or attending a sporting event with friends—increases as time moves forward, in part because we seldom do things alone. Elizabeth Dunn, a professor of who studies happiness says, “Going to a concert, taking a trip, any unique experience that is very special can make us feel more connected to people we love.” 

March, 2022, Atlantic Magazine

The Dark Side of Saying Work Is ‘Like a Family’

/

When I hear something like “we’re like family here”, I silently complete the analogy: We’ll foist obligations upon you, expect your unconditional devotion, disrespect your boundaries, and be bitter if you prioritize something above us. Many families are dysfunctional. Likening them to on-the-job relationships inadvertently reveals the ways in which work can be too. 

Joe Pinsker, writing in The Atlantic

Think Yourself Young

/

According to a wealth of research that now spans five decades people who see the ageing process as a potential for personal growth tend to enjoy much better health into their 70s, 80s and 90s than people who associate aging with helplessness and decline, differences that are reflected in their cells’ biological aging and their overall life span.

“There’s just such a solid base of literature now,” says Prof Allyson Brothers at Colorado State University. “There are different labs in different countries using different measurements and different statistical approaches and yet the answer is always the same.”

Many people will endorse certain ageist beliefs, such as the idea that “old people are helpless”, long before they should have started experiencing age-related disability themselves. Those kinds of views, expressed in people’s mid-30s, can predict their subsequent risk of cardiovascular disease up to 38 years later. 

David Robson, The Expectation Effect: How your Mindset Can Transform Your Life

How Feelings Help You Think

/

If you’re in a grocery store, and you're hungry, everyone knows you're going to buy more stuff. You go into the store, you have certain data. If you go when you're in a non-hungry state, you have all that data in front of you, and all those choices to make, and you make a series of choices. If you go when you're in a hungry state, same data, same information, and you make totally different decisions. That's a good illustration of what emotions do. The emotions are a framework for your logical processing. It affects how you evaluate data, how skeptical you are of certain ideas versus how accepting you are of those same ideas. Your brain doesn't process in a vacuum. 

Leonard Mlodinow, quoted in GQ

Fleeting Happiness

/

I have now reigned above 50 years in victory or peace; beloved by my subjects, dreaded by my enemies, and respected by my allies. Riches and honors, power and pleasure, have waited on my call. I have diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine happiness which have fallen to my lot. They amount to 14. —Abd al-Rahman III, the emir and caliph of Córdoba in 10th-century Spain

The Struggle for Social Innovation

/

Social problem solving is not only slow, it is untidy.  Purposeful social change occurs through a long and disorderly process of trial and error not unlike that of an infant learning to walk. The infant tries, fails, has partial successes, learns, bumps its nose, cries, and tries again. It has many failures before it succeeds. This is why Harlan Cleveland says that “planning is improvisation on a sense of direction.”  No plan for social or institutional Improvement can be put into effect without innumerable in-course corrections.

John W. Gardner, On Leadership

Data Science articles - Feb. 2022

/

Using artificial intelligence to find anomalies hiding in massive datasets

Using Google Maps to track the invasion of Ukraine —the app alerted researchers watching traffic before it hit social media or news sites

Technological advances make hiding military movements in Ukraine difficult—thanks to rapidly updated imagery from commercial satellites in the public domain & the IOT (from fitness trackers to cell phones) 

The role of analysts in Geospatial Intelligence technologies such as Very High Resolution (VHR) images, Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images

Dispelling the mysteries around neural networks in healthcare

A pitch for symbolic AI as a way to meet the shortcomings of machine learning

A new R package for simulation-based calibration of Bayesian models

Assessing the use of deep learning to detect deepfakes

Will the data-centric AI movement replace the shift to deep learning? A look at the attempt to yield “small data” solutions to big issues in AI

Pro tips for organizing, storing, & recalling pieces of Python code—managing code to be reusable

One of the world’s largest constellations of satellites is operated not by a government but by a company—what’s planned for the 100 Spire satellites floating just above Earth’s atmosphere

DeepMind says its new AI coding engine is as good as an average human programmer—more likely is progress but not great results—yet

5 Ways Google Does Data Engineering Differently

“5 things that I actually did at work as a data scientist“

“90% of the data generated is unstructured but only 32% of companies can extract business value from their data”- but you ignore unstructured data at your own risk

While there are plenty of resources talking about pruning neural networks there are few explanations of the code behind it— here is look at the nuts and bolts involved in pruning deep neural networks

Report: U.S. military needs a better way to buy commercial satellite imagery

SpaceX rocket successfully launches US spy satellite

Microsoft researchers say their AI model can create poetry from images

Resources for following the invasion of Ukraine

/

Links directly to the latest verified news on the conflict in Ukraine curated by news organizations. 

Twitter accounts related to coverage of Ukraine:

  • Daniel Dale (a list of Twitter accounts on Ukraine compiled by the CNN reporter)

  • Janet Lytvyneko (a senior research fellow at the Technology and Social Change Project at Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center and originally from Ukraine)

  • Josh Marshall (a list of Twitter accounts on Ukraine compiled by the editor and publisher of Talking Points Memo)

  • Kayleen Devlin (member of the BBC’s disinformation monitoring unit)

  • Lisa Charlotte Muth (DataWrapper writer compiled info on various maps)

  • Olga Robinson (member of the BBC’s disinformation monitoring unit)

  • Rebecca Shabad (a list of Twitter accounts on Ukraine compiled by the politics reporter for NBC News)

Interactive Maps on the conflict:

We’re doing Time management wrong

/

Time management strategies work in the sense that you’ll process more incoming inputs, but we’re living in a world with effectively infinite inputs—emails you could receive, demands that could be made of you, or ambitions that you could have. Getting better at moving through them is not going to get you to the end of them, so the promise of reaching a point at which you feel on top of everything is flawed on a math basis from the beginning.  

We are finite, limited creatures living in a world of constraints and stubborn reality. Once you’re no longer kidding yourself that one day you’re going to become capable of doing everything that’s thrown at you, you get to make better decisions about which things you are going to focus on and which you’re going to neglect.

Oliver Burkeman quoted in The Atlantic