Compare & Contrast
By Kevin
Two recent articles shows how openness balanced with secrecy is helpful for businesses navigating the real world. Management of information/secrets would be an important area for business success in the future. IKEA's Success tell discusses the features of IKEA's corporate style and secrecy while the Leaky Corporation discusses the difficulty of keeping important information internal within organizations today.
Stressed? Just Smile!
By Kevin
What Stress?
I just finished The Economic Naturalist by Robert H Frank a couple of days back and one of the questions was why managers who believed in achieving improvements in performance of subordinates through threats and reprimand rather than praise and reward were more likely to be able to prove that they are right.
Professor Frank suggests that it was because the performance of people usually varies with time but stays the same on average without special effort to improve or skive. That means that when a person perform badly it could just be his particularly down period and after getting scolded from the manager his performance tend to return towards the mean and result in the improved performance the manager was hoping for. On the contrary, a person may perform exceptionally on an especially good day and get praised for his work only to have his performance return to its mean, which means poorer than before the manager's rewards/praise. A manager who believes praise and reward yields better returns would thus have little means of proving he is right and so is unfairly proven wrong.
The truth seems more complex than just that. As this article from Harvard Business Review suggests, sensitivity to the anger or happiness of the manager or boss depends partly to the stress levels experienced. So from the perspective of the employer or manager, it is wise to inject more praise and rewards during high stress periods. Never mind the low stress periods when employers are slacking around.
Human behaviours and the motivations behind them are great subjects to study. This gives me the chance to introduce the publication, Psychology Today, which recently featured something really useful for people working in the business world (and perhaps even in academia). Confidence in yourself and your ideas really counts when it comes to presentations. So you will really have to work on yourself to get your ideas accepted. Check out the publication site for more of such tips to help discipline, aid and make sense of your mind.
Tired From?
By Kevin
There's a very weird relationship between actions and emotions. Most of the time we allow emotions to cause actions although the opposite case is supposedly possible - smiling for no reason do indeed make you feel happier and frowning without a purpose cause you to feel a little sadder than if you were to maintain a neutral face. The fact that actions can cause you to feel differently is an impressive tool you can use to trick your mind into many different things.
What we are going to describe in this article relates to the above piece of fact a little but we want you to bear that fact in mind so you might find it useful to smile or laugh away your fears and worries sometimes. The idea is that certain physical actions or sensations are associated with certain emotional state inherently and they can trigger off each other whichever is in place. We all know that we normally trigger off sleepiness, fatigue with boredom, disinterest in something that is going on. And that is what happens to you when you attend a lecture from that boring lecturer of yours go goes on and on about the principles behind matrices, how it relates to 'Arrays' in programming and how the direction of the arrows in the coding affects whether you meant to make it an input field or that the code would print something on the screen.
But wait a minute, are you sure that you're dozing off because your lecturer is boring? Your classmate seems to be listening intently, and sometimes in your dreams you do really wonder what 'Arrays' have got to do with Matrices that you know so much about in Mathematics, you just didn't bother to find out because you believe you didn't like programming. You tell yourself, 'Hey, programming is really just a heap of gibberish that only machines understands and it suck' and console yourself that you haven't missed out much in life after all and get back to sleep. Fact is that last night you've been playing Counter Strike Source until 2am with your friends and this dreaded Programming lecture happens to be the first lecture of the day in the morning. You sure is tired, but from the gaming, not because of the lecture.
I am not sure how many students managed to convince themselves of their lack of interest in a subject they might have enjoyed so thoroughly if they had just paid attention to the lectures and been a little more serious about their education. I dare to go to the extent of claiming that some students mislead themselves into disinterest in a particular subject just because they were so tired from activities on the first lecture they attended and decided it wasn't something for them. Too many people are too fast to judge things and blame others for it and rarely would they think about and consider their role in a particular mistake or fault, or crisis they encounter.
You just have to realise that it takes lots of energy to learn things and to actively listen or absorb things; therefore if you're tired it's obvious that you will benefit little from any activity intended to introduce new things to you. No point attributing your fatigue from a night of clubbing to the lack of interest in a subject. Identifying the source of your tiredness requires a huge load of self-awareness and correcting the problem would need another strong dose of discipline but it doesn't mean we can't achieve that.
Give yourself and every subject, module, discipline, field and programme you expose yourself to, a chance to interest you and motivate you; discover your strengths in areas you never know.
Calendars
By Kevin
Somehow people are preoccupied with time and dates since quite a while ago. Ancient people have been obsessed with building clocks that doesn't stray out of time, that tells the time of the day accurately and much interest have been vested in calendars, making sure that your Sunday is not actually my Monday and that the number of days in a week on mine corresponds to yours. We often take civilization for granted these days and it takes these fundamental developments in standardization of time, calendars, days of a week and days of a year to get people to coordinate, cooperate and collaborate. And that's why planners are nothing but calendars blended with a notebook.
These days however, things comes on a screen would have more functionality and can be improved by the 'manufacturers' more easily and so I would usually go online for my planner solutions. Long ago Yahoo! Calendar would be good for slotting in a couple of important events and then you are reminded if you request to be. That was a time when using a planner online isn't that serious an affair because it was tedious to enter different details in so many fields on the 'event' forms and everything seem to be treated like some huge event on the online calendar even a gentle reminder to shop for ant traps for the family seem to appear like a big affair on my email inbox.
These days when the pressure to digitalize my information, including more private ones like planner activities breech my threshold I decided to hunt for a good online solution. 
And I stumbled on Google Calendar. The first thing that impresses me is how its use of AJAX allows the web application to behave almost just like a calendar application on my computer (stuff like Outlook Calendar or iCal). And of course, it'd be a good idea to make use of Google Chrome to run the Calendar off an Application Shortcut, making it even more like an application on your computer.
Of course at times you decide you need an offline copy of things just to ensure you have backup or access to your calendar when you can't access the Internet so readily. It's definitely useful to synchronize the Google Calendar information with your local iCal or Outlook and then make them synchronize with your Palm as well and it'd be perfect although it seems quite a messy process.
You'd ask, wait a minute: I do have the Palm or smartphone synchronization software and it does work with Outlook or iCal but how to get Google Calendar's data over to these desktop applications in the first place? The solution is Calgoo.
Calgoo Connect is a powerful software that helps you get the job done and perhaps more. Because it allows you to synchronize across Outlook/iCal and Google Calendar, you can synchronize data between desktop computers as well, from your office to your online account and then synchronize the data over to your home computer from your online account. This is an additional data store besides using your handheld device to deliver the information. The initial process may be a little daunting and beware of messing up your calendars but once you get the hang of things, it should be fine. Be sure to set your time zones and dates correctly because that is always the reason for your calendar getting messed up and it's not a joking matter specially if you are into efficiency.