I’ve just finished Colm Tóibín’s book about the fathers of Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats and James Joyce. Very interesting but uneven work. Main conclusion is that all three were very strange men. William Wilde was an erratic (but formidable) polymath, John B. Yeats a talented but improvident painter who never finished a painting and never made a living, and John Stanislaus Joyce was a pompous wastrel and a drunk with a fine singing voice. And all three seem to have been terrible husbands. For their part, their talented sons all treated them ambivalently. It’s well known that having a famous father makes it difficult for sons. But being a famous son of an erratic or improvident father clearly has its problems too. Of the three, it was James Joyce who made serious artistic use of his father — there are recognisable aspects of John Stanislaus in Stephen Hero, Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake and Tóibín has been good at spotting and excavating them.

From the Economist:

Distractions clearly affect performance on the job. In a recent essay, Dan Nixon of the Bank of England pointed to a mass of compelling evidence that they could also be eating into productivity growth. Depending on the study you pick, smartphone-users touch their device somewhere between twice a minute to once every seven minutes. Conducting tasks while receiving e-mails and phone calls reduces a worker’s IQ by about ten points relative to working in uninterrupted quiet. That is equivalent to losing a night’s sleep, and twice as debilitating as using marijuana. By one estimate, it takes nearly half an hour to recover focus fully for the task at hand after an interruption. What’s more, Mr Nixon notes, constant interruptions accustom workers to distraction, teaching them, in effect, to lose focus and seek diversions.

Got that? Now back to Twitter.

Nice salutary tale for data fiends:

How Not to Be Wrong opens with an extremely interesting tale from World War II. As air warfare gained prominence, the challenge for the military was figuring out where and in what amount to apply protective armor to fighter planes and bombers. Apply too much armor and the planes become slower, less maneuverable and use more fuel. Too little armor, or if it’s in the “wrong” places, and the planes run a higher risk of being brought down by enemy fire.

To make these determinations, military leaders examined the amount and placement of bullet holes on damaged planes that returned to base following their missions. The data showed almost twice as much damage to the fuselage of the planes compared to other areas, most specifically the engine compartments, which generally had little damage. This data led the military leaders to conclude that more armor needed to be placed on the fuselage.

But mathematician Abraham Wald examined the data and came to the opposite conclusion. The armor, Wald said, doesn’t go where the bullet holes are; instead, it should go where the bullet holes aren’t, specifically, on the engines. The key insight came when Wald looked at the damaged planes that returned to the base and asked where all the “missing” bullet holes to the engines were. The answer was the “missing” bullet holes were on the missing planes, i.e. the ones that didn’t make it back safely to base. Planes that got hit in the engines didn’t come back, but those that sustained damage to the fuselage generally could make it safely back. The military then put Wald’s recommendations into effect and they stayed in place for decades.