Dave Munger at Cognitive Daily:

When you’re studying during nearly every free moment, what’s the best way to clear up your mind and refocus yourself for the next round of studying?

One old idea that has re-emerged recently is called “attention restoration theory”, or ART. William James actually discussed a similar concept in his 1892 psychology textbook. The idea that taking a walk in the woods can help you refocus your thoughts is at least as old as Immanuel Kant, and probably older. But how exactly does interacting with nature help focus attention? ART says that the natural world engages your attention in a bottom-up fashion, by features of the environment (e.g. a sunset, a beautiful tree). The artificial world demands active attention, to avoid getting hit by cars or to follow street signs. Since intellectual activities like studying or writing also demand the same kind of attention, taking a break in the artificial world doesn’t really function like a rest.

A must-read post!

Joel Spolsky as to why you should grow at break-neck speed if you do not want to disappear:

Then I came across a quote from Geoffrey Moore, who is best known for his best-selling book Crossing the Chasm, which is about how businesses cross over from their initial niche markets to dominate larger markets. In another book, called Inside the Tornado, Moore writes about the great battle between Oracle and Ingres in the early 1980s. The winner of that battle is well known: Oracle now has a market cap of more than $100 billion, and I’ll bet you’ve never heard of Ingres.

“What set Oracle apart from Ingres,” Moore writes, “was that [CEO] Larry Ellison drove for 100 percent growth while Ingres ‘accepted’ 50 percent growth.” Executives at Ingres meant well. According to Moore, they felt that the company “simply cannot grow any faster than 50 percent and still adequately serve our customers. No one can. Look at Oracle. They are promising anything and everything and shipping little or nothing. Everybody knows it. Their customers hate them. They are going to hit the wall.”

Of course, Oracle overcame those concerns and eclipsed its rival. And this got me worried. Were we Ingres?

I had to wonder. We do have a large competitor in our market that appears to be growing a lot faster than we are. The company is closing big deals with big, enterprise customers. And the wheels are falling off the donkey cart over there as the company stretches to fulfill its obligations. Meanwhile, our product is miles better, and we’re a well-run company, but it doesn’t seem to matter. Why?

Moore explains that “for pragmatist customers, the first freedom in a rapidly shifting market is order and security. That can only come from rallying around a clear market leader. Once the apparent leader-to-be emerges, pragmatists will support that company, virtually regardless of how arrogant, unresponsive, or overpriced it is.”

Uh-oh. Are we actually losing our market leadership position because we’re careful?

It’s entirely possible. Think of it this way: If you’re growing at 50 percent a year, and your competitor is growing at 100 percent a year, it takes only eight years before your competitor is 10 times bigger than you. And when it’s 10 times bigger than you, it can buy 10 times as much advertising and do 10 times as many projects and have meetings with 10 times as many customers. And you begin to disappear.

A nice and must-read post.

Peg Boyle Single has started a four part essay on dissertation writing. The first piece debunks two popular myths about writing. The second one talks about deliberate practice:

So what is deliberate practice? It is not inherently fun nor is it intrinsically rewarding. It is work. Deliberate practice is effortful practice with full concentration and includes a mechanism by which the results of the practice can be evaluated and improved upon in future sessions. Often a coach or master teacher oversees the deliberate practice, chooses individualized training tasks, and evaluates the results of the training. Experts more often engage in deliberate practice during the morning; research has supported that we have the greatest capacity for sustained, engaged and demanding cognitive activity during the morning. Research has also supported the many anecdotal accounts that four hours is the length of time that deliberate practice can be sustained. Mind you, these experts did not start by engaging in deliberate practice for four hours a day, they worked up to it. Also, I want to emphasize that research on expert performance underscores the importance of sleep and that experts tended to spend more time sleeping than a comparable reference group; they maintained that being well rested was crucial for engaging in deliberate practice.

One of the results of engagement in deliberate practice is enhanced pattern recognition. Ericsson and Charness present research showing that pattern recognition differentiates expert from novice chess players. In one study they cite, a chess game was set up mid-game and expert and novice players were given a moment to study the board. Then, both groups were asked to remember the location of the pieces. The experts exhibited enhanced recall of the location of the pieces compared with the recall of the novice players. But, and this is an important but, this superior performance in recall only occurred when the chess pieces were in a meaningful pattern on the board. When the pieces were randomly placed on the board, the recall was about equal.

This result tells us that experts look at the configuration of pieces as a whole and examine it from a broader perspective. They recognize meaningful patterns and by focusing on the patterns, they are able to remember better the location of the individual pieces. Novice players view the configuration of pieces as individual items and examine it from a narrower perspective. Although when the pieces were randomly placed on the board and no meaningful patterns existed, the experts’ previous advantage was stripped away and both groups were relying on straight recall. So, what differentiates the expert chess players is their ability to examine a board from a broader perspective and their ability to recognize meaningful patterns on the chessboard.

Of course, these two pieces are a must-read and I am looking forward to the next two.

Robert P Crease tells why, here, in this must-read piece:

In my own encounter with Feynman – which, incidentally, is recounted in the epilogue to James Gleick’s biography Genius – I asked him questions about episodes of his intellectual development. Feynman’s replies were direct, but accompanied by intense curiosity about why I was asking; he sought to learn. Then I asked him about progress in science. This did not interest him. A physiological change in his face told me that I had abruptly gone from scholar to scribbler.

All at once he grew angry, stood up, and began shouting. “It’s a dumb question,” he yelled, “I don’t know how to answer it. Cancel everything I said!” He slammed his fist into the mountains of papers on his desk, then strode to the door. “It’s all so stupid. All of these interviews are always so damned useless.” He walked down the corridor, shouting: “It’s goddamned useless to talk about these things! It’s a complete waste of time! The history of these things is nonsense! You’re trying to make something difficult and complicated out of something that’s simple and beautiful!”

In that instant, witnessing his curiosity evaporate, I realized this had nothing to do with me, nor with contempt for outsiders, nor with scorn for history. Rather, it had everything to do with Feynman’s absorption in his own work – the same kind of absorption that made him a great physicist.

By the way, there is an interesting story about S Chandrashekher too in that piece — one that you don’t get to see in the pages of, say, Current Science:

Horgan once flew to Chicago for a prearranged interview with the late astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who shared the 1983 Nobel Prize for Physics for his theoretical work on the structure and evolution of stars.Chandrasekhar, who was then writing a book on Newton’s Principia, demanded to know Horgan’s purpose. Horgan replied that he was writing a two-page profile about Chandrasekhar and his project.

“What!” the Nobel laureate hollered, ordering Horgan out. “You think that you can summarize Homer’s Odyssey in two pages? You think that you can write about the Sistine Chapel in two pages?” Horgan laughed nervously, wondering if this was a joke. It was not. Chandrasekhar again demanded he leave.

A University of Chicago public-relations aide eventually coaxed Chandrasekhar to stop the bullying and go through with the interview – but afterwards Chandrasekhar insisted that Horgan should not print anything about their meeting. Horgan, within his rights, did so anyway, penning a delicate, toned-down description of the encounter.

Horgan’s book, The End of Science, is full of such stories.

Link via John Hawks.

Sriram Venkatkrishnan has a nice piece in the Hindu:

Within a year, Nagarathnamma was to discover that she, and other women, would not be allowed to participate in the Tyagaraja Aradhana, then considered a male preserve. There began a battle for equality, with a separate women-only Aradhana being conducted at the rear of the Samadhi. As was to be expected, this festival conducted by the women outshone the rival events conducted by others. In 1940, everyone saw the light of day and the warring factions were united in their worship of Tyagaraja. The festival then took on its present dimensions.

What is interesting is however the role of women in ensuring a proper memorial to Tyagaraja. If Nagarathnamma showed the way and several Devadasis helped her in the women’s festival, the silver vessels used for worship came courtesy Padmasini Bai, a leading Harikatha artist. The electrification of the Samadhi was done in 1962 thanks to Kolar Rajam, consort of Palani Subramania Pillai. This was of course long after Nagarathnamma’s death, but she would have been pleased. For years, flowers for worship would come from Ammapettai Chellam Ammal, yet another hereditary artist. The inscribing of Tyagaraja kritis in marble slabs was envisioned and implemented by Srirangam Sundaram Iyer with donations and help from several people. But a survey of the slabs will show the contributions from M.S. Subbulakshmi.

Breaking the bastion

There remained the question of women’s participation in the unchavriti. This was a men- only-affair and that too performed by the most orthodox. Nagarathnamma had shown that women could participate in it indirectly, for she sponsored her own team of male bhagavatars who went around Tiruvaiyyaru and participated in the symbolic collection of alms. But still it was an event in which only men could participate.

Then during an Aradhana, many years after Nagarathnamma’s passing, three women came forward and broke the last bastion most musically. As the procession wound its way down Tiruvayyaru’s narrow lanes, Brinda, Muktha and M.S. Subbulakshmi joined the singing and walked with the group.

After so many years, it is impossible to fathom whether this was a premeditated move on the part of the trio or whether it was done on the spur of the moment. Presumably it had the backing of T. Sadasivam, MS’s husband who would have anyway loved challenging established taboos. And so they joined in and sang along. Not one voice of protest was heard. And so it became an accepted aspect of the Tyagaraja Aradhana. The spirit of Nagarathnamma lives on.

In a field where even now it is not uncommon to hear male singers refusing women accompanists and even worse, women singers refusing accompanists of their own gender, such stories are heart-warming and indicate that gender equality in Carnatic music, though not yet fully achieved, is definitely a success story.

Frigo and Johnson’s FFTW is a software that I have used extensively and continue to use. Today I learnt of another FFT that is faster than that of FFTW (pdf):

My djbfft software at http://cr.yp.to/djbfft.html computes power-of-2 discrete Fourier transforms at extremely high speeds. It’s several times fasterthan a typical “optimized” FFT library. It’s even faster than the Frigo-Johnson “Fastest Fourier Transform in the West.”

I got the link to the pdf file from Aaron Shwartz’s post (which, by the way, has some very nice quotes) which I reached thanks to Abi’s sharing of a link at Google Reader.

Although it is increasingly difficult to gauge what people can be expected to know, it is probably safe to assume that most readers are familiar with Ockham’s razor – roughly, the principle whereby gratuitous suppositions are shaved from the interpretation of facts – enunciated by a Franciscan monk, William of Ockham, in the fourteenth century. Ockham’s broom is a somewhat more recent conceit, attributable to Sydney Brenner, and embodies the principle whereby inconvenient facts are swept under the carpet in the interests of a clear interpretation of a messy reality. (Or, some – possibly including Sydney Brenner – might say, in order to generate a publishable paper.)

In due course, the edge of the carpet must be lifted and the untidy reality confronted, and in this issue of Journal of Biology we are launching an occasional series of Opinions in which contributors inspect the sweepings and discuss their implications.

Thus begins an editorial of Miranda Robertson in the Journal of Biology. A nice concept that is worthy of emulation by other journals too!

I found this nice blog of Michael Nielsen thanks to a pointer from MR. One of the pieces of Nielsen that I am reading and enjoying lot is the one about doing science online. Nielsen talks in the piece about the necessity of discussions with insightful colleagues:

As all of us know, when you’re working on a problem, a good conversation with an insightful colleague may be worth as much (and sometimes more) than reading the classic papers.

Nielsen also has some interesting things to say about how internet is and can influence the way science is done:

I’ve started this talk by discussing blogs because they are familiar to most people. But ideas about doing science in the open, online, have been developed far more systematically by people who are explicitly doing open notebook science. People such as Garrett Lisi are using mathematical wikis to develop their thinking online; Garrett has referred to the site as “my brain online”. People such as chemists Jean-Claude Bradley and Cameron Neylon are doing experiments in the open, immediately posting their results for all to see. They’re developing ideas like lab equipment that posts data in real time, posting data in formats that are machine-readable, enabling data mining, automated inference, and other additional services.

Stepping back, what tools like blogs, open notebooks and their descendants enable is filtered access to new sources of information, and to new conversation. The net result is a restructuring of expert attention. This is important because expert attention is the ultimate scarce resource in scientific research, and the more efficiently it can be allocated, the faster science can progress.

How many times have you been obstructed in your research by the need to prove or disprove a small result that is a little outside your core expertise, and so would take you days or weeks, but which you know, of a certainty, the right person could resolve in minutes, if only you knew who that person was, and could easily get their attention. This may sound like a fantasy, but if you’ve worked on the right open source software projects, you’ll know that this is exactly what happens in those projects – discussion forums for open source projects often have a constant flow of messages posing what seem like tough problems; quite commonly, someone with a great comparative advantage quickly posts a clever way to solve the problem.

If new online tools offer us the opportunity to restructure expert attention, then how exactly might it be restructured? One of the things we’ve learnt from economics is that markets can be remarkably effective ways of efficiently allocating scarce resources. I’ll talk now about an interesting market in expert attention that has been set up by a company named InnoCentive.

There is much, much more in the piece. Take a look!

வாலு போச்சி கதஂதி வந்தது டும்டும்டும் was one of our favourite stories from our grandma. Nicholas Carr describes a similar situation in the communications industry:

After email took hold in offices, you always had a few doofus laggards who continued to rely on the phone and voicemail. They were widely despised: synchronous dinosaurs lumbering through the pleasant pastures of asynchronous Internet communication.But email also did something else, the consequences of which we didn’t fully foresee. It dramatically reduced the transaction costs of personal communication. You had to think at least a little bit before placing a phone call, not just because it might cost you a few cents but because you knew you were going to interrupt the other person. Is this really necessary, or can it wait? Email removed that calculation from the equation. Everything was worth an email. (As direct marketers and spammers also soon discovered.) And there was the wonderful CC field and the even more wonderful Reply All button. Broadcasting, cumbersome with the phone, became easy with email.

Goodbye voicemail hell. Welcome to email hell.

Clearly, the universe itself must have decided last month that this blog was so abhorrent to it, it would employ quantum post selection effects to force me to procrastinate whenever I would otherwise have posted something.  An obvious corollary is that, if I do manage to post something nevertheless, it will bring about the immediate end of the universe.

From here; there has also been quite a bit of non-activity in this blog also in recent times; just saying.