Archimedes’ Hot Tub

The week ends on a happy note, as I got word I had stories win two Honorable Mention awards in the annual American Society of Journalists and Authors competition. My essay on Trickle-Up innovation for Fast Company, As the World Turns, was the runner-up for Outstanding Business & Technology Article, while a story I wrote for CIO, How Facebook and Twitter are Changing Data Privacy Rules, was runner-up for Outstanding Trade Article.
I should be thrilled. But I have won something in the ASJA competition three years running, so being runner-up feels like a letdown, even though I didn’t expect to win anything. I am suffering from ‘counterfactual thinking,’ which holds that I am comparing myself to whoever won first, rather than being happy I’m on the podium. I will try to flip this around and get some glow to bask in.

When the earthquake hit Concepcion, I thought to myself, ‘hey,  the same thing happened when Darwin was there.’ I remembered from reading “The Voyage of the Beagle” (still one of the great adventure stories ever written) that observing the upheaval of the earth had helped him form his theory of evolution.  Here’s a link I just saw looking at this bit of trivia.

Goldman Sachs warned that bad press is now one of its ongoing business risks. The Wall Street Journal noted the ‘New Risk’:

In its annual report, the New York company [Goldman]  said “adverse publicity” could have “a negative impact on our reputation and on the morale and performance of our employees, which could adversely affect our businesses and results of operations.”

The Journal refrained from asking whether Goldman’s employees will need raises to keep them from fleeing the firm for all those on Wall Street the press loves. But it did tuck in this note at the end: Goldman Sachs’ board “rejected demands from shareholders that the firm investigate excessive pay and take steps to recoup some of the awards given to executives.” Guess Goldman didn’t read the Supreme Court decision about how business works.

I got a gift card to a major online shopping site today. I had to change my password, since the one I thought was right no longer works. Registered, I went shopping. The major site didn’t have the album I wanted to download (Queen’s 1977 classic, News of the World), though iTunes has it. So I picked a song from the album, and went to buy it. It asked for my password, even though I had just entered it. Sigh. Then I have to check to see if it’s charging my credit card or my gift card, because it doesn’t tell me.  What happened to frictionless shopping?

A guilty confession: I am still hoping for the vision captured in those old Qwest commercials that promised we’d be able to walk into even cramped, cruddy stores and get access to the media we wanted, in Ionic or Doric. Instead, I either have to pick the friction of passwords and limited selection and downloading and burning or the friction of driving to stores and looking for things they don’t stock and coming away empty-handed. Maybe I should just be happy with what I have.

This story on a Florida family ‘giving up on’ small-town life irritated me. It trumpets the inability of a big-city family to adjust to small-town life in North Dakota. But at the end of the story, we read:

Jeanette said the main reason she wants to move back to the Miami area is to care for her elderly parents. Michael said he couldn’t convince his wife’s parents to join them in Hazelton.

A new Kaiser Family Foundation study says that kids 8 to 18 spend almost 8 hours a day immersed in electronic media. My kids might like to do that, but they’re not even here and awake 8 hours a day in most cases. They’re at school, or playing sports, or at a friend’s house (playdates are increasingly video-game driven, it is true).
But on school days, the TV is off during meals. They go to an after-care program that limits screen time to 30 minutes or so. When they come home, they spend at least an hour or two on homework, or basketball practice, or piano, or Cub Scouts, or some family project. The TV is generally off during meals. After dinner, they finish their homework or they read or they play until it’s time for bed, when we work on things like spelling, and we read. But even if we had the TV on the entire time they were awake, it would amount to no more than four hours of electronic media.
Obviously they don’t yet have cell phones. Though the older one *really* wants one. ‘Dad, can i get a cell phone? When can I get a cell phone? So-and-so has a cell phone and he’s in 5th grade. So I can get a cell phone when I’m in 5th grade, right? Dad, can I get a cell phone?’

I’m old-fashioned and still think of  phones as need-based, things you get when you need to make calls (i.e., I want to know where you are). I don’t disagree with articles like this one, Why an iPhone could actually be good for your three-year-old, and I have told other parents that gaming helps kids learn to collaborate, an important life skill. I also know that gaming is a kind of social currency for kids, especially boys, just like sports. I know my son wants a cell phone for gaming and sending text messages, and because kids he likes have them and he wants to be like them. But I also know how easy it is to do something you’ll regret online. I can only imagine what sort of stuff I would have posted in my youth.

So I’m starting now to help instruct him on what to do and not to do online. I set up a Web-based email for him, so his email use isn’t tethered to my computer forever (though practically speaking, it’s tethered there for now). I’m there to help him learn about spam and to make sure he doesn’t click on things. I’m not there to read his emails (though he does ask for spelling help).
I hope he doesn’t abandon everything else for the sake of the screen. But if he does, maybe he’ll become a national champion, like this kid.

One of this blog’s loyal readers coined a name for ambiguous headlines (i.e., Squad Helps Dog Bite Victim): Crash blossoms. Read about it in this eponymous NYT On Language column. The loyal reader is Dan Bloom. Congrats, Dan!

Check out this comment by Judd Gregg from today’s Wall Street Journal article on the massive deficits the Congressional Budget Office says our government will run for the next decade.

“These numbers are just staggering, and it appears that the sky is the limit for this tax-spend-and-borrow Democratic majority,” Sen. Judd Gregg (R., N.H.), the senior Republican on the budget panel said. “Despite all of the dire news about our mountain of debt, the spending spree continues, and only lip service is being paid to the issue of debt reduction.”

Yes, the numbers are staggering. But so is his disconnect from reality. Gregg was there during the tax-cut-spend-and-borrow years of the Republican majority. He can’t seriously forget that Bush inherited surpluses and wound up with (then) record deficits. Is Gregg trying to make up for accepting the job as Obama’s Commerce Secretary?

Sandy Pentland, an MIT researcher who looks back to look forward, says that our pre-language communications skills are so important that
“We think face time with colleagues is vital, as much as 2.5 times as important to success as additional access to information. Results aren’t final, but we think we can increase productivity by 10% at no cost just by rearranging the environment to promote more employee interaction.”

More on his thoughts on why this is so in this interview on whether we can measure the power of charisma.

“Compulsively readable” was what the Boston Globe had to say about Shankar Vedantam’s new book, “The Hidden Brain.” I met Shankar via the Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships, and I’m  not surprised. All of us who know him admire his work ethic, his clearheadedness and his extraordinary ability to make obscure things make sense. I’m looking forward to reading the book — and hoping he’ll give a reading while he’s here.