Teachers and Bosses: Banker to the Poor

Banker to the Poor

by Muhammad Yunus

Muhammad Yunus creation of the Grameen Bank has been a success and classic case study in poverty alleviation strategies. Although he is an economist and a large component of his success is due to economic principles, he rightly recognizes the human aspect of his organization.

I am happy that they consider me more as a teacher than as a boss. With a boss, one has to be formal, but with a teacher the relationship is more informal, even spiritual. One can discuss one's problems and weaknesses more freely. One can admit personal mistakes without fear of triggering an official sanction. Traditional bank officials need their office, their papers, their desk, and their telephone for support. They feel lost without these props. But you can strip everything away from a Grameen employee, and still at heart he or she remains a teacher.

Hearing Language: The Language Instinct

The Language Instinct

by Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker's classic book, The Language Instinct, helped decipher some complex theories of modern day linguists. He presents his case for an inherent ability to learn and communicate language, as the book title indicates. He provides much evidence, including the passage below:

When engineers first tried to develop reading machines for the blind in the 1940s, they devised a set of noises that corresponded to the letters of the alphabet. Even with heroic training, people could not recognize the sounds at a rate faster than good Morse code operators, about three units a second. Real speech, somehow, is perceived an order of magnitude faster; ten to fifteen phonemes per second for casual speech, twenty to thirty per second for the man in the late-night Veg-O-Matic, and as many as forty to fifty per second for artificially sped-up speech. Given how the human auditory system works, this is almost unbelievable. When a sound like a click is repeated at the rate of twenty times a second or faster, we no longer hear it as a sequence of separate sounds but as a low buzz. If we can hear forty-five phonemes per second, the phonemes can not possibly be consecutive bits of sound; each moment of sound must have several phonemes packed into it that our brains somehow unpack. As a result, speech is by far the fastest way of getting information into the head through the ear. 

Patent Awards in America and Europe: Lords of the Harvest

Lord of the Harvest 

by Dan Charles

Lords of the Harvest takes an in depth and non-partisan look into the rise of biotechnology. A key part in the development of this industry regarded patents in both the EU and America.

The European patent office, because it grants patents strictly based on who files an application first, awarded inventorship rights to Schell's group. In the United States, which awards patents based on who has first invented something....

Although this fact is somewhat well known as a result of Einstein (some accuse him of taking advantage of his position as a clerk in a Swiss patent office) but is still a very interesting fact. I am curious as how other countries around the world go about issuing patents...anyone with any experience?

Hobos: When You Are Engulfed in Flames

When You Are Engulfed In Flames

by David Sedaris

David Sedaris has not only a knack for storytelling, but his behavior is so unique that the pairing is always entertaining. He explains that when he was a child, he often used to dress as a hobo for Halloween. He explains:

...from then on I was always a hobo. It's a word you don't often hear anymore. Along with “tramp,” it's been replaced by “homeless person,” which isn't the same thing. Unlike someone who was evicted or lost his house in a fire, the hobo roughed it by choice. Being at liberty, unencumbered by bills and mortgages better suited his drinking schedule, and so he found shelter wherever he could, never a bum, bu something much less threatening, a figure of merriment almost.

I enjoyed this passage for it's colorful and somewhat accurate depiction of a hobo but I really enjoyed it after I read this article in the Economist some weeks later.  

Distance of Light: A Brief History of Time

A Brief History of Time

by Stephen Hawking

Stephen Hawking excels at providing complex scientific information and theory in an accessible manner. His books are full of so many facts and mind blowing analysis that it's often difficult to absorb. When dealing with the limits of humans perception, he speaks about viewing much of the universe through images from telescopes. This ultimately depends on our perception of light and because light has a finite speed, we are seeing mostly light that has traveled from a far distance.

Similarly, we do not know what is happening at the moment farther away in the universe: the light that we see from distant galaxies left them millions of years ago, and in the case of the most distant object that we have seen, the light left some eight thousand million years ago. Thus, when we look at the universe, we are seeing it as it was in the past.

If this doesn't blow your sensory perception mind, I don't know what will. 

Relativity and decisions: Predictably Irrational

Predictably Irrational

by Dan Ariely

Relativity can be complex and seemingly contradictory when it comes to our decision making. As Dan Ariely explains in his book, Predictably Irrational, the human mind has all types of tricks and processes that allow us to make choices. He gives a great example of relativity in the following passage:

Let me explain with an example from a study conducted by two brilliant researchers, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. Suppose you have two errands to run today. The first is to buy a new pen, and the second is to buy a suit for work. At an office supply store, you find a nice pen for $25. You are set to buy it, when you remember that the same pen is on sale for $18 at another store 15 minutes away. What would you do? Do you decide to take the 15-minute trip to save the $7? Most people faced with this dilemma say that they would take the trip to save the $7. Now you are on your second task: you’re shopping for your suit. You find a luxurious gray pinstripe suit for $455 and decide to buy it, but then another customer whispers in your ear that the exact same suit is on sale for only $448 at another store, just 15 minutes away.

He later explains that the way to combat this type of perception is to broaden our focus by asking ourself the question “Where can that $7 go that is more useful?” and this allows us to see the value of $7 matched up against itself, not relative to a huge sum of money like hundreds of dollars.