The product ecosystem that surrounds Apple iDevices reminds me of the Peace of God as described in the Bible — in that “it passeth all understanding”. This is an add-on for the iPhone4 (and 4S) that turns it into a microscope.
Well, sort-of.
The only thing I could find to test it when it arrived was a penny. This is how it came out.
Somehow, I don’t think it’ll make me into a latter-day Leeuwenhoek. But it’s fun.
Just came on this in Aaron Sloman’s wonderful home page:
What should I write if asked to act as an academic referee, and the invitation requests me to assess the impact of the candidate’s work?
“I am not interested in impact, only quality of research, which does not always correlate with impact, since the latter is often subject to fashion and transient funding policies, etc. If you want a study of impact you would do better to consult a social scientist. Moreover high impact as measured by citations is often a consequence of making mistakes that many other people comment on.***
Many great research achievements could not possibly be assessed for their impact until many years later, in some cases long after the death of the researcher (e.g. Gregor Mendel).I’ll tell you what I think about the research quality: things like the depth, difficulty, and importance of the questions addressed, the originality, clarity, precision and explanatory power of the theories developed, and how well they fit known facts, as far as I can tell. If there are engineering products I may have some comments on their contribution to research. I shall not be able to evaluate their contribution to wealth or happiness.”
Thanks to Seb Schmoller for the link.
***Footnote: Really acute observation this. One of the most cited research papers in recent history is the infamous MMR paper published by the Lancet.
I’ve just got Rebecca MacKinnon’s new book
John Kampfner’s review is here.
During the War, Hugh Trevor-Roper worked in British Intelligence, mostly on code-breaking and interpretation of intercepted messages. He also recorded in his diary what books he read. According to his biographer, the tallies for the four years 1940-1943 are:
1940: 65
1941: 72
1942: 84
1943: 119
Now I know that there weren’t all that many distractions available to an Intelligence Officer in wartime London, and that there were periods when he was hospitalised with chronic sinusitis, but still…
From the wonderful Brain Pickings newsletter.
On September 7th, 1982, [David] Ogilvy sent the following internal memo to all agency employees, titled “How to Write”:
The better you write, the higher you go in Ogilvy & Mather. People who think well, write well. Woolly minded people write woolly memos, woolly letters and woolly speeches. Good writing is not a natural gift. You have to learn to write well. Here are 10 hints: 1. Read the Roman-Raphaelson book
on writing. Read it three times. 2. Write the way you talk. Naturally. 3. Use short words, short sentences and short paragraphs. 4. Never use jargon words like reconceptualize, demassification, attitudinally, judgmentally. They are hallmarks of a pretentious ass. 5. Never write more than two pages on any subject. 6. Check your quotations. 7. Never send a letter or a memo on the day you write it. Read it aloud the next morning – and then edit it. 8. If it is something important, get a colleague to improve it. 9. Before you send your letter or your memo, make sure it is crystal clear what you want the recipient to do. 10. If you want ACTION, don’t write. Go and tell the guy what you want. David
‘S obvious, really. So why don’t more people do it?
Trying to escape from media consensus and groupthink about the economy, I came on this thoughtful piece by Gabriel Sherman arguing that the legislative changes in the US are beginning to bite on Wall Street.
Banks have always had occasional bad years, but the sense on Wall Street is that this bad year is different. Over the past several weeks, I have had wide-ranging conversations with more than two dozen senior Wall Street executives, traders, bankers, hedge-fund managers, and private-equity investors. And what emerged is a picture of an industry afflicted by a crisis it would not be flip to call existential.
The crash four years ago was shocking enough to the financial class. But what is happening on Wall Street now is even more terrifying. No doubt the economy itself—the crisis in Europe, the effects of the tsunami in Japan, America’s sputtering recovery—has played a large part in the financial industry’s struggles. But even the most stubborn economies improve eventually. The bigger issues are structural. The Dodd-Frank financial-reform act, much maligned, has already begun to change the shape of the financial system—even before a number of its major provisions are proposed to go into full effect this coming July. Banks are working hard to interpret Dodd-Frank’s provisions in a way most favorable to them—and repealing Dodd-Frank is a key piece of Mitt Romney’s campaign platform.
To comply with the looming regulations, banks have begun stripping themselves of the pistons that powered their profits: leverage and proprietary trading. In the wake of the crash, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs converted to bank holding companies to tap the “discount window,” the Fed’s pipeline of cheap funds that gave the banks an emergency source of liquidity. That move seemed smart then, but the stricter standards required of banks have now left them boxed in.
With all the major banks unable to wager their own funds on big bets, there’s a growing sense that the money that was being made during the Bush boom won’t be back. “The government has strangled the financial system,” banking analyst Dick Bove told me recently. “We’ve basically castrated these companies. They can’t borrow as much as they used to borrow.”
If true, this is good news. Worth reading in full.
I’m stuck in bed with a stinking cold but am greatly cheered by (a) news of the latest arrests at The Sun (a newspaper) and (b) Adam Sisman’s biography of Hugh Trevor-Roper
Canon Claude Jenkins, then in his sixtieth year, had been Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History since 1934. He was an Oxford eccentric, who dressed in a low-crowned hat and antiquated clerical garb, collected cigar butts to smoke later, and surreptitiously pocketed fingers of toast from the breakfast table. Piles of books on both sides of the steps up to his rooms left only a narrow corridor for visitors to ascend, before they squeezed into a study so stuffed with books as to be almost impenetrable. Even the bath was filled with them. Jenkins’s mind was as chaotic as his rooms. He lectured all morning on the hour, each lecture commencing directly after the other. An alarm-clock hanging from a string round his neck served as a prompt to change subject, though his few listeners (sometimes as few as one) found it hard to distinguish one lecture from another.
Sigh. They don’t make ’em like that any more. And if they did the Teaching Quality Assessment, or some other wheeze dreamed up by McKinsey, would do for him.
I love this. The announcement that Margaret Thatcher will have a State funeral when she dies has prompted this e-petition.
In keeping with the great lady’s legacy, Margaret Thatcher’s state funeral should be funded and managed by the private sector to offer the best value and choice for end users and other stakeholders. The undersigned believe that the legacy of the former PM deserves nothing less and that offering this unique opportunity is an ideal way to cut government expense and further prove the merits of liberalised economics Baroness Thatcher spearheaded.
It needs 100,000 signatures and currently has only 27,000. I found out about it in Julian Barnes’s lovely review of The Iron Lady in the New York Review of Books.
Spotted this afternoon in the college gardens.
From today’s NYTimes.
FOR barristers in 18th-century London, it was shoulder-grazing wigs. For the Mad men of 1950s New York, it was briefcases and fedoras. For the glass-ceiling-shattering women of the 1980s, it was shoulder pads.
And for today’s tech entrepreneurs in high-flying Silicon Valley, it is flamboyantly colored, audaciously patterned socks.
In a land where the uniform — jeans, hoodies and flip-flops — is purposefully nonchalant, and where no one would be caught dead in a tie, wearing flashy socks is more than an expression of your personality. It signals that you are part of the in crowd. It’s like a secret handshake for those who have arrived, and for those who want to.
“I have been in meetings where people look down and notice my socks, and there is this universal sign, almost like a gang sign, where they nod and pull up their pant leg a little to show off their socks,” said Hunter Walk, 38, a director of product management at YouTube, whose favorite pair is yellow, aqua and orange striped.
Note: the New York Times is serious newspaper.
