The man who beat Edison, the Flu, and Terry Gross

The man who defeated Thomas Edison
The man who holds more patents than anyone (including Thomas Edison) is Lowell Wood of Bellevue, WA. What makes the story intriguing to me is that he was terrible in school.

Wood insists that if he’s smart, he didn’t start out that way. Growing up in Southern California, he says, “I didn’t do well in any classes.” He often failed or received the lowest score on the first exam given in a particular course and improved his marks through repetition and intense effort. The strategy worked. He skipped a couple of grades and enrolled at UCLA at 16, where he tested into an honors-level calculus class. The worst score on the first exam—once again—was his. “I’d gotten into the class on the basis of aptitude, not knowledge, which is a ruinous sort of thing,” he says. “It’s like being told I understand the theory of swimming, and so here I am tossed into a high-speed river.”
The score horrified Wood, and he tried to make up for it with a very hard extra-credit problem. “You had to figure out how to cover an area with tiles in a specified fashion,” he says. “This is back in 1958, and it was a famous math problem. It was hopeless, and everyone worked on it for a while and then threw it away.”
As it happened, UCLA had just taken delivery of the first digital computer west of the Mississippi. Wood taught himself how to use the machine over the Christmas break and then wrote a program to solve the tiling problem. “It was a shameless sort of thing,” he says. “I used brute force to solve a problem that was meant to be solved through cleverness.” After he turned in his work, his professor accused him of cheating. “And so I reached down in a briefcase and pulled out the program,” he says. “The professor’s jaw literally dropped, and he said, ‘What is a computer? You can have the points if you teach me how to use this thing.’”

It makes me wonder how many of my low scoring students have hidden talents that I can't see. Then it makes me wonder how we change the education system so that we might be able to see those talents more clearly.

The Flu
What makes the flu spread more easily in winter? Partially, it's the dry air:

Tyler Koep, then at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, has estimated that simply running an air humidifier in a school for one hour could kill around 30% of the viruses flying around the air.

Read the article here. 

Terry Gross
Fresh Air's Terry Gross is America's best interviewer (I'm sorry Charlie Rose, but it's true), and The New York Times Magazine just did a profile of her. The profile includes an exchange from an interview I vividly remember listening to. Maurice Sendak was so real, and his emotions were so naked. I'm really glad the profile captured part of it.

On ‘‘Fresh Air,’’ we listen to Gross grapple with the most complex questions of existence — racial prejudice, faith, family, illness, morality, betrayal, gratitude. In 2011, when Maurice Sendak was 83, Gross called him at his home in Connecticut. What was meant to be a short conversation about his new book, ‘‘Bumble-Ardy,’’ became a meditation on his nearness to death. You feel Sendak looking over into it from his living room.

Sendak: Oh, God, there are so many beautiful things in this world which I will have to leave when I die, but I’m ready, I’m ready, I’m ready. … You know, I have to tell you something.
Gross: Go ahead.
Sendak: You are the only person I have ever dealt with in terms of being interviewed or talking who brings this out in me. There’s something very unique and special in you, which I so trust. When I heard that you were going to interview me or that you wanted to, I was really, really pleased.

Read the interview here

My Walkscore

The New York Times Magazine for this Sunday was all about "going green," and it listed ideas for helping the environment. Walking more, instead of driving, was one of the main actions it listed that could help reduce your "carbon footprint" (I hate that phrase).

In the article, it listed a site called walkscore.com, which tells you how "walking friendly" (sorry about all of the "quotation marks") your neighborhood is, judging by how close you live to necessary locations like grocery stores, restaurants, parks, etc.

My house gets a 55, which means my neighborhood is very walkable. The site said 50-70 means "Some Walkable Locations: Some stores and amenities are within walking distance, but many everyday trips still require a bike, public transportation, or car."

My old house got a 14. Scores from 0-25 mean "Driving Only: Virtually no neighborhood destinations within walking range. You can walk from your house to your car!?"

You can check your walkscore at walkscore.com

Amazingly, TV Does Not Make You Smarter

From the New York Times

I know I shouldn’t admit to playing baby videos for my children, but allow me to embarrass myself. “Baby Mozart” was part of my first child’s life when she was all of 3 months old. She was a colicky baby, despite my hours of walking her, nursing her and singing to her. The video didn’t always work — and the calm never lasted much longer than 15 minutes — but I was desperate.

Back then, in 2002, there was no research on whether these videos lived up to their billing of being good for babies’ cognitive development. But now a survey by researchers at the University of Washington, just published in The Journal of Pediatrics, has found that for every hour of baby-video viewing per day, children ages 8 to 16 months knew six to eight fewer words than those who watched no videos.

Read the story here.

Life's hard when you're stupid, part II

Older people who lack “health literacy” — that is, they cannot read and understand basic medical information — may be paying a high price. A new study finds that they appear to have a higher mortality rate than more-literate patients.

As the authors note, education levels have long appeared to play a role in longevity: one study found that people who did not graduate from high school lived an average of nine years less than graduates.

The explanation, researchers have suggested, may be that better education tends to result in better jobs, housing, food and health care.

Read the article here.

The Power of the Subconscious

The NY Times has an article on their site now pointing out how our subconscious mind has a profound effect on our behavior. For instance:

In a recent experiment, psychologists at Yale altered people’s judgments of a stranger by handing them a cup of coffee.

The study participants, college students, had no idea that their social instincts were being deliberately manipulated. On the way to the laboratory, they had bumped into a laboratory assistant, who was holding textbooks, a clipboard, papers and a cup of hot or iced coffee — and asked for a hand with the cup.

That was all it took: The students who held a cup of iced coffee rated a hypothetical person they later read about as being much colder, less social and more selfish than did their fellow students, who had momentarily held a cup of hot java.

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In one 2004 experiment, psychologists led by Aaron Kay, then at Stanford University and now at the University of Waterloo, had students take part in a one-on-one investment game with another, unseen player.

Half the students played while sitting at a large table, at the other end of which was a briefcase and a black leather portfolio. These students were far stingier with their money than the others, who played in an identical room, but with a backpack on the table instead.

The mere presence of the briefcase, noticed but not consciously registered, generated business-related associations and expectations, the authors argue, leading the brain to run the most appropriate goal program: compete. The students had no sense of whether they had acted selfishly or generously.

In another experiment, published in 2005, Dutch psychologists had undergraduates sit in a cubicle and fill out a questionnaire. Hidden in the room was a bucket of water with a splash of citrus-scented cleaning fluid, giving off a faint odor. After completing the questionnaire, the young men and women had a snack, a crumbly biscuit provided by laboratory staff members.

The researchers covertly filmed the snack time and found that these students cleared away crumbs three times more often than a comparison group, who had taken the same questionnaire in a room with no cleaning scent. “That is a very big effect, and they really had no idea they were doing it,” said Henk Aarts, a psychologist at Utrecht University and the senior author of the study.

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In one 2006 study, for instance, researchers had Northwestern University undergraduates recall an unethical deed from their past, like betraying a friend, or a virtuous one, like returning lost property. Afterward, the students had their choice of a gift, an antiseptic wipe or a pencil; and those who had recalled bad behavior were twice as likely as the others to take the wipe. They had been primed to psychologically “cleanse” their consciences.

Once their hands were wiped, the students became less likely to agree to volunteer their time to help with a graduate school project. Their hands were clean: the unconscious goal had been satisfied and now was being suppressed, the findings suggest.

I'm trying to figure out what implications these studies have. My first thought is to use this information to guard myself against subconscious persuasion. However, I fear that the whole point is that the persuasion is subconscious, so there is really no way to guard against it. The only implication seems to be that we are very easily manipulated, and there's not much we can do about it.

However, we may turn the tables and use this effect to our benefit. For instance, I have always been a proponent of dressing professionally for work--I wear a tie at least three days per week. The subliminal message would seem to be that I am serious and businesslike--which I'm not. But the tie at least counteracts, possibly neutralizes, my relaxed, flippant demeanor.

Think, too, about the effect this could have on personal relationships. What little thing can we do to predispose people to like us? Have them hold a cup of warm coffee? Ask them, at the start of the date, to tell us about their dream date? Surely, it seems most important NOT to talk about anything negative. Put them in a positive mindset, and the night is yours. The possibilities seem endless, and exciting, and also kind of scary, in the sense that we may be able to wield much more power over people than they will be able to discover.

Read the entire article here.

The New York Times--I hate to love you

I love the New York Times. I love their liberal bias. I love their arts coverage. I love their opinion pieces. I love their cultural observations. I love A.O. Scott's movie reviews.

I love the New York Times.

But I hate the New York Times when they publish pieces that assume every one of their readers is fretting that their kids won't get into Harvard, or worried that their summer homes are outdated. Or pieces like this.

ANGELA KIM spends two days a week baby-sitting for her 2-year-old grandson, Noah, while her daughter, Andrea, a doctor, works nine-hour hospital shifts.

Only Mrs. Kim, 57, lives in Houston and her daughter and grandson live in Dallas — 250 miles away.

This long-distance child care arrangement means that on Tuesdays Mrs. Kim wakes at 4:45 a.m. to catch a 6:30 a.m. Southwest Airlines flight to Dallas Love Airport, where her daughter and Noah pick her up at the curb.

At the hospital, her daughter hops out of the car to make her 8 a.m. shift and Mrs. Kim slips into the driver’s seat. Then she and Noah drive to his preschool, and after that, home, where Mrs. Kim fills her grandson’s next two days with brown rice, seaweed and Konglish, a mix of Korean and English.

On Wednesday night, Mrs. Kim does the trip in reverse, catching a 7:30 p.m. flight to the Houston airport, where her husband picks her up.

Terri P. Tepper of Barrington, Ill., made a similar trek every week for a year to help care for her granddaughter so that her daughter could pursue her career. Beginning in 2001, Ms. Tepper flew to New York on Sundays and returned to Chicago on Thursdays.

“It was cheaper than getting a nanny,” said Ms. Tepper, 64. The round-trip tickets, which her daughter paid for, cost between $190 and $230. “I actually saved them a lot of money,” Ms. Tepper said. Her daughter later made partner in her consulting firm.

Read the entire article here.

I Know, Rob...Portion Control

Late last year, a little book called “Mindless Eating” started appearing in bookstores. It was written by Brian Wansink, a Cornell professor who has spent his career doing brilliantly mischievous experiments about the psychology of eating.

In one of my favorites, Mr. Wansink gave away five-day-old popcorn — “stale enough to squeak when it was eaten,” he wrote — to moviegoers one day at a theater in the Chicago suburbs. The crux of the experiment lay in the size of the buckets that held the popcorn. Some people got merely big buckets, while others received truly enormous ones. Both sizes held more popcorn than a typical person could finish.

Yet when the Wansink research team weighed the buckets after the movie, there was a huge difference in the amounts the two groups ate. Those with the bigger buckets inhaled 53 percent more on average, suggesting that a lot of stale popcorn is somehow more appealing than a little stale popcorn.

Over the years, Mr. Wansink has done similar experiments with everything from different-size dinner plates to bottomless bowls of tomato soup that are secretly connected to a tube underneath a restaurant table. His overarching conclusion is that our decisions about eating often have little to do with how hungry we are. Instead, we rely on cues like the size of a popcorn bucket — or the way we organize our refrigerator — to tell us how much to eat. These cues can add 200 calories a day to our diet, but the only way we’ll notice we are overeating is that our pants will eventually get too tight.

Over the last couple of decades, a new field of economics, behavioral economics, has emerged to explain why people so often act in ways that are contrary to their own interests. They overeat, smoke, forget to take their medicine and don’t save enough for retirement, saying all the while that they wish they could change. Figuring out how to turn these wishes into action could put a dent in some big social problems.

This study, though, is related to more than just eating. It's related to the commonsense idea that the context in which a choice is presented might be the most important factor used to make decisions. We see this in manufacturing, too. I've heard stories of appliance makers who create two models: one really expensive one that they don't expect to sell many of, and one less expensive model that looks like a bargain in comparison. Check it out the next time you're shopping. It's pretty bizarre.

Though lessons learned from behavioral economics can be used to manipulate us to go against our own better judgment, they can also be used to trick us into doing ourselves a favor.

Last year, President Bush signed a new pension law that was based in part on this idea. It gave companies an incentive to sign up workers automatically for 401(k) plans. The workers can still opt out; in fact, they have the same range of choices they have always had. But if they do nothing, a small part of their salary is set aside for retirement.

The pension bill sprang directly from academic research showing that automatic plans vastly increased the amount of money that people saved. “It’s the success of behavioral economics, by far,” Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist who helped found the field, recently told me.

Whether it’s 401(k)’s or food, the way choices are presented to people — what the economist Richard Thaler calls “choice architecture” — has a huge effect on the decisions they make.

Read the entire article here.