Dear God
/Dear God. No use tryin' to kid You ... You know I done it. -Denise the Menace
Avoiding the Transitions
/Individuals will walk out of relationships, rather than letting go of the approach to the relationships that made them unsuccessful and unsatisfying in the past. Individuals will look for new jobs rather than face the attitudes and behaviors toward work and toward authority-figures that made them unsuccessful in all of their past jobs. They don’t ask what it is time for them to let go of. Instead they say they need to start over. Individuals will decide to move to a new house or a new town, rather than letting go inwardly of the old way of living that lacked meaning. They make a change rather than making the more profound transition, which would put them on a genuinely new life-path.
William Bridges, The Way of Transition
Genuine love
/Genuine love is an active striving for the growth and happiness of the loved person, rooted in one’s own capacity to love. -Eric Fromme
Determination
/Determination is often the first chapter in the book of excellence.
How instead of Why
/When life is hard, we often find ourselves harping on “why” questions: “Why is this happening to me?” In those moments, Elaine Fox (author of Switch Craft: The Hidden Power of Mental Agility) suggests letting go of the “why” and asking “how” instead: “How can I change this situation?” Or perhaps you’re already asking a “how” question, but the wrong one: Instead of “How do I stop working so much?,” she explains, try an easier question: “How can I find time to go to the gym?”
Kira Newman writing in Greater Good
The Present with a Twist?
/Because time is such a slippery concept, we tend to imagine the future as the present with a twist, thus our imagined tomorrows inevitably look like slightly twisted versions of today. The reality of the moment is so palpable and powerful that it holds imagination in a tight orbit from which it never fully escapes … we fail to recognize that our future selves won’t see the world the way we see it now.
Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness
The Inbetween Times
/Unexpected solutions to difficult problems and creative ideas in general come out of a murky state where purpose and focus are temporarily suspended. Many of the decisions that change the direction of our lives are made during in-between times, after something has ended but before our lives have taken a definite new shape.
William Bridges, The Way of Transition
29 Data Science & Geospatial Articles from March 2023
/Smaller, simpler neural network models are always more suitable for real-world applications
US vs China—a video about the race to launch the next generation of space telescopes
Pentagon Prepares for Space Warfare as Potential Threats From China, Russia Grow
Remote sensing companies try to capture bigger piece of satellite imaging market
What data scientists need to know about machine learning
The value of predictive models — cartography when data is very scarce
Space Force Wants $60 Million for Ultra-Quick Satellite Launches—with just 24 hour notice
China launches second classified high resolution remote sensing satellite
China’s secret naval base in Cambodia, through satellite imagery
Four machine learning trends to watch in 2023
Valuable GitHub repositories for data engineering
OpenAI’s price cut is “a warning sign that this may be a business with few producers"
31 Generative AI Tools for text, images, & more with descriptions
Debating the rules of a conflict in orbit
Data Cleaning with Python Cheat Sheet
The difference between the roles of questions versus decisions in data science
Happiness is
/Happiness is not a feeling; rather, feelings are evidence of happiness. -Arthur C. Brooks
Leadership in Times of Difficulty
/Even if they don’t have immediate solutions, emotionally intelligent leaders are able to maintain calm in the face of difficulties. This can help their team focus their energy on coming up with solutions, rather than needlessly squandering time and effort on fear and worry.
Harvey Deutschendorf writing in Fast Company
The Job
/Don’t do the job you want to tell people you do. Do the job you want to do. -James Fallows
The Motivation behind Fake News
/Fake news may be a fight not over truth, but power, according to Mike Ananny, a media scholar at the University of Southern California. Fake news “is evidence of a social phenomenon at play — a struggle between [how] different people envision what kind of world that they want.”
Ideological fake news lands in the social media feeds of audiences who are already primed to believe whatever story confirms their worldview.
Brooke Borel writing for FiveThirtyEight
Choosing the Misery
/Force yourself to make a different choice for a short time, for at least an hour. Do something physically hard that, under different circumstances, you can easily do and that you usually enjoy, perhaps a brisk walk or a short hard run. If you can do it with a good friend who is not overly sympathetic, so much the better. While you are walking or running, especially with a friend, you will notice you are not depressing. For a short time, you are not thinking about your unhappy relationship, and you feel much better. But as soon as you finish, you tend to go back to thinking about the relationship that has gone bad, and the feeling comes back. To depress, you have to keep thinking the unhappy thoughts. To stop these thoughts, change what you want or change your behavior. There is no other way.
William Glasser, Choice Theory
The exchange
/Exchange your unlived-in face for lines of character.
an unlived life
/Destructiveness is the outcome of an unlived life. – Eric Fromm
Earnest was right, but no on listened
/As legend has it, Ernest Duchesne was a student at a French military medical school in the 1890s when he noticed that the hospital’s stable boys who tended the horses did something peculiar: They stored their saddles in a damp, dark room so that mold would grow on their undersurfaces. They did this, they explained, because the mold helped heal the horses’ saddle sores. Duchesne was fascinated and conducted an experiment in which he treated sick guinea pigs with a solution made from mold—a rough form of what we’d now call penicillin. The guinea pigs healed completely. Duchesne wrote up his findings in a thesis, but because he was unknown and young—only 23 at the time—the French Institut Pasteur wouldn’t acknowledge it. His research vanished, and Duchesne died 15 years later of tuberculosis (a disease that would someday be treatable with antibiotics). It would take 31 years for the Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming to rediscover penicillin, independently and with no idea that Duchesne had already done it. In those three decades, untold millions of people died of diseases that could have been cured. Failed networks kill ideas.
Clive Thompson, Smarter Than you Think
What a TikTok Ban Won't Do
/
While Congress has been up in arms about TikTok, it has failed to pass even the most basic comprehensive privacy legislation to protect our data from being misused by all the tech companies that collect and mine it.
The even deeper problem is that putting TikTok under state control, banning it or selling it to a U.S. company wouldn’t solve the threats that the app is said to pose. If China wants to obtain data about U.S. residents, it can still buy it from one of the many unregulated data brokers that sell granular information about all of us. If China wants to influence the American population with disinformation, it can spread lies across the Big Tech platforms just as easily as other nations can.
it would be much more effective for China to just hack every home’s Wi-Fi router — most of which are manufactured in China and are notoriously insecure — and obtain far more sensitive data than it can get from knowing which videos we swipe on TikTok.
Investigative journalist Julia Angwin writing in the New York Times
Two kinds of Coping Strategies
/Psychologists like to group coping strategies into two main types: emotion-focused and problem-focused. Emotion-focused strategies change the way we feel, like distracting ourselves, getting support from friends, or looking at the situation from a different perspective. Problem-focused strategies, on the other hand, involve taking action to solve the problem directly.
No one strategy works all the time, and you’ll often see people get stuck in their favorite way of coping. If you tend toward distraction and denial, you might avoid dealing with a problem that you actually could have solved; if you’re an inveterate problem-solver, you might feel helpless and angry when confronting a problem—or a loved one’s—that has no solution, when all that’s really needed is support and connection.
Kira Newman writing in Greater Good
The Secret of Success
/Survivorship bias pulls you toward bestselling diet gurus, celebrity CEOs, and superstar athletes. You look to the successful for clues about the hidden, about how to better live your life, about how you too can survive similar forces against which you too struggle. Colleges and conferences prefer speakers who shine as examples of making it through adversity, of struggling against the odds and winning.
The problem here is that you rarely take away from these inspirational figures advice on what not to do, on what you should avoid, and that’s because they don’t know. Information like that is lost along with the people who don’t make it out of bad situations or who don’t make it on the cover of business magazines – people who don’t get invited to speak at graduations and commencements and inaugurations.
The actors who traveled from Louisiana to Los Angeles only to return to Louisiana after a few years don’t get to sit next to James Lipton and watch clips of their Oscar-winning performances as students eagerly gobble up their crumbs of wisdom. In short, the advice business is a monopoly run by survivors. As the psychologist Daniel Kahneman writes in his book Thinking Fast and Slow, “A stupid decision that works out well becomes a brilliant decision in hindsight.”
Before you emulate the history of a famous company, Kahneman says, you should imagine going back in time when that company was just getting by and ask yourself if the outcome of its decisions were in any way predictable. If not, you are probably seeing patterns in hindsight where there was only chaos in the moment. He sums it up like so, “If you group successes together and look for what makes them similar, the only real answer will be luck.”
Entrepreneur Jason Cohen, in writing about survivorship bias, points out that since we can’t go back in time and start 20 identical Starbucks across the planet, we can never know if that business model is the source of the chain’s immense popularity or if something completely random and out of the control of the decision makers led to a Starbucks on just about every street corner in North America. That means you should be skeptical of any book promising you the secrets of winning at the game of life through following any particular example.
David McRaney Read more here