Why and when people make less than the best decisions

 

The dangers of decision fatigue

(Economist) “Have a break” is a slogan associated with the popular chocolate snack, KitKat. But it may be pretty good advice for any manager or worker, minus the calories. The longer the shift, the less effective the employee may become. In a new paper for Royal Society Open Finance, “Quantifying the cost of decision fatigue: suboptimal risk decisions in finance”, Tobias Baer and Simone Schnall examine the credit decisions of loan officers at a leading bank over the course of their working day. The academics write that decision fatigue “typically involves a tendency to revert to the ‘default’ option, namely whatever choice involves relatively little mental effort”. In other words, as you become tired, you get mentally lazy.
     The study authors calculated that decision fatigue, by causing more [loan restructuring] rejections, actually cost the bank around $500,000 over the course of a single month. Similar patterns have been seen in other situations. A much-cited study of Israeli judges found they were less likely to grant parole as lunch approached, but became more lenient once their stomachs were full again. Other research found that doctors grew steadily more likely to prescribe antibiotics, even when these might not be necessary, over the course of their shift. Mental activity can result in physical exhaustion, as anyone who has spent a day in successive meetings can attest. Breaks can also boost creativity. It is easy for the brain to develop tunnel vision when it is working hard. There are times when the mind needs to roam free. Kevin Cashman of Korn Ferry, a consultancy, and author of a book, “The Pause Principle”, reports that executives say their best ideas often come when exercising, taking a shower or commuting.

Virus ‘does not spread easily’ from contaminated surfaces or animals, revised CDC website states

(Washington Post) The CDC made a change to its website, clarifying what sources are not major risks. Under the new heading “The virus does not spread easily in other ways,” the agency explains that touching contaminated objects or surfaces does not appear to be a significant mode of transmission. The same is true for exposure to infected animals. The virus travels through the droplets a person produces when talking or coughing, the CDC website says. An individual does not need to feel sick or show symptoms to spread the submicroscopic virus. Close contact means within about six feet, the distance at which a sneeze flings heavy droplets.

Big Brother Venezuela Style, slightly apocalyptic...


How ZTE helps Venezuela create China-style social control
By Angus Berwick in Caracas, Reuters
In April 2008, former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez dispatched Justice Ministry officials to visit counterparts in the Chinese technology hub of Shenzhen. Their mission, according to a member of the Venezuela delegation, was to learn the workings of China’s national identity card program.
Chávez, a decade into his self-styled socialist revolution, wanted help to provide ID credentials to the millions of Venezuelans who still lacked basic documentation needed for tasks like voting or opening a bank account. Once in Shenzhen, though, the Venezuelans realized a card could do far more than just identify the recipient.
There, at the headquarters of Chinese telecom giant ZTE Corp, they learned how China, using smart cards, was developing a system that would help Beijing track social, political and economic behavior. Using vast databases to store information gathered with the card’s use, a government could monitor everything from a citizen’s personal finances to medical history and voting activity.
“What we saw in China changed everything,” said the member of the Venezuelan delegation, technical advisor Anthony Daquin. His initial amazement, he said, gradually turned to fear that such a system could lead to abuses of privacy by Venezuela’s government. “They were looking to have citizen control.”
The following year, when he raised concerns with Venezuelan officials, Daquin told Reuters, he was detained, beaten and extorted by intelligence agents. They knocked several teeth out with a handgun and accused him of treasonous behavior, Daquin said, prompting him to flee the country. Government spokespeople had no comment on Daquin’s account.
The project languished. But 10 years after the Shenzhen trip, Venezuela is rolling out a new, smart-card ID known as the “carnet de la patria,” or “fatherland card.” The ID transmits data about cardholders to computer servers. The card is increasingly linked by the government to subsidized food, health and other social programs most Venezuelans rely on to survive.
And ZTE, whose role in the fatherland project is detailed here for the first time, is at the heart of the program.
As part of a $70 million government effort to bolster “national security,” Venezuela last year hired ZTE to build a fatherland database and create a mobile payment system for use with the card, according to contracts reviewed by Reuters. A team of ZTE employees is now embedded in a special unit within Cantv, the Venezuelan state telecommunications company that manages the database, according to four current and former Cantv employees.
The fatherland card is troubling some citizens and human-rights groups who believe it is a tool for Chávez’s successor, President Nicolás Maduro, to monitor the populace and allocate scarce resources to his loyalists.
“It’s blackmail,” Héctor Navarro, one of the founders of the ruling Socialist Party and a former minister under Chávez, said of the fatherland program. “Venezuelans with the cards now have more rights than those without.”
In a phone interview, Su Qingfeng, the head of ZTE’s Venezuela unit, confirmed ZTE sold Caracas servers for the database and is developing the mobile payment application. The company, he said, violated no Chinese or local laws and has no role in how Venezuela collects or uses cardholder data.
“We don’t support the government,” he said. “We are just developing our market.”
An economic meltdown in Venezuela is causing hyperinflation, widespread shortages of food and medicines, and a growing exodus of desperate citizens. Maduro has been sanctioned by the United States and is criticized by governments from France to Canada as increasingly autocratic.
In that, critics say, Maduro has an ally. The fatherland card, they argue, illustrates how China, through state-linked companies like ZTE, exports technological know-how that can help like-minded governments track, reward and punish citizens.
The database, according to employees of the card system and screenshots of user data reviewed by Reuters, stores such details as birthdays, family information, employment and income, property owned, medical history, state benefits received, presence on social media, membership of a political party and whether a person voted.
Venezuela’s government didn’t respond to requests for comment for this article. Nadia Pérez, a spokeswoman for Cantv, the state-run telecoms firm, declined to comment, and Manuel Fernández, the company’s president, didn’t respond to emails or text messages from Reuters. China’s Justice Ministry and its embassy in Caracas didn’t respond to requests for comment. Although ZTE is publicly traded, a Chinese state company is its largest shareholder and the government is a key client.
ZTE has run afoul of Washington before for dealings with authoritarian governments. The company this year paid $1 billion to settle with the U.S. Commerce Department, one of various penalties after ZTE shipped telecommunications equipment to Iran and North Korea, violating U.S. sanctions and export laws. The Commerce action was sparked by a 2012 Reuters report that ZTE sold Iran a surveillance system, which included U.S. components, to spy on telecommunications by its citizens.
Legal experts in the United States said it is unclear whether ZTE and other companies that supply the fatherland system are violating U.S. sanctions on Venezuelan leaders by providing tools that critics believe strengthen the government’s grip on power. Fernández, the Cantv president, is one of the targets of those sanctions because of the telecom company’s censorship of the internet in Venezuela, according to a U.S. Treasury Department statement. But the prohibitions thus far are meant primarily to thwart business with Maduro and other top officials themselves, not regular commerce in Venezuela.
Still, U.S. lawmakers and other critics of Maduro’s rule are concerned about ZTE’s role in Venezuela. “China is in the business of exporting its authoritarianism,” U.S. Senator Marco Rubio told Reuters in an email. “The Maduro regime’s increasing reliance on ZTE in Venezuela is just the latest example of the threat that Chinese state-directed firms pose to U.S. national security interests.”


German vs. American schools


Why I Dread Returning to an American Public School
By Firoozeh Dumas, NY Times
After almost six years in Munich, my family and I will soon be returning to California, and there are a few things I already know I will miss. I am not talking about the obvious (fresh pretzels, fresh pretzels with cheese, fresh pretzels with cheese and pumpkin seeds, no potholes, universal health care) but the less known differences that come with spending time in schools.
We are fortunate to live in a part of Munich with top-notch public schools, similar to where we lived in America. We pay a few percentage points more in taxes than we paid in California, but holy Betsy DeVos, do we get more!
Our daughter’s elementary school, which she graduated from a few years ago, offered a rich curriculum, from math and sciences to arts and languages. After school, in addition to the more traditional offerings of chess, theater and computers, she could take circus lessons, where children learned to juggle, walk on a tightrope and ride a unicycle. Since her school did not have a pool, students were bused every week to a nearby sports club for swim lessons, at no extra charge.

The Cuban diet: eat less, exercise more—and preventable deaths are halved

by Jeremy Laurence, The Independent

A country whose citizens collectively succeeded in losing weight and increasing their level of physical activity saw their health improve and death rates plunge.

What led to Jair Bolsonaro getting elected president of Brazil

By Mike Inger Helmke


This answer is quite simple: there was no credible alternative. Bolsonaro is pretty controversial because of all his odd remarks over his years in parliament. But exactly those antics have worked on his behalf, they have proven that he is honest and doesn’t care too much about public opinion. It was exactly this sometimes almost brutal honesty that always got him reelected to congress.

Secondly he doesn’t really represent any political party.  He represents, though somewhat imperfect, an institution that Brazilians still trust, the military, which in turn represents order, disaster relief and peace troops like those in Haiti and Rio de Janeiro. Brazilians are not afraid of their military any more than Austrians are, not even the armed criminal groups in Rio de Janeiro. An exception might be some left extremists.

In order to really understand what led Brazilians to vote for Bolsonaro you have to understand the sheer magnitude of the problems the Brazilians are facing.

To Understand Rising Inequality, Consider the Janitors at Two Top Companies, Then and Now

Neil Irwin, NY Times, Sept. 3, 2017



ROCHESTER–Gail Evans and Marta Ramos have one thing in common: They have each cleaned offices for one of the most innovative, profitable and all-around successful companies in the United States.

For Ms. Evans, that meant being a janitor in Building 326 at Eastman Kodak’s campus in Rochester in the early 1980s. For Ms. Ramos, that means cleaning at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., in the present day.

In the 35 years between their jobs as janitors, corporations across America have flocked to a new management theory: Focus on core competence and outsource the rest. The approach has made companies more nimble and more productive, and delivered huge profits for shareholders. It has also fueled inequality and helps explain why many working-class Americans are struggling even in an ostensibly healthy economy.

Drucker vs Pol Pot

They Smashed Banks for Pol Pot. Now They’re Founding Them.
By Julia Wallace, NY Times, March 22, 2017

MALAI, Cambodia–For years, Tep Khunnal was the devoted personal secretary of Pol Pot, staying loyal to the charismatic ultracommunist leader even as the Khmer Rouge movement collapsed around them in the late 1990s.

Forced to reinvent himself after Pol Pot’s death, he fled to this outpost on the Thai border and began following a different sort of guru: the Austrian-American management theorist and business consultant Peter Drucker.

6 WAYS TO SLOW DOWN TIME


Tips for how to keep the years from flying by as we get older


If the saying, “Time flies when you’re having fun,” holds true, we must be having a lot more fun as we age. Time certainly seems to zip by as the years roll on.

Interestingly, this time warp is not all in our imagination, says Dr. Allen Towfigh, medical director, New York Neurology & Sleep Medicine in New York City.
“Our brain seems to measure time relative to an event marker. In order to create this perception of time, markers must therefore be created in the form of memories,” Towfigh says.

5 New Year’s Resolutions For Older Adults


By Bruce Rosenstein, Next Avenue

In 2007, British psychologist Richard Wiseman followed more than 3,000 people attempting to achieve New Year’s resolutions including the top three: lose weight, quit smoking and exercise regularly. At the start of the study, most were confident of success. A year later, only 12 percent had achieved their goals.

To make meaningful New Year’s resolutions that you’ll really keep, set long-range resolutions for your second act. This way, you can help reach the goals that matter to you in the context of your entire future, not just a single year.

Faith at the Olympics

By Eric Metaxas, BreakPoint.org, Aug. 22, 2016
We’ve all heard the story of Eric Liddell, who turned down an opportunity for Olympic gold at the Paris Games in 1924 in order to honor His Savior. It was Liddell who famously said, “God made me fast. And when I run, I feel His pleasure.”

Immigrants helped create 1.3 million jobs in Germany, study finds

By Ishaan Tharoor, Washington Post, August 11, 2016
In 2014, entrepreneurs and small-business owners with foreign backgrounds created some 1.3 million jobs in Germany, according to a new report released Thursday.

There’s No Speed Limit (The lessons that changed my life)

By Derek Sivers, Early to Rise, Aug. 12, 2016
Whether you’re a student, teacher, or parent, I think you’ll appreciate this story of how one teacher can completely and permanently change someone’s life in only a few lessons.
I met Kimo Williams when I was 17–the summer after I graduated high school in Chicago, a few months before I was starting Berklee College of Music.
I called an ad in the paper by a recording studio, with a random question about music typesetting.
When the studio owner heard I was going to Berklee, he said, “I graduated from Berklee, and taught there for a few years, too. I’ll bet I can teach you two years’ of theory and arranging in only a few lessons. I suspect you can graduate in two years if you understand there’s no speed limit. Come by my studio at 9:00 tomorrow for your first lesson, if you’re interested. No charge.”

How to help end a civil war: bringing Christ to the rebels

How an American preacher came to help the Colombian rebels who abducted him
Sibylla Brodzinsky in Havana, The Guardian

As an American citizen traveling through remote corners of Colombia at the height of the nation’s civil war, Russell Martin Stendal offered an enticing prospect for left-wing rebels who often kidnapped foreigners for ransom.
So tempting, in fact, that Stendal was abducted five times by different units of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or Farc.

Should Greek islanders win a Nobel Peace Prize?



By Molly Jackson, Christian Science Monitor, Jan. 24, 2016
If the signatories to a popular petition have their way, Greek islanders who have put aside their own country’s economic crisis to care for more than 800,000 migrants during their first hours in Europe will be nominated for the 2016 Nobel Peace Prize.

The origins of English: English is weird

English is weird
John McWhorter, The Week, December 20, 2015

English speakers know that their language is odd. So do nonspeakers saddled with learning it. The oddity that we all perceive most readily is its spelling, which is indeed a nightmare. In countries where English isn’t spoken, there is no such thing as a spelling bee. For a normal language, spelling at least pretends a basic correspondence to the way people pronounce the words. But English is not normal...

Seasoned Detective Investigates the Resurrection of Christ

INVESTIGATING THE RESURRECTION
by J.WARNER WALLACE

I was a committed atheist when I first heard a pastor preach a sermon that described the resurrection of Jesus. This pastor seemed to actually believe Jesus rose from the dead and was still alive today. I assumed it was just another example of “blind faith”; another well-intentioned church leader believing something for which he had no supporting evidence. Worse yet, I suspected he possessed an “unreasonable faith” and trusted something in spite of the evidence.

I was familiar with the rules of evidence and the process by which we can determine the truth about past events. As a detective, I was doing this for a living. I decided to investigate the resurrection as I would any unsolved case from the distant past.

Are modern kids too stupid to play with lego? Don't know how to hold a pencil?

Infants 'unable to use building blocks" due to i-phone addiction

By Graeme Paton, Daily Telegraph

Rising numbers of infants lack the motor skills needed to play with building blocks because of an “addiction” to tablet computers and smartphones, according to teachers.

Why Children need Chores


By Jennifer Breheny Wallace, WSJ

Today’s demands for measurable childhood success—from the Common Core to college placement—have chased household chores from the to-do lists of many young people. In a survey of 1,001 U.S. adults released last fall by Braun Research, 82% reported having regular chores growing up, but only 28% said that they require their own children to do them.

Productive Failure, the secret of learning math

FIT FOR FAILURE
The best way to learn math is to learn how to fail productively
Quarz, 10/29/2015
Singapore, the land of many math geniuses, may have discovered the secret to learning mathematics (pdf). It employs a teaching method called productive failure (pdf), pioneered by Manu Kapur, head of the Learning Sciences Lab at the National Institute of Education of Singapore.

What's Behind the Explosions of Violence in Palestine? -- The Destruction of Religious Sites and "Extrajudicial Executions" of Palestinian Teenagers

Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor, Stanford University
Huffington Post, 10/14/2015

If what we see going on in Israel-Palestine is not yet a third Intifada, one may not be far off. As presented in the mainstream press, the stabbings of Israeli settlers, the rock-throwing, the mass uprisings, all seem chalked up to some inexplicable proclivity toward violence on the part of Palestinians. Nothing could be further from the truth. The fact of the matter is that this wave of violence comes in response to an on-going campaign to desecrate and destroy holy sites that anchor non-Jewish peoples to their faiths -- not only are mosques being destroyed, so too are Catholic churches.

The consequences of Artificial Intelligence & the military industrial complex


The danger of easily replicable technology that could search and kill humans based on “pre-defined criteria.

DANGER WILL ROBINSON - Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, and hundreds of scientists want to keep AI out of our weapons

Quarz.com 

Maybe we should take the warnings of RoboCop more seriously. Famous scientists, engineers, and businessmen are banding together to call for a ban on autonomous weapons development.

How to be rich right away...

More Than Enough
Kathleen Elkins, Business Insider
Tony Robbins has clearly figured out a thing or two about money.
He went from a cash-strapped upbringing to an estimated net worth of $440 million, has coached some of the wealthiest people in the world, and even wrote a book about mastering your money, “MONEY: Master The Game.”

The girl in the picture: Kim Phuc’s journey from war to forgiveness


By Paula Newton and Thom Patterson, CNN
Even without the benefit of context, the image of a naked 9-year-old girl running for her life is as searing and indelible today as it was 43 years ago.
That image jolted people around the world. Some say it hastened the end of the Vietnam War.

Airbnb to Cuba in major US business expansion

By Michael Weissenstein, AP
HAVANA (AP)—The popular online home-rental service Airbnb will allow American travelers to book lodging in Cuba starting Thursday in the most significant U.S. business expansion on the island since the declaration of detente between the two countries late last year.