A Better Course

• “The language of stamps:” a cautionary tale for steampunk writers. | jessnevins.com
  "We communicate with expressions and body language, with our choice of vocabulary and grammar and rhetoric, with our use of emoticons or lack of same, with variations in vocal tone, with length or shortness of paragraphs, with the kind of manners we choose to employ […] To assume that the spoken language is not only the primary language but the only one is to make a major mistake."
  (tags: none)

• Amazon’s Plagiarism Problem | Fast Company
  "Most erotica authors stay within the genre, so Sharazade was surprised Cruz had ventured into horror. Amazon lets customers click inside a book for a sample of text and Sharazade was impressed with how literate it was. She extracted a sentence fragment, googled it, and found that Cruz had copy and pasted the text from Bram Stoker's Dracula."
  (tags: none)

• Google, what were you thinking? ← Mocality Kenya
  Weird and desperate behaviour from Google, found by a really excellent use of data from Mocality:

  "When we started this investigation, I thought that we’d catch a rogue call-centre employee, point out to Google that they were violating our Terms and conditions […] someone would get a slap on the wrist, and life would continue. I did not expect to find a human-powered, systematic, months-long, fraudulent [..] attempt to undermine our business, being perpetrated from call centres on 2 continents."

  (tags: none)

In January of last year, I noticed that I’d only read books by women, and decided to make a project of this for the rest of the year.

This turned out to be a good project, for two reasons – firstly, I’d never really thought about how few books by women I read (proportionally), and secondly, it meant that I read Jane Jacobs’ The Death And Life Of Great American Cities, which I had been putting off for some years.

This set the scene for this project in a satisfying way, as a lot of the non-fiction I read by women was about the division between public and private space – the legal distinctions in Anna Minton’s Ground Control, and contrast between personal invisibility and a total lack of privacy in Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel And Dimed. I recommend both of these books very highly, incidentally – the Ehrenreich in particular resonates with the current political and economic situation. By contrast Bait And Switch, her book on jobhunting in the corporate world, felt somewhat hasty and conclusionless.

The best book I read this year – Marshall Berman’s All That Is Solid Melts Into Air – is also the best book I’ve read in the last five years, easily one of my favourite books of all time. It’s a beautiful look at modernism through some specific and highly diverse lenses; it makes an abstract concept feel like personally lived history. I can’t recommend it highly enough, it’s wonderful.

On the topic of the personal and the universal, Daniel Miller’s The Comfort Of Things is also great – I know that I am late to this party, though. It’s a series of essays (not quite sure this is the word – they might be more like interviews or case studies) in which people who live on a road in South London talk about the things that they own. It’s very affecting, not least for the feeling of having been invited into these people’s lives – I feel like I would know any of their houses if I went into them.

Incidentally, I read The Comfort Of Things after Patrick Hamilton’s The Siege Of Pleasure and before Joanna Trollope’s The Best Of Friends. This was not intentional but the formal similarity of the titles together pleased me.

Last year I set myself the aim to try again with Ivy Compton-Burnett, and she is a woman, so I did that, and did not enjoy it. I read Pastors and Masters, and everyone in it is not only horrible but annoying; I just can’t get on with the way she puts words together.

Aims for next year are:

One last graph, just for comparison with previous years:

…one more re-read than last year. All rereads other than The Sea, The Sea were F Scott Fitzgerald novels, it is Nabokov’s turn again next year.

Previous years: 2010, 2009, 2007, 2006

• New Study: When NBA Players Touch Teammates More, They and Their Teams Play Better – Bob Sutton
  Players who touched their teammates more had higher "Win scores," defined as "a performance measure that accounts for the positive impact a player has on his team’s success (rebounds, points, assists, blocks, steals) while also accounting for the amount of the team’s possessions that player uses (turnovers, shot attempts). "
  (tags: bobsutton business sport research touch )

• Five big mistakes expert travel marketers make every day | Tnooz
  Only run experiments if a 10% improvement will matter
  (tags: conversion tnooz online marketing )

• Why Good Advice Sometimes Feels So Bad – Edward Hallowell – The Conversation – Harvard Business Review
  Support that is too blatant risks making the recipient feel as if he needed support, which is not a feeling most people in the workplace feel comfortable acknowledging. Well-intended though it may be, visible support can backfire, and make the employee feel resentful, insecure, and worried.
  (tags: harvardbusinessreview leadership support work )

• Unplanning – Only Dead Fish
  “spending more time on planning won’t make the numbers more accurate; it just makes the numbers wrong to the penny"
  (tags: planning marketing onlydeadfish budgeting )

• Apple engineer re-creates 2,000-year-old Greek computer. With Legos. – The Raw Feed
  An uber-egghead named Andrew Carol, who works as a software engineer at Apple, has re-created the amazing Antikythera Mechanism using Legos. Ancient Greeks created the device in 100 B.C. to predict astronomical events.
  (tags: mathematics lego therawfeed astronomy engineering )

• BUSINESS EXPOSED: The looks of a leader
  These Swiss people would never have seen and did not know anything about these sets of two candidates. Subsequently they asked them “who do you think will win this election?” In 72% of the cases, having seen only the two photographs, people predicted the results of the elections correctly… That’s probably a lot better than most political analysts. Then they got a little mischievous; they gave the photographs to 681 children and told them “we are going to play boat; who do you want as captain of our ship?” In 71% of the cases, the children’s’ choice correctly predicted the winner of the local French parliamentary elections.
  (tags: businessexposed freekvermeulen attractiveness leadership )