To put Susan Cain's ideas in a rather more coherent way; an introvert is someone who gets energy from low levels of social stimulation while the extroverts are people who are energized by high levels of social stimulation. It's great to see a book like Quiet published. And I was pretty moved by Susan's talk in part because I really appreciated the position she was describing, and in part because she presented herself as a really genuine, quiet cheerleader of the introverts.

The more interesting idea that I picked up from the talk was this idea about the transition from a culture of character to a culture of personality. Indeed, because of the ultra connected world and our obsession with efficiency and speed, we no longer have time to try and truly get to know people - we can't be bothered to. Therefore, we prefer bite-size pitches, 'superficial' demonstration of abilities, outright self-confidence, the easily-identified bright spot. Personality supersedes character; even though I suspect that in long term, it really is the people with good character whom you should hang on to.

We need to re-discover character-building; we need to discover people's character to know them and not just by their personalities. Only when we take the time to discover them, people would start realising the importance of building that up. The decline of character-building is also why people are more easily irritated by failure, intolerant of difficulties and drudgery, quick to anger and slow to forgive.

Virtuous Haste?

I came across this image a couple of days back and was amused by it. But I've also discovered how mutated our culture has become; indeed, 'hurrying' has already become a virtue, just by the sheer number of people upholding it. So what's with the haste? Why not sit back and think about where has persistence, endurance, patience gone? What's with the obsession with quick fixes and speed? The way we see 'time' has indeed altered our judgments of the merits of the man of actions and the man of contemplation. While those men of action should sit back and contemplate, those men of contemplation need to summon the courage - in Susan Cain's words - 'to speak softly'.

Tubular Steel Chair

I was in Germany for a while this winter break and I spent half a day at Bauhaus Archives. It was a really interesting museum that traced the history of the Bauhaus school and it's 'radicalism' in arts and design. The conception of Bauhaus as a school that would marry arts with craftsmanship was a really powerful idea to me personally. In essence it seek to put together fine arts and applied arts as well as the socio-economic value of them.

I looked at how some of the course components of Bauhaus focused on perfecting the skills and crafts of students while getting them to think about the appropriate materials and techniques involved in the production of things they designed. In many sense, I see a lot of Bauhaus sort of ideas in IKEA - design oriented towards functionality and serving the needs of people (including low costs). Perhaps there's always a business element in the whole Bauhaus movement - in any case, we want to believe that business exists to serve the greater interests of the society.

Equally important in the Bauhaus movement was the idea of 'total arts and design', where all different forms of arts and design were explored, architecture, photography, metal works, pottery, weaving - including the combination of these different products. The potential of such a school combined with industry haven't seemed to be explored again after the closure of Bauhaus - at least not in my knowledge. I'd love to see the movement spring to life again and not just be a relic of the past where we can only reminiscent on the impact it has brought to design in the modern world.

Galbraithian Wisdom

I've got some great quotes from John Kenneth Galbraith in his mid 20th Century book that bears great lessons for us even today.

Wisdom, itself, is often an abstraction associated not with fact or reality but with the man who asserts it and the manner of its assertion.

And after watching 'Inside Job'; you can't help but wonder if Galbraith's forecast turned out to be true for the SEC:

...regulatory bodies, like the people who comprise them, have a marked life cycle. In youth they are vigorous, aggressive, evangelistic and even intolerant. Later they mellow, and in old age - after a matter of ten or fifteen years - they become, with some exceptions, either an arm of the industry they are regulating or senile.

In any case, the documentary got me reading about some of the economist interviewed in the film. In particular, Glenn Hubbard and Frederic Mishkin were both caught a little off-guard in the film's interview by the director's questions. I thought that they handled the aftermath pretty okay (Mishkin here and Hubbard here). Obviously, the director had something he wanted the two professors to show to the audience and did portray them a little negatively but he did so to demonstrate a wider phenomenon as he justified.

From a human point of view, it is definitely easy to empathize with the director and it is what sells the movie. The policy difficulties and the way the crisis arose make it more difficult for the people in charge to agree with the director. There’s both a lack of certain (vs uncertain) information and cognitive bandwidth to process clues at the time before the crisis and during it. With the benefit of hindsight, the director is empowered to challenge the pre-crisis regime. Dommage pour le financiers!

As for takeaways on making presentations, Dan Ariely always does a great job packaging his personal experiences into the messages he wants to bring across. This is possibly because in most of his talks, he discusses his own studies and research experiences - but he almost always successfully makes us think a great deal out of those simple experiences and reflect on their implications. That perceptiveness is probably the reason why he had managed to design such interesting experiments to draw exceptional conclusions about humans and the way we work.

I must say that Kathryn's style of presentation does make her appear like she believes she is right; at least enough for her to write a book about it.

Perhaps the most important part of Tim's talk was the last part, on the point of how obvious it is to us that trial and error underlies most of our important discoveries and approach to problem solving. Guided trials and learning from the error presents one of the most powerful means of design. We must, indeed come to this point of realisation that we should perhaps, no longer attempt - in our haste to simplify - to make kids believe that there's only 1 right answer to questions they encounter. The kind of struggle that we experience as we mature to accept that there's a need to hold multiple views and suspend judgment should have taught us that. But we wanted to shield our young ones from that suffering (and as a result, merely helped to postpone it) - one that turns out to be inevitable.

It's amazing how much thought he puts into his talks to engage his audience; the kind of computer graphics that presents what he wants to say, the props that he brings, the way he is able to relate his ideas through the props. He's such a great actor at the same time while speaking without much hesitation. And on to the content, I totally agree with his last point. Technologies that raise productivity back in homes have the amazing effect of being able to raise productivity further by freeing up time invested in education, in generating higher quality output.

And this is why being able to move up the technology ladder helps generate such a huge advantage and great returns. More importantly, this could partly explain sources of inequality, some sort of feedback from technology. Washing machines themselves don't help economies grow, but when combined with time freed for other productive activities, the economy could develop sufficiently for people to enjoy even higher standards of living.

There are other wonderful animations on many different topical issues found here.

Rosling's Charts

I was catching up on finishing my previous issues of The Economist before 2010 ends and I stumbled upon an article about Hans Rosling and his Gapminder Foundation. This Swede is really passionate about statistics and its presentation to the world. And I went on to discover that he came up with the Trendanalyzer software which Google took over and is now the Google Motion Chart.

Hans Rosling doesn't look like an exciting man on first impression; to rave about statistics and its presentation seem like a really odd thing for this professor of public health who is a physician by training. Yet he impresses people with the passion and enthusiasm he displays when he talks about development. It is the development statistics that are of particular interest to him; it is the way these numbers change or stay constant, correlate or indicates no relationship (though more often than not, they indicate false ones). You can watch his talks on TED.com and you'd discover that statistics is very much his starting point to drive home messages. And his grand message is really that if you can measure something, and you know about it, you can try and do something about it.

He presented a documentary on BBC, appropriately titled 'The Joy of Stats' where he talked about the uses of statistics and the powerful visualization tools in the real world and how it influences the lives of ordinary people.

Make them interesting!

I've been giving tips for Project Work and I thought that since it's close to the time when Promos are about over and OP for PW is going to come, it'll be good to draw attention of readers to my page on Project Work, especially Oral Presentation. Here's the part I've written about it:

The Oral Presentation is probably the most frustrating part of the entire PW, forcing the less eloquent students to present and grading them both as a group and individual at the same time means that groups with weaker students would have suffer more. It would therefore pay to work doubly hard.

You can go through the net to find tips on doing presentations; they would invariably involve watching your tone, gestures, maintaining eye contact with audience. Yet you can't master all these without practising; so I would recommend that after the team has decided what to present and allocated the parts to the members, practise often in front of the mirror and try to memorise your script by repeating it over and over again.

Team dynamics is judged during the presentation so no matter how busy you are (shouldn't be since by then the exams would be over already), the team should meet up to rehearse together. Going through the presentation in its entirety would help you track your time spent, familiarize with what you have to say at different slides and also to get team mates to watch each other and point out any awkwardness in gestures or pronunciations.

I recommend rehearsing the entire thing at least 10 times before the actual presentation; each rehearsal should involve the entire team. The maximum rehearsals in a day should be about 4; leaving time in-between the evaluate your own performance and work in improvements. Try to do a video recording of your entire presentation and then watch it together as a team; more often than not, you are the one who can correct yourself best. And since you can't see yourself on the spot doing the presentation, a video recording would help greatly.

To make the presentation interesting, you could either use video clips, animations, or do a skit. Most students opt for the skit because of the lack of other resources. When dealing with skits, ensure the script is well crafted and of relevance to what you're doing in the project.

I cannot stop emphasizing that practice is really the key to doing well and there's no point practicing over and over without improvements so find a way to evaluate yourself in every practice and then make use of that feedback. It can be from the mirror, your video recording, your voice recording (to check for pronunciation, tones, speed of speaking) or your friends and family. Just make sure you practice for the purpose of improving and not just to pretend you've done your part. Make every single practice your best effort.